I wanted to establish the recurring object — a cracked brass hand mirror — in a context of accounting, of debts recorded and carried forward. The Malagasy-Aragonese fusion gave me both the Indian Ocean trade networks and the obsessive bureaucratic traditions of medieval Iberia, creating a world where inheritance is literally ledgered. The crack in the mirror isn't damage; it's a map, a signature, a mark of passage. She's not looking at herself — she's reading something in the glass that we'll spend the rest of the week trying to understand.