¹Editor's Note: The following transcript was recovered by an expedition into the lair of a woolly scorpion gecko at the cost of three junior apprentice explorationaries, third grade. Please fondly regard them as they are converted into sentient crystal over the next two hundred seventy five Summer Sessions of Her Magesty's Court. No trace of the second half has yet to be recovered as of this publication.

A tiny tinkling noise almost but not entirely unlike wind chimes roused me from my nap. I'm not quite sure why the comparison sprang to mind, but it was the closest thing mine drew a comparison to. I stretched, nearly falling out of my hammock bed as I did so, then washed myself in the traditional fashion before it occurred to me to investigate. I climbed out in as undignified a fashion as I could muster, stretched again, and then clawed the ol' scratching post for good measure. I had finished my morning potion and was just about to check my messages on the ætherweb when the noise happened again, pricking my ears towards the door to my Atelier.

"Alright, Tinkerbell, hold your horseflies, I'm coming. Gosh, fairies just don't know not to rush a cat..." I grumbled, grabbing my hat and shoving it roughly on my head. My wand glinted in my hand, the stylized flame at the tip beginning to incandesce with very real heat. I wasn't planning on permanently killing whatever woke me up, but the fairies around my Atelier get uppity if I don't exterminate a few of them every few weeks and it's not like they don't come back...eventually. Besides, who or whatever roused me from my well-earned fourth daily nap definitely had it coming. You don't just wake up a cat without consequences after all, let alone one who is also a witch.

"Okay, I'm coming, let me just...HA!" I yell as I yank open the door, stabbing my wand through the opening as I blasted a firebolt at...the poor willow tree at the corner of the lot, which I had once again given a reason to weep. I stood stock still for a minute, ears forward and nose twitching as I sniffed for the telltale slightly-burned-cardamom odor of a recently-cast invisibility spell and listened for the faint titter of fey laughter at a successful prank. To my consternation, there was nothing.

"Hello?..." I said to no one.

Winter had come early this year, and the cold air made me shiver and puff up as I realized I neglected clothes in my rush to punish the interloper. I looked towards the brush-covered rubble mound, glanced down at the shattered halo lying on a bed of fluffy charcoal grey feathers on the stoop, cast my gaze towards the too-small pond I dug out next to the brook in an abortive attempt to make a fishing hole, and spared a regretful glance for the tree I'd nailed with a bullet of magical heat before I shut the door. 

Wait a second.

I opened the door again, this time wearing a hastily-donned long coat, and squatted down. The halo was cracked into two main pieces, along with quite a number of smaller shards. With a gesture from my wand I levitated the second largest experimentally, unwilling to touch it directly. Even in my past lives I had never actually seen a halo in person, up close or otherwise, and the fragments looked remarkably like glass especially when they caught the afternoon sun just right. The broken ring seemed to have a supernatural fire inside as pretty as any opal, and I found myself wondering just for a second how compatible it would be with the glasses I use and whether I could get the colors to really shine. I let the chunk of halo fall slowly back to its place on the feathers, then straightened with a bit of a scowl.

"Okay, whoever's there, show yourself. I don't know how you got through my wards or how you're hiding, but I'm not gonna do any repair work for someone who won't even do me the decency of showing their face, especially not some twerpy archon who broke their stupid head ring," I ventured, searching for any sign that could betray the location of whatever encroached on my territory, but to no avail. I reached for the hordes of glass servitors that secreted themselves across the reforested lot I'd made my demesne, but couldn't sense anything through them either.

Secretly, I was panicking a little. I wasn't always a witch, after all. I used to be the familiar of a capital-E Evil Sorceress, and even though it's been a long time since I had to deal with any of the ramifications or fallout from being such a servant, I'm always a little on guard when the so-called "Forces of Good" are anywhere within scrying range. The fact that this bundle of broken divinity got dropped off at my studio doorstep without triggering any of my wards had me very concerned. My eyes fell to the broken halo on its feather bed, and narrowed. Either this was a test by a pesky archangel with some unknowable criteria for success, a message that someone who could take on an angel and win could reach me in spite of my precautions, or a genuine request for aid. Being as I am ultimately a creature of the Fae, I decided the Laws of Hospitality applied, and chose to believe the most charitable of these possibilities.

