Closed Where Crowns Rest (Madeira)

[Allassanachassanya]

21st Winter, 516 AV
"Speech"
"Others"

Morning broke, misty and curiously scented like apple sauce, on the day that Ssanya had decided she would visit Madeira Craven. Unbeknownst to her, it was the same date that they had first met, a season before. The time had passed with a flurry of happenings, and during the season Ssanya had never gotten round to actually meeting the woman again, despite having wanted to. Then last evening, a sudden flurry of resolution had come over her, and she had decided that was that.

So she left the Wolf's Cave as the morning sunshine fumbled at the mists but failed to get through, casting it's diffuse rays through cloudlets of moisture that billowed in her wake like candyfloss. She held the image of the sixteen-pointed star in her head, and walked with a wandering purpose, as Ionu lead her on a merry dance through Alvadas' Zeltiva quarter, then through the shallows of the Suvan Sea. Finally, she arrived in what some called 'Alvadash', but what she recognised as an illusion of Kenash.

Her feet trod through the small city, and she grinned at some of the more familiar sights. The swamp lay to her right, but a string of houses presented themselves to her left and she almost knew without looking that Madeira's would be the one in the middle. She was right, and she blessed Ionu for the amusement of the walk, and for finally allowing her to arrive at her destination. The snake woman smoothed her clothes down, and ran a hand through her hair before stepping up to the house.

She knocked twice, firmly but not too fast and waited on the step, trying not to fidget. Over her shoulder her rucksack was slung, yet it was heavier than normal as it contained the precious remains of the woman that Maddy and herself had helped all those days ago. The skull and few ribs that they had taken were cleaned. Ssanya had removed the remaining flesh and had washed them so that now they were just bones. It hadn't been a pleasant task, but it had been a necessary one. For Ssanya, for Madeira to learn properly, and indeed for Catherine.

Had she received the proper attention, and had her wrongdoers been properly punished? Had Madeira helped the woman to pass on? She just didn't know, but the brown-skinned woman standing on the step hoped there would be answers.

Yet truthfully, despite her nervousness and her fidgeting, the snake woman was joyous, and excited. If her mother could see her now, she was sure she'd be proud. After all, she was passing down the tradition, from one person to the next, teaching malediction so that others could make physical that respect for death in a way that nothing else could. It wasn't a magic that hurt anyone (although that in itself was a lie, Ssanya thought, you could make what many believed to be cursed items that would harm, even kill people if you so wished). It simply... was malediction, nothing evil, nothing bad, unless you willed it to be. And the woman who lived behind that door was, in Ssanya's mind, a perfect fit for the magic. Not a bad person, yet not quite entirely normal. Someone who had a respect for death and the dead that Ssanya only really knew in herself.

The door opened, and she stepped forwards with a quiet word on her lips, "It'sss Sssanya."

[Madeira Dusk]

The sharp rapt on the door cleaved through Madeira's head like a lightning strike. With a gasp she sat up in bed, her heart pounding a furious rhythm and head vibrating with the memory of sand on her tongue.
 
She was fully dressed on top of the covers of her neatly made bed, and it took her a long moment to remember why. Suddenly the scenes of yesterday began rolling through her head; Maro the Eiyon jackal, the ghost of Djmila the tailor, who tried to kill her with sand and clay, pretty, angry little Autumn, a possession, a madness, a fight... Gods, her face hurt. She brought her hand up to her throbbing cheek, only to be surprised to see the tips of most of her fingers were bandaged. Right, they went to Ionu's Mercy afterwards to get patched up. Then she must have passed out as soon as she got home. She squinted out her one solitary window. A weak, misty morning light was filtering sideways through a boggy marshland. She did the math backwards in her head, and figured she must have been asleep for twelve, maybe fourteen bells.
 
"A moment!" She called to whoever was waiting on her doorstep.
 
Madeira rolled laboriously to her feet. Her blouse was creased, her trousers stained, and her hair hung in greasy tangles about her pallid face. She straightened her clothing as best she could, and scraped her hair back into a ratty chignon that did nothing to stop ringlets from sticking to her sweaty neck. Her left eye was red with broken veins, and her left cheek was one long, faded purple bruise going yellow at the edges. All gifts from Maro, from when he smashed her in the face with a fish while she was possessed.
 
