As Declan's apprentice left to spread his news elsewhere Elise stormed over to the counter. Once again she needed a drink. Helping herself to one of the bottles she had stashed there she poured herself a glass of sweet amber liquid. She downed the glass in a single motion.
"Do you think she really has come back?" The timid Willow asked, looking up from her task.
"Nothing is impossible. But I rather doubt it. It doesn't take much for rumours about her to get started. All it takes is one drunk fool in a bar talking about how they've seen her and all of a sudden the entire damned town is talking about it,"
The whole story brought back memories that Elise would rather not think of. It was easier to drown them in drink and block them by focusing on focuses than to endure remembering. Elise refilled her glass and briefly considered pouring one for Willow but quickly dismissed that as a terrible idea. It seemed rude to drink alone when someone else was there but Willow was a bit young for alcohol.
"Yeah, this Obsidian Witch is coming out of hiding thing is going to change nothing. It'll be forgotten soon, like all the other empty rumours before it. It'll disappoint some people sure but they'll recover in time to believe the next popular lie,"
Finishing her second glass she threw her attention over to what Willow was working on. She'd stripped the bark and sanded down the stick and was now using the carving knives to cut an image into the stick. It was crude, the work of an amateur, but the image it depicted was clear and simple. It was a tree and not just any tree.
"A willow tree huh?"
Willow didn't respond directly but she grinned shyly. Clearly pleased with herself. Elise found herself smiling back. She dragged over a stool and sat next to Willow. Then she fumbled around in the box under the desk for a few choice sticks.
"Now since you're not a reader and I haven't got you a testing box yet I can't 'show' you how to burn channels. But I can describe it for you, draw some diagrams and explain where you're going wrong. Before you mention anything about screwing it up; I'm self-taught. My first attempts were all terrible. If you get a working focus within your first hundred attempts you're doing better than I did,"
Talking about channels and focuses always filled Elise with a degree of excitement and this was no exception.
"I'll be starting you off with a gateless focus. Basically, it'll be an enchantment. It'll only have one possible spell effect. But the lack of gates means it won't have to match the user's spell thread so precisely and you can make the channels larger if you are prepared to accept more spell jitter in exchange for having more people be able to use it effectively. Now to burn a channel you just have to force your spell thread through the wood in the pattern you want to burn. This is harder than it sounds, your spell thread will try and deflect around impediments and the wood does not have a uniform density. You need to really force it to go into the wood. And the changing density means the effort you need to burn the channel changes as you go. Keeping your channels straight and in the shape they need to be can be challenging. Are you ready?"
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Willow nodded with far more enthusiasm than Elise had anticipated. For the next few hours, they sat there. Time blurred for Elise like it did when she was working on focuses herself as she talked Willow through the process and caught her mistakes. She directed the young girl as she formed spooling reservoirs and twisted the channels into useful spell patterns. By the end, Willow had several single-purpose focuses in front of her. Each had been channelled by her own thread. The wand marked with a willow tree produced a bright blue light at its tip but Willow's beaming pride outshone it. She tried to hide her smile but she couldn't stop herself from grinning as she held the piece of wood aloft and filled the shop with light.
As much as Elise would have loved to stand there watching Willow admire her work it was well past time for the shop to open. With a reluctant heart, Elise flipped around the little card in the shop window so it read open. Thankfully her shop was never the busiest of places. The lows were not an ideal place to put a custom focus shop. Most of her competitors served a more high-end market. The majority were located near the plaza with a few sprinkled in the noble district near the top of the hill. Truthfully she could have easily set up her shop anywhere she wanted. She chose to operate in the lows. There were no expectations of behaviour in the lows. No pomp and ceremony and certainly no nobles. Though a few of the more wealthy clients that dared to come down acted with enough arrogance that you could understandably be confused. But most clients like that avoided the lows like the plague. Probably because there was the occasional report of plague from the lows.
The odd customer that filtered in usually wanted a quick repair job. Most commonly some form of crack had severed a channel and a new channel needed to be burnt to route around the damage. It rarely took her long with each instance. But today the conversation with each was the same. Every damned one of them was talking about the Obsidian Witch. She dealt with each one with gritted teeth. The constant repetition of the subject grated on her. Every time someone mentioned it she was tempted to grab them by the collar and drag them from her shop and throw them into the street.
As the day marched on the pile of wands in front of Willow grew. Elise hadn't asked her to make more she had chosen to. Elise left her to it so she could handle her accursed customers. In between quick repair jobs and taking the specs for new orders, Elise worked on the backlog of work she had so carefully built up. Despite the constant blathering about the Witch Elise lost herself to a familiar rhythm of making focuses and dealing with customers.
It was mid-afternoon when a pair of customers entered. They were the kind of well dressed, smug folks that Elise utterly despised dealing with. Her location in the lows wasn't enough to keep all such people away, unfortunately. Their lines were pretty long and they exuded the sense that they thought themselves better than those around them. It only got worse when they saw Elise's scars and tiny line. The couple looked at her with open disdain, never even attempting to hide their contempt behind niceties.
"I was told this place was the best focus shop in the city," the man of the pair said his voice dripping with disbelief.
"Maybe it's-" the woman began speaking as she looked around the small shop. But she trailed off as soon as she took a good look at Willow.
Willow was nearly out of sticks she had spent the day carving and channelling them till a nice stack of single-purpose focuses had gathered on her workbench. They had all had flaws. Cavities in the channels. Slightly sloppy carvings. But each one was different. Each one an experiment. Willow placed down the latest stick she was working on and turned to look at the new customers with terror-filled eyes.
"Mom? Dad?"