I brought out the tray for my tea set and began to place the fragments of the divine headpiece on it, still not actually touching them directly. One never picks up broken glass with one's bare paws if she can at all help it, and the edges looked every bit as sharp, if not more so. The tray itself was silver and, while not pure, would probably be the least offensive and safest thing for the halo to rest on. I had to don my magic-detecting spectacles to find all the tiny bits I could before I could safely pick up the feathers, which went in a simple woven basket from a gift I got from an elderly wizard in thanks for a particularly large Orb of Seeing I made some time ago. Those were some really tasty summer sausages, and I had no idea you could even make jerky from incarnate concepts like the color blue.

I knew immediately not only that the broken halo was magical but that the feathers were, too. Once they were safely arrayed on my workbench and I had sufficiently garbed myself for being in my Atelier, I began a more in-depth analysis. The energies in both seemed to be aligned so they were almost certainly from the same entity, or failing that one or both were exceptionally well faked. There were signs they had been exposed to powerful abjuration magic at some point, and there were clear resonances that smacked of interplanar teleportation, but I was at a loss as to what caused the halo to break. There was no telltale eldritch contamination from Infernal or Outsider attack, nor any other hazardous residue that would pose a particular problem for me.

Delicately, I picked up one of the feathers. It was a very light ashen grey, and surprisingly uniformly so. While the shape was most like a primary wing feather, it had a fluffiness along the leading edge of the quill that was more like down. It also smelled like a mixture of tobacco and cannabis smoke with more than a hint of clove. I toyed with it idly as I considered, resisting the urge to seize it in my teeth and chew out of concern that it might be taken as an affront even though I really wanted to know what the texture was like. Look, don't knock it if you haven't tried mouthing the discarded bits of magical creatures while investigating them. You'd be surprised what you'd learn, such as what does and doesn't make a good stim toy for an oral fixation.

I turned my attention back to the broken halo on the sterling silver tray. In the magical light of my shop, the fragments looked more or less like they were plain glass with exceptional optical clarity. The opalescent fire came back when I exposed a piece to sunlight, though. Gosh it was pretty, and I thought it was such a shame I wouldn't be using it for something more worthwhile than a glorified floating purity ring. Again, the fear it was a test or a trap stayed my usually greedy paw.

"Well then," I said aloud to the otherwise empty studio of my Atelier. "Let's get started."

First, I tried heating a small bit with my bench torch. This took some experimentation as I didn't want to pick it up with the plain steel of my tweezers as I already suspected it would require far too aggressive a flame, and I couldn't get a glob of hot glass to grab it even with a large molten gob either. I toyed with a brand-new tungsten-tipped hole maker to hold the fragment, but this could grip only delicately between its tines and would have been useless for the larger repair. Potentially I could have held it with magic, but I was concerned about trapping my essence in between the pieces and creating cracks, or worse, inclusions. I then tried to weld a couple pieces together on a graphite plate using a hand torch with a number of different tips, eventually even balanced on top of a bunsen burner to preheat. This effort turned out to be for naught as the oxygen-propane flame didn't seem to be hot enough to get past the halo shards' ability to dissipate heat. I tried two other fuels and even gasified quintessence, but I only barely got it to soften for a moment.

The last one surprised me, to be honest. I wasn’t really expecting the mundane options to work, but I figured I would give them a shot just in case since the other option is so rare and costly. The galling thing was that the heat it radiated was enough to singe the fur on my paws in spite of my protective sleeves, and even left a divot on the graphite plate where it spalled from the intensity. It was trivial to fix the latter with a spell, but I don’t think there’s a cat anywhere that appreciates burning their beans. The only thing the rarefied element did achieve was making the opalescent fire appear in glints of yellow, orange, and green that stuck around until the slivers lost enough heat, at which point they abruptly went completely transparent again.

This called for a tea break.

I don’t usually get out the full service unless I have a guest to show off for or a conundrum to puzzle through, and this definitely ticked at least one of those boxes. Normally I just heat water directly in a mug with a simple cantrip and use an in-cup strainer, but today I needed the ritual of preparation to settle my mind so I could work through the problem. A few minutes later, I was sipping the first infusion of the last of my favourite leaves, a milk oolong I occasionally trade marbles to a cute crow girl for. I decided I was overlooking something, and started examining the broken halo again.

My impatience was getting to me, and as usual I started taking shortcuts. The first thing I noticed as I picked up the largest piece of halo was that it had a texture that wasn’t immediately obvious. There were grooves in the form of fine concentric rings like a tree, as if the headgear was turned like metal on a lathe, spun like adamantine, or even molded like a record. ²Editor's Note: A record is a deprecated form of on-demand musical storage in the Material Realm far inferior to the Fae counterpart of merely shrinking and imprisoning musicians within a much more convenient convenient brooch or other gemstone. While the former suggested a metallic composition that was out of my wheelhouse and the second would require exorbitantly expensive dwarvish aid as a matter of course, the latter might still have promise as a means of restoration I could pursue on my own. I sure hoped that was the case since, after all, I’d already accepted the quest and would certainly suffer a hit to my reputation were I to pass it on. Fairy Land rules still apply even if you leave so long as you aren’t in the Material Realm, after all.