She padded barefoot to the door and took a moment to crack her knuckles, neck and back. Despite how she looked, she felt better than she had in days. A physicians care and a long sleep could cure anything, she decided with a kind of purring satisfaction. Even the ever present bags under her eyes had faded.
 
The door groaned in protest as she cracked it open. Her pale eyes squinted as she brought the tiny creature on her doorstep into focus. Even a season removed from the events of the Fall, she instantly recognized the dusky skin, dark hair and piercing brown eyes. It was the silver-tongued Maledictor. 
 
"Sanya" she croaked with sleep, both eyes opening wide and a smile cracking in the corner of her lips. 
 
Without another word she stepped aside and ushered the snake woman into her home, then snapped the door shut behind her. Besides the trickle of sand that led from the door to the bed, her home was almost suspiciously sterile. There were all the necessities; a scrubbed wooden table with a single chair in the centre of the room, a stone fireplace in the far corner and a small locked chest at the foot of the bed. But there were no pictures on the walls, no flowers on the table, not even a misplaced sock. It was unusual for a native Avalad to live somewhere with absolutely no personality.
 
"You missed a great party a couple weeks ago" Madeira continued as she went to the window to close the shutters against prying eyes. "The Speakers put Mr.Harman on show. He sang his sins in limerick while dancing on a pile of red-hot Mizas, then there was a play, and... Well, and everyone got roariously drunk. Catherine was there. She was under my uncles care, but I watched her exorcism. I hope by now she has moved on to her new life. I hope she's happy."
 
She paused and looked at the woman standing in the middle of her home. She nodded towards the lumpy pack on her shoulders.
 
"Is that her?" 

[Allassanachassanya]

"Speech"
"Others"

Somewhere beyond the door, Ssanya heard the unique voice that belonged to Madeira. Instead of answering, she stood quietly on the top step and gazed down the street whilst she waited for the woman to get ready. The cobbles glistened with glitter, and a crow idly pecked at it's reflection in a shard of glass. Somewhere in the distance she could hear an argument, the sounds oddly warping in and out of hearing as if being distorted through a silken curtain. The street that Madeira's house was on lay in almost complete silence, apart from the soft ticks of the crow's beak, lulling her into that peaceful serenity that sometimes comes whilst on the edge of doing something exciting. Yet soon enough she was snapped out of her reverie as the door creaked open in front of her, and she neatly stepped aside to show her face properly to Madeira.

Her first impressions were that the other woman looked remarkably terrible, and she couldn't stop her eyebrow raising and her eyes widening as she studied her briefly on the step. The long bruise was the most glaring mark, and it's peculiar shape made her wonder whether she'd been walloped across the face in a fight or a brawl. The idea of a pub brawl made her smirk somewhat, as she was unable to picture the woman drunk, despite knowing how fiery she was. Then she followed her into the house, posing her first question as soon as the door was safely closed, "What in Sssiku's name happened to your face, Madeira?"

Whilst she stood quietly in the room, she listened with curious attention to the story the spiritist told her. At the end of it, Ssanya closed her eyes for a fragment of time and sent a prayer to Dira. "I am glad to hear that she iss... ssafe, now." Her emotions had settled on the steps outside, but now she felt a kind of religious stirring inside, as her soul urged her to do what it wanted. She paused, and placed the aforementioned bag carefully on the table before beginning to unfasten it and drawing out the skull, placing it in the centre of the table. "Yess, it'ss her."

"I have her sskull and two ribsss." With reverent fingers, she placed the ribs next to the skull, and curved her thumb gently along the eye socket. Then the maledictor turned her gaze upon the blonde woman, and although she was clad in her human features, the look in her eyes was so very predatory in that moment. She drew the knife from her belt, tested the edge on her palm, and laid it beneath the ribs. The maledictor's eyes bored into Madeira's own. "Ssso... Madeira, have you carved bonesss before? Do you have a knife, are you prepared to ussse it? Are you ready?"

Because I have a world to show you, and it will be glorious. Because there is so much to explain in words I can't begin to phrase, and it all hinges on you. What kind of a woman was she, really? When it came to it, would the physical desecration of another's remains cause her to be squeamish? Ssanya doubted it somehow, and grinned wide with a flash of white teeth. She was giddy, and didn't even bother to disguise it as she constantly scanned the woman's expressions for her reaction.
OOCAaand I'm a whole month behind. Eek! Hopefully I won't be such a slow-coach from now on.

