"They are, as far as I can tell, unfixed beings—changeable, shaped by the thoughts or feelings of people who live close to thin places like the Trod, and the way that we can make fixed forms. We take ore and heat it and hammer it and all of a sudden it’s a gold ring. We take the sounds of our mouths and write them down and fix them on paper and all of a sudden we have stories. I don’t think they can make anything new for themselves, but they’ll come like moths to a flame when they’re offered something beautifully made.

All this time I’ve been thinking that they’re the ones with the magic, but what if it’s the other way around? What if, from their perspective, we are gods and djinns because of what we can conjure out of our imaginations with our hands? And in that case, what do you have to make to bring out something huge like the Greenfather? How clever? Or beautiful? Or terrible? How do you awe a god?”