You left the day job for the work you were built for.
Or you are still in it, planning your exit with a lump in your throat. Either way the real work exists now, and it is not paying like it should.
So you do the math at 2am. You refresh the sales screen like the number will change if you catch it off guard. And when someone at the table asks how "the little business" is going, you smile and say good, really good, while something in your chest files it under evidence that leaving was the mistake.
You raised your rates once and quietly walked them back down. You bought the price-your-worth workbook. You took the marketing course. You posted every single day for a month. You said yes to clients you knew were wrong for you because money is money.
None of it was wasted, and none of it moved the thing. Because the work was never the problem. Somewhere between the offering and the asking, the price keeps slipping out of your hands. You did everything right. The specific thing is still there.
So I wrote you a rite.
It is called Paid Like the Offering It Is, and you cast it yourself, tonight if you want, with a candle, a coin, and your own spice rack. It has you write what your work actually is in your own words, set the real number beneath it, and fasten the payment to the offering with wax and your own two hands. It is free. I made it. You cast it.
Every ingredient in it earns its place, and the rite tells you why as you go, the way a recipe should. It ends with one real ask made out in the world within seven days, because a spell with no ask behind it is a wish, and I do not deal in wishes. You walk away with a charm that sits where your work happens, holding the number you finally wrote down.