[Madeira Dusk]

The first words out of Ssanya's mouth, after whispering her name through the crack of the door, was to comment on how awful her host's face looked.
 
The Spiritist had to brace one hand on the back of her lone wooden chair as an unexpected laugh ripped through her chest. It was just so refreshingly rude. No ignoring it, or beating around the bushes, no timid 'how are you's or insipid small talk. She was standing in the middle of her house, they had not seen each other for an entire season, and she called out her wrecked appearance. That, more than anything, convinced her that they were friends.
 
"An Eiyon brained me with a fish yesterday", she admitted with a smile, hiccuping her way through the last tremors of her laugh. "I had it coming, though. I was possessed and trying to kill him at the time. I'm not joking, by the by" her bandaged fingers danced over the worn table with some kind of childish excitement. "I met an actual Dira-blessed Eyion. I should introduce you two sometime. His name is Maro. He's a good man. Not what you'd expect, but a good man."
 
The mood in the small cottage changed dramatically when the skull was produced from the depths of the bag. The air became heavy, like you'd find in a church, or a forest at dusk. It was almost revenant. Madeira's fatigue was forgotten instantly, and she leaned over where the last of Catherine Harman was spread across her table. The bones were clean and white, and seemed to glow with an oily yellow cast in the muted light. She brushed the blunt edge of a rib with one of her few undamaged fingers. What kind of power did these bones carry? How did one unlock it?
 
Suddenly Ssanya was leaning over the table too, and the two women were face to face. The look in her eye, that glint of something less than human, was enough to make the Spiritist pull away and straighten her posture. Though the woman was nearly a foot shorter than her, she felt suddenly small in her presence. As the Maledictor laid the knife down below the ribs her brown eyes burned into blue, and Madeira knew instinctively that she was looking for something. But what? Honestly? Commitment? Was she looking for the same brand of madness that prompted the snake-woman to look giddy even as she risked her life to practise forbidden magic? 
 
As it so happened, Madeira possessed all three. Her answering smile was eager. And her eyes, wide and red and broken, were alight with something ravenous. She wanted this. She wanted to learn and understand and dig deep into this concept of death she had never known before.
 
"Yes." was all she said.

[Allassanachassanya]

"Speech"
"Others"

Brained with a fish? The turn of phrase made her think of fish brains, her stunted Common twisting the meaning in her head, and she wondered what kind of strange cuisine Madeira ate. Certainly it shouldn't have made her skin bruise like it had, but... then suddenly she clocked the key word, Eiyon. Dira-blessed. Her eyes widened like an owl, and she blinked once, twice. Maro. The name was simple, but she stored it away for later. An Eiyon would be a wonder to meet, someone who knew Dira personally. Ssanya didn't even really know what the gnosis did, although she knew of it vaguely. Some members of the nest had gnosis of gods, but her own family wasn't blessed in such a way by a deity. She wondered, quickly and fleetingly, what it would feel like, to harness a god's power.

But then she was busy with understanding the complexities of the person in front of her, and she stopped thinking of gnosis and gods and Eiyons. Her eyes held it all. Although pale, they held an intensity that sealed the deal. The blue contrasted so distinctly with Ssanya's own, coffee-brown eyes, but their expressions matched. She exclaimed a non-word, an 'aah' of satisfaction, and nudged her head to briefly touch Madeira's forehead before drawing away and grabbing the knife with a practised hand.

"You undersstand. I am... glad."

"Here, take thiss, feel the blade, get used to the weight." She handed the knife to her partner-in-magic, and searched for the words to explain what to do. "Malediction givess dead thingss a purpossse. The purposse is given through a circle. It iss all in the circle. A circle of meaning."

She took the skull reverentially in her hands and handed it to Madeira. Then she traced a crude circle with her fingertip on the forehead. "The circle musst have meaning. Catherine wass a certain type of woman, not barbaric or cruel. Maybe naive? But... elegant. We would carve the circle and show that, give elegance and thought and pour her ssspirit into the dessign."

"It will be difficult, and we may not succeed. Human remainsss are difficult to handle." She felt a hot burn of shame, then, suddenly realising that she might not be able to even produce something that would work. "Animalsss are easy, but humanss are full of... energy. It isss difficult to harnessss. But, we can try." Full of a difficult sentience that is hard to make sense of.

