Viola Longdawning, from the city of Verguston on Delyria, is a transpositioner - a mage who specializes in teleportation and other space-warping sorts of spells. Delyria is a very do-it-yourself sort of place, though, and instead of simply buying a pre-enchanted blade to use as a weapon, it's generally much more cost-effective (and good practice) to take a sturdy but non-magical piece of equipment and inscribe the runes on it yourself. The final step is what she's doing here - filling the item with chroma, the substance that fuels magic. Viola is linking this short sword to a "beacon" spell; anything she strikes with it will become magically linked to the blade itself, allowing her to use her own teleportation magic to recall it back to wherever she herself is. It's too expensive to maintain a link to more than one or two things at a time, and if they get too far away she won't be able to recall them, but it's still a convenient ability to have.