Fen Marach has spent her life translating dead languages - patiently, precisely, until meaning reveals itself from within. When she's assigned to examine a sealed vault beneath the city, she expects another puzzle. Another lost script. Another problem no one else can solve. What she finds instead is a language no one should be able to read. And a voice waiting inside it. Cavel has been alone for three thousand years. He built a language designed for one kind of reader - someone capable of fully inhabiting meaning itself. Someone like Fen. What begins as translation becomes something far stranger: a correspondence across millennia, a meeting of minds separated by stone, time, and the limits of language. Because some messages aren't meant to be decoded. They're meant to be received.