She shrugged, slowly, letting out a deep sigh and shutting her eyes as she focussed on the task at hand. "We will try." That was all anyone could do. The maledictor gathered her thoughts, and drew her focus entirely inside, picturing spiralling circles and imagining Catherine as vividly as she could in her mind, her expressions, her personality, the closest thing she could imagine of her life.

[Madeira Dusk]

Ssanya nudged her head forward, and there was a low, wordless exclamation and a hollow tock as the two women bumped foreheads. And Madeira knew she had somehow satisfied this woman's expectations for her student and sealed their unspoken pact.

The bone-handled knife was given to her right hand, and the skull of Catherine Harman was placed in her left. Madeira's mottled face was pinched down into a glare as she focused on absorbing what Ssanya was saying. At first she was worried about being taught such a complex discipline by someone who did not have a total grasp of the Common language. But soon she began to appreciate the simplicity the Dani was
forced to use. She did not speak with the flowery language of the higher educated, at least not in this language, and she did not fill Madeira's ear with clutter. Simple language and a voice filled with reverence conveyed the deeper meaning Madeira felt she needed.

She palmed the skull, looking into it's hollow eyes. This used to be a person, she caught herself thinking. Her eyes flicked up to Ssanya, and caught the Dhani with her eyes closed and deep in concentration. Madeira followed her lead, but instead of closing her eyes, she poured herself into the black pit of the empty skull and
tried to imagine Catherine as she was; a woman who loved deeply and naively, who's loyalty extended beyond death.

With a deep, cleansing breath Madeira pressed the tip of the blade into the skull, and paused. Suddenly she was overcome with something that was not quite doubt, but caution. This was her first try, and she was expecting her first try to be awful. She didn't want to defile what little was left of Catherine with her inept scrawlings.

Madeira replaced the knife and the skull on the table, and walked around to her neat little bed, at the foot of which was her little chest of belongings. She bumped it open with the knuckle of her foot, revealing the chaos that was missing from the rest of her home. There was a half-full bag of flour, a mess of blue linen rags, a pile of jade beads, a jar of skin cream and a clutch of ebony arrows thrown in haphazardly. Wedged in the corner were three lidded jars, one with a centimetre of semi-congealed blood and another of decaying and gently glowing soulmist. Madeira knelt in front of the box, dug into the mess up to her elbows, and produced a small red book and a black inkstick.

She kicked the box closed and returned to the table on Ssanya's side where the two stood shoulder to shoulder. She flipped rapidly through the book, scrolling through investigative observations, failed soulmist recipes and study notes until she found a blank page. Then she pinched the ink stick between her fingers and plotted out her
circle for her Dhani teacher to see.

Madeira's lip caught between her teeth as she mapped her first Malediction circle. The Avalad was no stranger to abstract thinking, but she was also no artist. The circle was the size of her palm, drawn painstakingly slow to make sure it was a perfect curve. Inside she mapped out Catherine as she remembered her. The design was made of
complete circles and intersecting lines, as she imagined the woman’s unbending loyalty and gentle soul would look if put to paper.

Madeira slid the circle to Ssanya, the inkstick wedged in the spine for her to add to or make alterations to the simple design.

"Would our chances of success increase if we worked on this together?” she asked hesitantly.

[Allassanachassanya]

"Speech"
"Others"

It might seem strange to the woman to see that same caution echoed on the Dhani's face. Despite her concentration, despite her eyes screwed shut and her furrowed brow, there were traced of hesitation caught in the skewed lip and the tight knuckles of the Dhani's slight form. She was deep in her meditative state of remembrance yes, but her surface seemed trapped in self-doubts. So it was that her eyes snapped open with fright as she heard Madeira rummaging through the chest. The Maledictor looked over at her briefly, and then at the notebook and the Spiritist's design starting to flourish.

Ssanya watched with fascination. Everyone had their own style. Something that was as unique to them as their thumbprint. Her mother had been her inspiration, of course. Hers had been a style of substance and desert and connections and family over anything. Her work had been rich and expansive. Ssanya still felt like she was nowhere near her mother's art, but she could feel a sense of what her own style was like. She liked the abstract, she liked to create a story with pictures and fragile stalks and stems that combined together to make a stronger 'whole'. But her own style was constantly changing, adapting to her emotions and her geographical whereabouts.

