A strange and interesting story. The actual cause(s) of events are very secondary to their effects, as story drivers. There's a mystery, which gets solved almost off-screen. The major focus of the story is the Calligrapher (from The Aphorisms of Kherishdar) and Shame (from The Admonishments of Kherishdar) meeting and interacting. Correction, relationships, broken pots, and very complex realizations on both sides - this is a(nother) very internal book. Mutual therapy. Unlike the previous two, there is actually one story here, not the short pieces we've seen before - but it's still presented as Al-Naidar explaining events (and interactions) to human. In this case there's a lot of explanation of words and meanings, too. The interspersed explanations are useful, but they also threw me out of the story a bit. The short "deleted scenes" at the end are excellent - events from other POVs (the story itself is entirely from the Calligrapher's POV). ( )