Chapter 21: What Sable Sees in Maren That Changes Her Calculations

The conversation had no language she could name afterward.

That was the first thing she would struggle to explain to Petra, when there was time for explaining — that it was not words, not precisely, and not the way she had imagined communication to work, which was in sentences with beginnings and ends and a shared vocabulary established through mutual agreement. This was something older than vocabulary. It was closer to the feeling of pressing your hand against old stone and feeling the stone press back. It was the recognition that the pressing was intentional.

She asked it: what are you?