Li Wen sat at her table in front of her window, looking out into the night as it crept across Grim Aegis. On the table, far from her, was a small cup lying upside down with a string attached to it. She held one hand up, pointing at the cup with one finger. Her eyes focused down that finger, both open as she lined up the tip of her finger with the top of the cup.

The cup almost perfectly tracked with the rising moon, and she squinted as she tried to keep the entire process lined up. She focused on one thought and one thought only: She wanted to slow the cup the moment she pulled on the string. She didn't know why she did it, but it was a daily practice for her.

She took a deep breath before releasing it, slowly pulling the string taunt to pull the cup across the table. She kept her finger steady; that was one thing that served her well in her job, waiting tables at the cafe, and for the rest of her life.

Skrrt.

She pulled hard on the string, ripping the cup across the table. In her mind, the cup slowed. The hard slide turned into a slow scoot. She began to track the cup with her finger, her hand moving with the cup's speed, but her mind predicted the motion faster than her body could track.

However, it was all an illusion.

The cup skidded into her fingers, her hand bringing it to a stop despite her attempt to slow time itself. It was all a flight of fancy, no different than her midday imaginations on her break, where she would take a ball of cold, swirling white energy and slam it into the ground to create a sheet of ice. She picked up the cup from her lap and sat it on the table.

Clack.

The sound echoed through her room, and Wen shook her head.

"What are you doing?" she stared at her reflection in the mirror.

It stared back at her, the same dark eyes unflinching in the face of being questioned. Wen shook her head, and her reflection did the same. She was playing in an imaginary world when she should have been getting sleep for the next day. She would go back to her job regardless of how much sleep she got, yet she was playing around with a finger gun instead of going to bed.

"It's so childish."

She stood, leaving the cup and string on the table as she walked to her bed. Maybe it was because she wasn't happy. Maybe it was because of her daily conversations with Alex about how wrong Grim Aegis felt. She didn't know, but she felt like she didn't belong and could be just about anywhere else besides her current job and life.

She pulled back the covers on her bed before sitting on the matters. She put her head in her hands to push away the thoughts. She could be anywhere else, but she was obviously in Grim Aegis.

In the next moment, her world turned on its head.

She opened her eyes in a small dark room, sitting on a smaller bed, much lower to the ground. The room around her was made of metal, painted an off-white that burned at her eyes with the fluorescent light in the room. In front of her stood a man she could only describe as an incarnation of Death.

His head was dark-skinned and bald, but his arms and chest were only white bones. He wore a blue robe, but the top exposed his ribcage, and she could see a purple crystal stuck inside where his heart should be.

Wen immediately tried to withdraw, but she couldn't move. It was as if she was trapped inside her body, not much different than the paralysis that accompanied night terrors. She could do nothing as the man leaned forward, his face a dark shadow.

"What you're describing to me, Wen doesn't sound like the next level of your curse."

"Oh," she whispered involuntarily.

"At the same time, it is progress." The man shook his head, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Instead of worrying about evolving your curse, you should instead consider how you might create a technique."

"A technique?"

Images flooded Wen's mind as she thought about two other shadowed men. One held a blazing sword, almost wreathed in fire, while the other covered himself in metal. There was also a woman wrapping herself in vines that grew from her body and even the skeleton before her as he conjured a spirit from the shadows.

Wen didn't recognize them, though one of them reminded her of Alex. However, she sensed that she was impossibly far behind in those images. She couldn't push herself as hard as those figures, nor could she catch up.

She was too weak.

"None of us became who we are in a single day," the skeleton said, pulling his hand away and gesturing at himself. "I started my journey through my curse with simple strings. I could call them and bind with them, but they were useless beyond that."

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Wen watched him, her heart beating a heavy beat in her head.

His hands glowed purple, and lined strings shot out from his fingers, sailing through the sky like slipships across the nightsea, curving through the air and coming to rest around him on the ground.

"However, I didn't see the application at the time. Spirit Strings."

He flung out his hands, sending the strings flying away from him and to the far sides of the room. In seconds, he had a web of purple light between himself and Wen, all tied into place at his fingers. He drew them tight, wrapping his fist around the strands.

"But, these strings were just the beginning. By using them, I learned more about my curse, and I found new ways to use my strings. I started fighting with them when the time came for that, and my opponents pushed me to new heights."

"I've used my curse," Wen whispered, wrinkling her shirt in her hands with clenched fists.

