#haliah lenayah

It was no secret, but Echo loved to work with her hands - she found it calming, something to train her focus on when everything else could be a mess. And the fact that she could make things, trinkets and baubles and pieces of jewelry for her friends to carry around was just an added bonus. It made her special, at least that’s how she thought of it.

So she found new, creative ways to work with wire and twine, broken bits of colored glass with the sharp edges filed down to make them less dangerous to wear. Gems and particularly cool looking rocks, shells from the beach - she could work with pretty much anything someone gave her, make things out of items that carried memories.

She was proud of her work, really. If she could, she’d love to make her products cheaper, but with the time and the effort that it took… well, quite a few of her friends had to convince her not to.

Whatever it might cost for others though, for her friends, things were always free. And often unasked for, but she enjoyed seeing them smile when she presented them with something that she made.

“Hey Furia, is this looking okay?” She held up her mess of wires and cording, where she was slowly weaving them together around a broken piece of rainbow fluorite, an incoming gift for Haliah.

The redhead looked up from her book and blinked a couple of times, looking at the work in progress with a blank look. “I’m going to say yes but honestly I have no idea what kinda look you’re going for there, so take that how you may.”

Echo giggled and shrugged. “It’ll look better the further I go with it, I think. It just kinda looks like a tangle right now, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely. But I’ll trust your judgement in this.”

Haliah sighed, rubbing a hand over her face again. Another failed concoction, another day wasted trying to figure out what should have been a simple spell.

She could have gotten this figured out days ago, but-

But she was alone out here. There was no one to teach her, not in such a hotspot for normal human activity. If she could just get even just to the next city over, somewhere that wasn’t downtown New York… she knew that witches gathered in places where they could do their magic more freely.

Curses came easily to her - hexes, things that harmed. Maybe it was the poisonous place she grew up in. In dark alleyways, rundown apartment buildings that were absolutely not up to any sort of safety standards. But she wanted better things.

Just a simple spell, pulling clean water from her surroundings. And she couldn’t. Because there weren’t any other witches that she could find in New York to teach her. No covens, no stray magic users, no one.

“Haliah, that guy is here again.” Mariah, her twin, leaned against the door frame and watched her with an almost blank look. Almost blank - there was a little bit of contempt there, arms folded over her chest as her nails dug into her skin. “Should I let him in?”

Pausing for a moment to take a deep breath, Haliah steadied her thoughts and then let her mental mask slide into place as she smiled at her sister. “Yeah, let him in. Just give me a few minutes to get ready, yeah?”

Mariah nodded with a gruff noise and stepped out, as Haliah gathered her notes again and shuffled them away into a dresser drawer. If only for her sister, she had to keep doing whatever she had to in order to keep them safe, off the street. That meant that she couldn’t abandon her, not even to look for a teacher.

She’d learn. She would, she had to.

~

Honestly I need to delve into Haliah’s backstory more. She had it pretty bad when she was younger, but she actually kinda got her shit together around the time that she reached about 20ish, just in time for Akaira to bump into her so that Haliah could help her figure her life out as well. 10/10 best mom friend, will use blood magic to help her friends.