Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Well this was haunting and strange and consuming and basically everything I needed and expected from a new John Crowley novel, written about a crow, read in the darkest days of winter.

“Why,” he asked, “did we come back by the way we did? When it wasn't the way I went in?”
She was looking far off, hand shading her eyes. “You never come out the way you went in,” she said. “And if you go back in again, you never go by the same way.”
“Oh?”
“Because,” she said, “you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.”

“Ymr,” Dar Oakley said. “It's the realm where what People think is true is true.”
She laughed. “There is no true,” she said. “Only what happened, after it has.”

“One day like me you'll begin to die for good, no matter how long it takes before you do. You'll live so long you'll think your life's forever, and you'll call it forever, but it's not. You'll see.”
“I don't care,” he said. He was beside her, with her, and he felt as deathless as any youth. “It's enough.”
“Can you have enough life?” she said.
“You can't have more.” He came to groom her, took the feathers of her head in his bill one by one. “Not more than all.”