Madeira's style was fledging, and it was why she was so fascinated as she watched the tentative strokes of the inkstick on the fresh page of the notebook. Soon she had finished, and she pushed to notebook over to her. Ssanya felt a glow of satisfaction and nostalgia, so tightly bound together that she couldn't separate the two. Over her shoulder, she felt the imagined presence of her mother, her soft, warm hands over her own, slight, brown ones as she took the paper and gazed over it. She smiled.

"We will do thiss together," she agreed. She took the inkstick between her fingers and looked over the design. It was simple, but not bad. The woman had obviously taken care over it, and she appreciated that. "Madeira, explain it to me. I have ideass, to wrap my own layer around your core. But I need to know your thoughtsss. Why does thiss part do thiss? What do you want to encourage out of her ssskull? What do we want to encourage out of her ssskull? I know I want to make sssome kind of talissman to besstow trussst. Or to make sssomeone dissstrustful. She wass trusstful, you think? Or ssimply naive."

OOCSsanya truly needs lessons in enunciation! Or Madeira needs snake-tongue lessons.

[Madeira Dusk]

The tip of Madeira's tongue swept across her cracked lips, and her fingers drummed thoughtfully on the scrubbed table. Her bloodshot eyes were wide and overbright, as if she were in the middle of a breaking fever. Very few people had ever seen this side to Madeira. The side that had a burning, almost unhealthy fascination with magics. But in
that tiny cottage with the window shuttered and the door locked, that old Avalad madness was making itself known in the Craven.

"We can do that? We can layer circles?" the corner of her mouth turned up, showing a sliver of clean white teeth. "Ok, well, my circle I tried to map out her love. She loved him, didn't she? Right through to her death. I want to make a talisman to make someone feel her strange brand of unconditional love towards who wears it." The usefulness of such a thing would be incredible. She imagined talking to her family, dealing with an unruly ghost, or even bartering in the market, and how these situations would change drastically if the people involved were held in an inexplicable love towards her.

"It's an ambigram, see?" Madeira flipped the book over, and the lines inside the circle reflected themselves. "It doesn't change. It's unconditional." She traced a pale finger across a few of the carefully drawn lines, and illustrated how they all met in the middle. "And it all comes back to the core, I want to draw out whatever it was inside her mind that turned that love into unfailing loyalty." Perhaps the design was too simple to denote something as complicated as love, but she was proud of her effort.

Madeira turned to Ssanya then, but her glittering eyes were focused somewhere beyond the Maledictor. "And think, if you were to try to draw out her trust on top of that... I mean, the two lead into each other, no? Trust can be a symptom of love, or the other way around."

Of course, that was a big 'if'. It was more than likely that what they did would backfire. Or worse, nothing would happen at all. But Madeira's doubt was being eclipsed by her focused, bubbling enthusiasm.

[Allassanachassanya]

"Speech"
"Others"

But Ssanya's eyes widened as she nodded twice, her hair flopping around her face haphazardly as she did so, brown strands getting caught on her parted lips as she drew in breath to speak. Words tumbled out, rapidly and without her control. "Yes, that's a brilliant idea! I'll layer this..." She caught herself. This time, she spoke in Common rather than her native snake-tongue, "Ssssorry, Madeira. It isss eassier to ssspeak in sssnake when I do malediction, but what I sssay iss, it iss a brilliant idea. Trusst and love. Powerful emotionss that work together. Instead of.. aah, hiding one circle with the other, we will place love at the centre, and swaddle it in trust. Like, sso..."

She grabbed Madeira's scrap of paper and quickly borrowed the inkstick, and started to draw. She first made a rough copy of the spiritist's design, trying to be careful but not being nearly as neat as the blonde woman had done. Then, she began her own circle. Her work evolved slowly, as she felt a keen desire to make the two artworks compatible. Catherine was on her mind too, her ghostly body appearing in her mind as clearly as she could remember. The soft textures of her voice, weaving with the tinge of emotion she gleaned when the dead woman had spoken of her treacherous husband.

Her circle linked with Madeira's own at three points, top and two at the bottom in the most gentlest of ways. Her rough scribbles fell into a pattern of trustworthy, regular hazings of triangles, laced through with minute dots. Her drawing skills were nowhere near high enough to accurately portray the next thing she attempted, but through the lines of the sketch, the ghosted a slim hand reaching to the other side of the design. It was abstract, barely distinguishable from the rest of the maze of lines and ink. Then she pushed the paper back to the woman whose home she had all but forgotten she was in, and began to explain.

