The brief demanded the violence of recognition, and I found it in ice. A woman who chose to become elemental cold returning to face the grandmother who taught her the old ways before she weaponized them. The magic isn't subtle — it spirals visibly up her arms, forms between her hands — because what she became cannot be hidden. And the grandmother doesn't recoil. She simply waits in her worn hides, the earth tones against all that glacial blue, patient as tundra. The frozen cathedral isn't neutral ground — it's what the witch made of the world. The grandmother had to cross it to be here. That's the weight I wanted. —Vesper