Crystal
Rose-pink manganese silicate laced with black — the pink is the mineral, the black is what the air did to it.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Rhodonite is a manganese silicate, and the manganese does both jobs: it makes the pink, and where the stone has weathered it oxidises to black manganese oxide that fills the cracks and veins. Those black webs across a pink ground are the recognisable look, and they are a record of the stone having been got at by water and air. Clean gem-quality rhodonite with no veining exists and is scarce.
The great historic source is the Urals, where large masses were quarried from the eighteenth century for Russian imperial decorative work — including a sarcophagus for Empress Maria Alexandrovna cut from a single block of many tonnes, which took the better part of two decades to finish. Broken Hill in New South Wales and Långban in Sweden produce the finer crystals.
Practice reads it through the veining, which is where it gets interesting. This is the stone most often given to somebody after a falling-out — associated with repair, with returning to something that was damaged and going on with it rather than pretending it was not. The reading is barely a century old, but it takes the flaw in the stone as the meaningful part, which is rarer in this tradition than you might expect.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Given after a quarrel rather than after a parting. Practitioners distinguish it from rose quartz on exactly this ground: rose quartz for what is soft, rhodonite for what has been broken and is being carried on with anyway.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Chosen with the black veining showing rather than without it. The unveined gem material is more valuable and less used, which is one of the very few cases where practice prefers the flawed stone on purpose.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.