"You have." The man nodded. "But at the same time, you haven't. You found an easy path in your bullets, and because of that, you stunted yourself."

He reached across the table, retrieving the black cylinder that had rested on it. He gently rolled the cylinder back and forth in his skeletal palm, examining the object. Wen's balled fists tightened until her nails dug into her palm as she watched him roll the cylinder.

"This is a marvel; do not misunderstand me," he said, holding up the object. "It is an important tool for you to use when fighting for your life. However, it is important to consider it a step, not an end. This is not all you can do, but only one thing of many."

He held out the object to her, and she took it in shaking hands. It was heavy. Her arms sagged underneath the weight. Wen held the object but didn't know why. All of this felt too much like a dream she had fallen into.

"You're saying that what I saw was my mind trying to push my curse harder," Wen said. "I saw that moment freeze when fighting Captain Grayson because that is a technique that I might be able to use."

"It could be." The skeleton shrugged. "Everyone comes into techniques in different ways. Some people develop new ones easily, creating names and streamlining aether like they were born to swim in it. Others use simple techniques and make advancements with thought and planning. They think about application and see where they might grow."

He paused, tapping his chin with one bony finger.

"Your subconscious might be trying to speak with you. It saw an application of your curse and wanted your conscious mind to see it as well. I read many papers at the Academy that suggested that a person's mind is really two separate entities, working together for the betterment of both."

"I've heard similar things back on Earth," Wen said. "It wasn't my major, but it was hard not to learn a little psychology while learning literature."

"I often forget that I am among scholars," the skeletal man said in a way that implied his shadowed face was smiling. "Too often, we are focused on surviving and reaching our destination. Perhaps we should just sit down and discuss our passions someday."

"I'm sure we could wrangle them to just talking." Wen shook her head. "But I'll take your advice to heart. I'll work on applications, and maybe I'll figure something out."

"The consistency of the practice is important." The skeletal man raised one finger. "It is more important for you to practice every day, regardless of what you see accomplished. An ant who pushes a rock might not see the end for hours, but each step is one toward the end."

Wen smiled.

"Come on, Erin!" A figure blurred past the door to her room, shooting past the skeleton like a black-jacketed cannonball. "We said sorry!"

"That's not an excuse for dismemberment!" a green-cloaked figure followed after.

"Erin, you shouldn't reopen wounds!" A silver-haired knight followed after. "Even if he might be a buffoon."

"No, they'll never forget to push themselves, even for a moment." The skeletal man shook his head as he stepped out into the hall. "Are you coming?"

Wen got up to follow him, rushing out into a haze and out of her dream.

Wen opened her eyes, her face against her room's hard, cold wood floor. The pressure pushed back against her, sending a tingling sensation running down her neck and up her shoulders. She didn't know how she had managed it, but she had fallen asleep face down on the floor with only her knees holding her body steady.

It should have been impossible.

Thump.

"What time is it?" she groaned in a slur as she fell on her side, the wood absorbing some of the impacts but still sending shocking tingles rocking down her arms.

The moon still shone through the window as she forced her neck up to look outside. A spike of pain ran down her neck, but she already knew it would be with her for a while. She had slept on the floor in the wrong position and would be sore the next day, at least.

So, she took some time to recover, laying on the floor on her back as she stared up at the ceiling. She did her best not to move, knowing that every twitch would cause her tingling pain or spiking pain. For the first time, she had a good sense of all the holes in her ceiling between the wood planks beneath the attic.

She hadn't bothered to look at it before. She hadn't spent that long thinking about her home or work ever since she had shown up in Grim Aegis. How long ago had that been again? She couldn't remember, no matter how hard she tried. A heavy haze wrapped around her mind when she tried to think about more than a few days in the past.

"Isn't that odd, Alex," she whispered, finally gathering the courage to get up off the floor and return to her table.

She sat down and looked at her cup and its little string. She smiled, placed the cup on the other side of the table, and pulled back the string the same way she had earlier that night.

The words from the dream stayed with her more than anything she had seen in Grim Aegis as far back as she could remember. Practice every day, and the consistency would carry her through. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. She forced her mind to focus on the cup as she lined up her finger and pulled the string taut.

Skrrt.

She pulled it, imagining the cup slowing as she drew her finger along the line. She didn't worry about whether she succeeded. All that mattered was that she kept trying.

One day, she would succeed.

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