I didn't even feel the cut until after I had put the halo fragment back on the silver tray with its siblings and freshened my mug from the tea pot resting on the pillar of my servitors who had stacked themselves for the task. This became obvious when I noticed the handle was sticky and a little wet when I set it down. The cause turned out to be a neat little cut into my palm pad, with the sharp edge having passed straight through the tough fabric with apparently no resistance. The cut was extremely clean and fairly shallow, a deep scratch more than anything, but remarkable both in how freely it bled and how painless it was, considering. The familiar injury had the odd effect of reassuring me, though. Glass will punish you if you don't respect it for the creature it is, and this was behavior I was familiar with. Properly chastened, I resolved to slow down and take more care in handling the halo as I sealed the wound, mended my sleeve, and cleaned everything up.

Thinking back to my almost-success with the torch, I decided to try an experiment. I got out a little lamp supposedly carved from the bone of a wraith that I was given by an elf at the completion of a commission that was filled with a liquid form of the Fifth Element, and lit it with a splint of hornbeam after setting it on my working altar. The tiny but pure white flame superheated a gemstone suspended on an arm for this purpose which, by the time I put on my protective spectacles again, was shining brilliantly. I picked up a halo shard and held it up to the pure light.

The fragment began radiating just as intensely as the lamp crystal and I marveled for a moment at all the scintillating dots of fiery color that had sprung up on all the surfaces of the studio, but I didn't have time to indulge the surge of adrenaline my prey drive shot into my system in anticipation of pouncing on one of the dazzling sparkles. I'm a professional witch, after all. With the protective flip-down shades filtering the radiance I could finally see what I was working with. I’m not sure if this applies to all haloes, but this one was definitely made from numerous flakes of something that were sintered together in a mold, somehow resulting in the glass-like material. I could work with this. Slumping wasn’t my favourite thing since it was just a lot of fussing followed by even more magical energy expenditure and a lot of waiting…meaning that I just had to sit around getting tired because I wouldn’t be able to distract myself otherwise.

I really hate not being able to distract myself otherwise.

After some more inspection and introspection, based on the amount of power and the lack of a second chance if something went wrong, I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to do this as if I was making my top tier model of Orb. This meant…ugh…an actual bath in water, and one with stinky heat- and magical radiation-resistant unguents that would stick in my fur for days and feel greasy on my beans. Even worse, I would have to bathe again after it was done just to get enough of the oils out that I wouldn’t stain my clothing or bedding. Then I’d have to miss meals, snacks, AND naps until it was over.

“I hope you’re worth getting all gross and gooey, little miss angel,” I snarked out loud, tail swishing in pre-emptive annoyance. My servitors began clinking against each other from their resting spots around the Atelier, producing the successions of chirps that passed for laughter amongst them. My tail puffed up and I would have hissed or even growled, but then sighed and chuckled instead. I'd probably giggle at me too if it wasn't me who had to do it.

…

Ugh, that stuff gets worse the older it gets. The only thing worse than using it is making it, too.

Properly protected, I began to set up the Atelier for the ritual. I didn’t have a purpose-made mold on hand, and I was pretty sure I didn’t have time to have one made. Also, plaster- or sand-casting would definitely not work for the amount of heat I was going to be using. Casting my gaze about in search of a substitute, my eyes found the cast iron giant doughnut cake mold hanging on the wall in the corner of my kitchen in the other room. If by now you’ve guessed it was a thank-you gift for a commissioned Orb, you’d be right. I get a lot of knick-knacks that way, and while most of them are useful in some fashion, some are so mono-purpose that I usually just use them as kitchy art.

I hadn’t ever bothered to give it a try since baking wasn’t usually my thing when it came to cooking, and besides which I had always figured the mold was a bit small for what it was. There was a durability charm on it I wasn't familiar with and was definitely well seasoned, and while I’m sure it was probably at least a little blasphemous, it seemed to be the perfect size and shape for the halo. A thought occurred to me and I grinned maliciously upwards, as if leering at the angel I imagined to be watching.

“Well, hey, at least when I fix it your halo, it'll be sacrelicious!”

