Chapter 20

Brendan's never slept so well in the twenty-five years he's been alive, as he does now. 

Brendan had learned early on that being able to control something did not mean the same thing as being immune to those same terrors. Born with the Gift of being permitted to command all those wraiths, terrors, and horrors that haunt the minds of men, made him suffer the same every day.

Most nights, ever since he'd personified his Gift as a young child, he'd found his dreamless sleep plagued by the same terrible things that he can command unto others. 

As he'd explained to Alcina, these shadows cannot kill him the way he can kill others with them.

But it does not change the fact that he nearly dreads sleep with the anticipation of an endless, all-consuming despair each night.

Even if the terrors don't visit him every night, the nights when he is given the brief reprieve, he spends trembling in fear, teeth grit and back ramrod straight, bracin