I think love is the fundamental vibration of the universe—a mixture of exuberant joy and erotic creation (birds and bees, the earth ripe with spring, the stars in one’s eyes upon seeing one’s lover). Its sensation is a boundary-dissolving limitlessness that allows us to transcend the limited perception of self in order to experience an interconnected merging with other. And to experience love fully means being willing to unwrap the barbed wire of self-protection from our hearts.

I find Enga fascinating to write because she’s such a badass yet significantly disabled. Obviously she has cyborg limbs and technology in her head, which in some ways help her find workarounds for her impairments, but she’s still impaired; she still faces significant challenges that the other characters don’t and would never be mistaken for an able-bodied person. I’ve always seen her as a character who is deeply angry.

The first image I had was of a person being so inflamed by her uncontrollable emotions that she literally burns to death—but also comes back to life. The last part is important because it symbolizes the cyclical nature of life: some days are good, other days are bad; the tide goes out, but it always comes back in; a phoenix dies, but gets reborn. In the same way, it’s so easy to get lost in the heat of an intense emotion and think we’ll always feel this way.

At its heart, this is a genie story. This is the story of the guy who asks a magical figure for a wish and does not get precisely what he asks for. The great power he asked could have been a wizard or a demon, with little rewriting necessary. The story actually began with the anecdote told in its middle about the time traveler commissioning Shakespeare for a love sonnet, and could have been just that, but I wrapped another story around it.

“Witch” can mean so many different things. For me, in this story, it embodies a woman who has defied the patriarchal order, and escaped the social and religious strictures that she was born into, to become a person of power and knowledge. She sees the hypocrisy of her family, and the cruelty of the religious right, and disowns them. There is always a price to pay for such things. Not everyone can be saved. And sometimes, the only way to save yourself is letting go of everything else.