I laughed riotously at my own joke. My servitors joined in. The Laws of Hospitality don't say anything about teasing your guests if they can't ask you not to, after all.

The actual repair took me until midnight to start. First I had to decide on the right incense, settling on frankincense for the initial phase and patchouli for later. Then came the wards to keep out any scrying eyes or wandering spirits, and while at first I hesitated on using the full degree since I might inadvertently hedge out whoever brought the halo to be repaired, I decided it was an acceptable breach of Hospitality. It took another hour for me to delicately position all the fragments in just the right shape in the mold before adding a drop of liquid quintessence to each crack, though as I write this I suspect it was a lot of unnecessary effort. Finally, I surrounded my altar with concentric spell circles drawn in powdered fluxes in order to help shape and purify the stream of mana I would push into the contents of the mold. I had my little glass servitors arrayed to bring me anything I didn’t have immediately on hand.

“So…let’s get started.”

Eight hours later, day broke to find me grumpy and exhausted as I opened the clamshell mold that had survived the process astoundingly well, and even gave off the slight smell of buttery pancakes. I chuckled again at yesterday’s jape. The halo itself was still glowing as though white hot. I knew it was much cooler, but by the way the radiant heat dried my nose I could tell it was at about the softening point of a more mundane type of glass. I stood and started working the kinks out of my everything, stretching this way and that so as to release the stiffness that came from sitting in one place all night. I might be a fat cat, but I’m still more flexible than most naked monkeys I know.

I wasn’t sure if it would actually need it, but I chucked it in my kiln anyway. That is to say, I actually rather delicately levitated it in before setting a comprehensive heating and cooling cycle, but I definitely imagined just whanging it in there with no grace or care for the damage that would cause. It probably would have embedded itself in the refractory and given me no end of headaches for repairs with nary a scratch on it, anyway. Haloes sure are made of tough stuff. I'd hate to meet who or whatever broke this one.

After a long, hot bath - that I totally didn’t enjoy or find really relaxing and soothing, shut up - full of all sorts of soaps, oils, and salts to break up the goop that was already starting to attract and fuse dust to my fur, I took a well-deserved nap and didn’t wake up until about the same time I was roused the day before. After scrounging up a meal from three different sets of leftovers, I went to inspect my handiwork in the Atelier.

The halo was still softly glowing as I took it out of the kiln. The ring had definitely reached room temperature but still felt slightly warm. Furthermore, it felt significantly lighter in my paws, as though it were almost self-supporting. I couldn’t help but admire that same opalescent fire I observed the day before, especially since it didn’t require holding it at just the right angle in a sunbeam or burning expensive magical reagents to see it. I carried it into my living space to where it was less well lit just to look at the pretty glowy shiny thing I had recreated. I’m sure my pupils were probably super dilated as I did so.

On a lark, I held it over my head and made a silly face at my mirror.

“Mneh, I am a stuffy uptight do-gooder, mnehhh,” I jeered, before stopping as I felt my scalp prickle. Experimentally, I let go of the halo. It remained floating just above my ear tips, rotating slightly. I gave it a flick, and it let out a quiet bell tone that sustained way longer than it had any physical right to. In the back of my mind, I wondered at the implications of this and whether it was a three dimensional shadow of an n-th dimensional object. At the front, I merely said,

“Whoa.”

A ripple of frission passed down my spine. I could just barely see the rim as it rotated. It had a slight perturbation in its orbit that was close enough to just barely touch the longest few hairs of my left ear, making it flick each time in an autonomic response I rapidly started to get annoyed with. Deciding I’d had enough with this angelic cosplay, I reached up to yank it off my head with a huff. I nearly threw myself into my dresser. It was stuck.

“MOTHER FU-“

After a string of invective that would have gotten me keelhauled in at least thirteen different navies in five separate parts of the multiverse and a one-cat wrestling match that would have made the toughest feline brawlers cringe, I came to rest on a pile of broken furniture, head propped up because my ridiculous new headpiece was caught on the remaining hinge of my armoire that had barely avoided falling on top of me. Giving my home the customary furtive glances to make sure nobody had seen me make a damned fool of myself, I started casting mending and cleaning spells while sulking. I was so intent on feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t notice that I had company until I was mostly done and had started pondering how to disengage myself from the consequences of my curiosity. With a sigh, I looked in the mirror with a wry smile, thinking about the old adage about such with regards to cats like myself.

An angel looked back at me, our eyes locked on each others'. We blinked in perfect synchronization.

We both screamed.