"Sso, although you sseem to have the grassp of the magic already, the bassic principle of this item is that we are making a talissman and it hass to have meaning. We have drawn love and trust from Catherine's intentionss. If we misjudged her character, which I do not think we did, then our outcomess might not be what we exsspect. Here is love," she indicated with a small point, caressing the page and following the ambigram, "And here is trust", as her finger linked into the traced hand and zigzagging triangles of her own sketch. "We have imbued it with our meaning. Now... now you need to undersstand the Djed. But, as you are a practiser of magicss anyway..." She trailed off, looking up at the other woman through sideways eyes. "Ussse the feeling you usse to practice sspiritissm. Here, take the knife. You need to go firsst."

She pushed the knife gently, and it slid point forwards, coming to a rest facing the blonde-haired, eyes-of-fire, physical wreck of a woman. It was a challenge, and invitation, and a blessing. Madeira didn't know if she taught well, or even if the other woman was ready for the challenge, but like the very woman whose skull they were practising this dark magic on, she trusted her. So, she muttered a prayer in snake-tongue, praying to Siku and to her deceased mother to guide this woman, and to guide them both through this, the most difficult part of the process.

[Madeira Dusk]

Madeira's lips thinned into a hard line to keep from smiling, but she didn't comment on Ssanya's sudden eruption into her native tongue. She would never admit to thinking it, and she would offer her own bones to the Maledictor before voicing it, but her excited slip-up was so disarmingly cute. Distantly, she wondered at her comment that snake-tongue was easier to speak when doing her craft. Did that mean she learnt it from another Dhani? Possibly her family? Madeira made a mental note to ask her later.

Ssanya spoke briefly about how to fit the two pieces of love and trust together, before she mapped out what was to be their finished design. And Madeira knew she should be looking at the design blooming on the paper. But instead she was caught up in the expression on Ssanya’s face.

Madeira wasn't worried about being caught staring, since the Maledictor seemed to have left the room as soon as the ink met paper. Her dark eyes were focused and her brow furrowed, but she appeared to be seeing more than the paper below her. Madeira lent her hip on the table, fully facing the Dhani now, and merely watched her as she drew. This was what she always expected magic to be. Not the loud bangs and flashes of Reimancy or the surprising amount of bullshyke in Spiritism, but the quiet, consuming planing and understanding that burned from Ssanya's eyes.

When the book was pushed back to her, Madeira dropped her gaze and adjusted her posture like she was doing something inappropriate. Now that the finished piece was before her, she let herself look into it and tried to detangle the message that both Ssanya and herself were trying to convey. She followed the trail of her dark finger as the Dhani traced the design, and nodded along to her explanation.

The knife was pushed to her, and Madeira felt a thrill of her earlier anxiety. But now she had the design, and, more importantly, she had Ssanya's words running through her mind. She was as prepared as she would ever be. Use the feeling you use to practise Spiritism, she said. Ok, she would do just that.

She pulled her one chair over to their side of the table and sat down. With her right hand she picked up the knife, and with the left she brought Catherine's skull closer. With quick motions she unwound the bandages on her tender fingertips, willing to endure the pain of her missing and broken fingernails so to be able to touch the skull directly. Beside her she heard the mumbling of a prayer, in words that had a sibilant rush of sand between her fingers.

The Spiritist closed her eyes, trying to occupy that space where she drew soulmist from her body. But this time, she wasn't drawing her soul from within herself, she was drawing whatever a soul left behind in the bones of a woman. She had to turn the magic outward, outside of herself, to draw the Djed from Catherine.

There was a heavy, breathing silence as Madeira pressed the tip of the bade to the crown of the skull. And with unpractised but painfully careful strokes, Madeira began to draw love out of Catherines bones.
The bone was softer than she expected, and years of practise made the magical focus, if not easy, at least bearable. Yet by the end there was a flush to her breath and a dampness on the back of her neck as if she had physically exerted herself. Perhaps she was forcing it too much. Perhaps this was a symptom of her inexperience. But the end result was worth it.

Madeira stood and offered Ssanya the chair and a chance to look over her work, and there was a small spark of pride in the way her skinny shoulders were set under her blouse. Her malediction circle was a painstaking recreation of her original design; a perfect anagram made of gentle lines and enclosed in circle. Though she couldn't help but think that it looked lonely without the cradle of Ssanya's design.