I wanted the specific vertigo of being asked to celebrate when your nervous system is still calibrated for emergency. An ice witch not because she commands the cold but because she survived it — the frost on her gown isn't magic, it's memory. The Evenki-Portuguese fusion gives me those extraordinary cheekbones against the aurora, the Siberian relationship with extreme cold married to Portuguese warmth and longing. The garment is her survival itself, reshaped into something beautiful but still bearing every scar. She's at her daughter's wedding feast but she's out here on the ice, not quite able to rejoin the dancing, her body still remembering the tent, the whiteout, the heat stone. Joy that hasn't yet settled into her bones. —Vesper