“Don’t worry, working with sigils is still a bit advanced for you, but the basics are simple enough to explain. Come here, I’ll show you,” Rhi said, pointing to the sink in an unspoken command to wash my hands. When I had done that, she patted the stool beside her. I sat, and she handed me a rolling pin. “You roll, I’ll explain.”
I saluted like a diligent soldier, and then began to work the dough into a flattened circle as she spoke.
“I’m sure you’re already sick of me going on about intentions, but it’s foundational to your magic, so get used to it. A sigil is a way to represent an intention in the form of a symbol. The way it works, essentially, is to create a statement of intention, remove the vowels and the repeated letters, and then arrange the remaining letters into an abstract symbol.”
I smiled down at the dough I was rolling. “That sounds a little like how my friend Poe and I used to create a secret code to pass messages to each other that no one else would understand.”
Rhi threw back her head and laughed her throaty laugh. “That’s not a bad analogy. There is certainly some element of secrecy with sigil creation—or at least, some element of wanting to protect oneself. As you know, we witches couldn’t always practice so openly, and so practices like sigils were integral to our continued spellwork.”
“That makes sense. But how do sigils and baking go together?” I asked.
“Well, I created my sigils by carving them into these wooden disks. As you can see, they’re basically cookie cutters, except they will not only cut the shape of the cookie, but press the sigil itself into the dough, like this.” And she picked up a small wooden disk from her work surface, and pressed it into the dough I’d just flattened. When she lifted it, there was a complexdesign stamped into the surface of the cookie —a strange, lopsided collection of curves and slashes that made no sense I could understand.
“But… what’s the point? Someone will just eat it,” I pointed out.
“Thatisthe point,” Rhi said, smiling again. “There are many ways to charge a sigil so that it is powerful, and one of those ways is to destroy it.”
“Destroy it? Seriously? What good would that do?” I asked, confused.
Rhi pursed her lips for a moment as she considered how to answer. Finally, she said, “Wren, let me ask you a question. Let’s say I was casting a hex on you, and I wrote your name on a piece of paper and then rolled it up and lit it on fire.”
I felt my eyes go wide, my mouth fall open. The words had sent an absolute jolt of fear right down my spine. Then Rhi slapped her hand down on the floured surface, scaring the shit out of me with the sound, and sending a cloud of flour into the air around us.
“You see? Now, why did you react that way? That was a visceral reaction!”
“I…I…” My stammering went on as I tried to analyze what felt like an automatic reaction that any non-witch would have had. “I’m not really sure,” I admitted after a moment’s pause. “I suppose it’s just… well, my name represents me, and so the idea of someone lighting…me… on fire feels like an attack. Something meant to hurt or destroy me.”
“That’s right! If my intention was to hurt you, that seems like a pretty powerful, symbolic thing to do.”
I looked down at the cookie in front of me, wary. “I’m suddenly thinking I might not want to be the one to taste-test these cookies,” I said.
Rhi chuckled. “I was just trying to illustrate a point. Destroying something can be powerful in magic, but it’s not always a negative thing.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, the last of the confusion clearing away. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Now, back to that idea of lighting your name on fire. Let’s take it a step further. Destruction is not the only purpose of fire, is it?” Rhi countered, seeming to really enjoy herself now, the way an expert lights up like a Christmas tree when their subject of expertise comes up in general conversation. “Can’t you also cleanse things with fire? Can’t you warm them? Light their path forward?”
I suddenly felt completely wrong-footed. “Oh, I… yeah, I guess that’s true.”
“My point,” Rhi said, “is that you can use the destruction of the sigil to enact its intent, even if the intent is a positive one. Fire is one way to do it—the process of baking is nearly that, but as long as my dough recipe is effective in holding the cookie’s shape, the sigil will not be destroyed. In fact, it will have gained in strength during the baking process.” Rhi reached over onto the cooling rack and plucked an already-baked cookie from among its fellows. She held it up and showed me that the design from the sigil disc was still perfectly preserved in the surface of the cookie. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “But can you guess how I intend for these sigils to be destroyed so that the sigil reaches its maximum power?”
“How?” I whispered, almost breathless.
“Like this,” Rhi said, and crammed the entire cookie in her mouth, chewing in a loud, exaggerated way.
I burst out laughing and she joined me for a moment before having to stop so she could prevent herself from choking on a mouthful of half-chewed cookie. When we’d both gotten ahandle on ourselves, she handed me a cookie with a more serious expression.
“The intention of the sigil, and therefore, the cookie, is to achieve a state of calm,” Rhi said, “but without alerting the eater to the fact they’ve been influenced by the cookie. How did I do?”
I examined the cookie for a moment and then bit into it. Nothing very immediate happened. I took a second bite, waiting for something to take effect; but again, I felt no change. I took the final bite, chewed carefully, and swallowed. Nothing.
I turned to Rhi, unsure whether I should lie or hurt her feelings, and not really wanting to do either, but she held up a finger. “Wait for it,” she whispered.
And not a full second later, a wave of absolute contentment washed over me, leaving me with an almost floaty feeling in my head. I shook it, and like the whirl of flakes in a snow globe, the feeling began to spread and settle downward. I felt my shoulders drop, my knees soften. I felt the tension I was holding in my jaw suddenly ease. All of it was subtle and natural, but it made an enormous difference in how I felt.
“Wow,” I said, and found I could grin quite easily.
But Rhi shook her head. “‘Wow’ is not exactly constructive criticism, Wren,” she said, sounding a bit flustered. “I need something a little more descriptive than that!”
