Black Sand

Everyone in Vesperine dreams the same dream. Every night. Nyx Onyx is the one girl who doesn't.For four years, seventeen-year-old Nyx has been waking up inside the Weave — the shared dream the Dreamwardens weave for all three hundred thousand citizens of the kingdom — and walking its perfect streets while everyone else drifts through them asleep. It is a secret that could get her taken. The Wardens do not tolerate wakefulness.But Nyx has her reasons. Eight years ago, her mother died in her sleep with black sand on her pillow, and the Wardens called it a mercy. Now Nyx has found a wound in the Weave — a jagged tear in the dream's floor, spilling cold black sand — and from the darkness below it, something is humming her mother's lullaby.Caught at last by the Wardens she has spent four years dodging, Nyx is given a choice: serve the order she despises as their newest dreamthief, or lose everything she loves. Forced into training as the Wardens' instrument, she discovers a dangerous gift: what she can steal from a dream, she can bring back waking. Objects. Memories. Even skills. But every theft has a cost, and the Weave remembers what it loses — and it collects.Between Emrys Thorne, the true-believer Warden falling for the girl he is supposed to report, and Juno Pike, the rebel who cannot dream and cannot be lied to, Nyx must decide who owns a person's inner life. Because beneath the perfect dream, an ancient prisoner is waking up — and it knows her name.The Black Sand is the first book in the Dreamthief Saga, a ten-volume YA dark fantasy of dream-heists, forbidden magic, and a heroine who gets a vote.