Item from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Carolyn's domain — every language that has ever been spoken, written, or thought, including the languages of animals, the dead, and mathematics itself.
The catalog of languages is the domain of communication itself. Not just human languages — all languages. Animal communication, the mathematical language of physics, the speech patterns of the dead, the encoding systems of entities that predate language as a concept. Carolyn has spent millennia studying here, and the result is that she doesn't just speak languages — she understands communication at the structural level. She can hear what people mean underneath what they say. She can construct sentences in any language that carry precisely the emotional and intellectual payload she intends. This makes her the most effective manipulator among the siblings, because language is how humans organize thought, and she has mastered the infrastructure.
The language catalog manifests in the Library as a vast wing of shelves containing texts in every script humanity has ever devised, alongside scripts that no human civilization created. The air here hums with overlapping whispers — fragments of every conversation ever held, layered into a white noise that Carolyn can parse like a radio tuning between stations. Some shelves contain books. Others contain sounds, preserved in containers that shouldn't be able to hold sound but do.
Also known as: the language catalog, Carolyn's catalog, the languages