Wen lay against the ground, pinned by sharp claws. Above her, the bird-woman leaned down, her beak coming for Wen's throat. Wen had nothing left. Her guns were scattered, and the claws pinned her shoulders down. The sharp beak of the transforming woman's face would hit her neck in seconds, but she could do nothing.

She was going to die. All because her curse was too weak without preparation. Wen almost accepted that truth. She almost gave in. Cold seeped from her shoulders and up the woman's talons, and she watched as ice flakes slowly crept up the woman's legs. Her gate opened wide, calling in more aether to freeze the attacker, even if it was painstakingly slow.

Then she remembered Jean's words.

"But let me tell you this: My curse was also useless at the beginning."

For Jean's curse, he had been given simple strings that he could attach to objects. However, she had seen Jean in a fight. Because he had pushed his curse, it was now far beyond simple strings. By pushing himself hard with his curse, he had forced it to become something stronger.

Her reliance on her guns stunted her growth. While they gave her an easy win condition, that ease had made her less likely to risk her life in a fight. She hadn't pushed her curse to survive. Because of that, she was unaware of what cold could really do. She locked eyes with the yellow gaze of the descending bird woman. Perhaps it was time that she pushed her curse, pushed herself to try something new.

She threw up her hands, grasping hold of the woman's face as she focused on the cold within her.

"Cold Touch!"

Cold sapped at her arms and legs as she focused on drawing in aether and converting it into her freezing fingers. Wen grasped firm hold of the woman's beak, clamping the bird woman's mouth shut. A force like a falling stone pushed against her arms as the woman struggled against her grip, but Wen dug her short nails into the feathers. She wasn't going to let go. Even if the bird woman ripped off Wen's arms, she wasn't going to let go.

"Craw!" the woman screeched as she pushed against Wen, trying to get her neck with a forceful lean in. "Give up! You are already dead!"

"No," Wen whispered, her arms burning even as the cold rushed in to soothe the sensation. "I'm not going to die here!"

Crackle.

Her fingers had turned a deep blue as cold flooded through her arms. Ice shards formed around the bird woman's beak and up her talons as more cold flowed from Wen's body. Wen knew she was winning. She just had to hold on. She opened her gate further, feeding more aether through her body as she took in a big breath.

"Colder." Her voice escaped from her lips because there was no space left for it in her mind. "Colder."

Purple spread through her fingers and arms, and a numb, tingling sensation rippled through her limbs. Wen ignored the pain. She ignored the emptiness. She knew that her curse had to be damaging her and that it wasn't as simple as a benevolent bit of magic, but she didn't care. Her path forward was through the cold and the pain. She wouldn't let go.

"Enough!" the bird woman's feathers bristled, but Wen refused to let go. "Why do you try so hard? Why won't you just concede?"

Her talons bit into Wen's shoulders, but only a cold slush of blood seeped out. Wen focused on the cold, the same way she did when she generated her bullets, and her body temperature was dropping lower than it had ever been before. The entire time, she held onto the bird woman for her life, staring into the yellow eyes as they glazed over.

"Please," the bird woman whimpered, her claws loosening Wen's shoulder as she lowered the temperature. "Please, stop."

Ice wrapped around Wen's fingers, but she wasn't going to stop. She rolled over, putting herself on top of the bird woman and reversing their positions. Wen kept her eyes locked with the yellow orbs. She wasn't going to let go. She wasn't going to show mercy. The bird woman had been ready to kill her just moments before. Wen was ready to do the same.

"Never," Wen said, digging one knee into the woman's abdomen for balance.

Crack.

As Wen followed the noise, she noticed white ice forming over the bird woman's abdomen. Like when she used her bullets, her opponent was enveloped in an ice coating. If she kept it up, the bird woman would be entombed completely. All she had to do was hold on.

"I'm going to freeze you solid," Wen said as ice crept down the bird woman's neck, connecting with the ice forming over the rest of her body. "After that—"

A wobbling sensation shuddered through her limbs, rushing up to her head and forcing her to blink. She had drawn in so much aether. It was like she had drank an entire gallon of water and was still trying to force more down her mouth. Never in her life on Erth had she experienced this feeling. It was like she was full to bursting, and forcing any more aether through her gate would cause it to explode.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I can't give up," Wen hissed out a wisp of white smoke, holding the beak tightly and leaning against the bird woman's body.

She had only transferred the cold through two points of contact. All of the cold had funneled through her hands and through where the woman's talons had cut into her shoulders. Wen knew she didn't have long. She needed to speed up the process. She leaned into the bird woman, letting go of the beak long enough to grasp her tightly in a hug.

It was like huddling together in a snowstorm, but instead of granting warmth, Wen leeched its way. She held on tight to the woman's body, closing her eyes as she stopped forcing aether into her gate. What she had done already would have to be enough. She held her gate open as long as she dared, but eventually, she had to force it to close.

When she could hold on no longer, she closed her gate and rolled away from the bird woman, her back hitting the warm ground as she stared up into the night sky. She felt it, in a faraway way, like landing on a thousand soft pillows after falling from a great height. Wen blinked a few times as her eyes tried to focus through the canopy of trees at the stars above.

Her head swam, and she didn't quite understand exactly what was happening. For a moment, she was sure that she saw the bird woman lying on the ground, covered in a thick layer of white ice like the victims of her bullets. In the next, she thought she saw a long vein grab hold of the woman and drag her away.

Wen tried to focus on that image, but the frozen woman was gone after she blinked a third time.

"What the—"

Thud.

Wen tried to push up from the ground but only fell face-first into the dirt. Tingling num spatters of electricity shot across her fingertips, shocking pain that cut through her despite the freezing cold that ran through her limbs. With her gate closed and the warmth of the jungle wrapping around her like a warm blanket, the damage her curse had done across her body was coming back to her. Wen closed her eyes and groaned.

She had never gone that cold for that long before, and without directing her power into a singular place, all the cold had flowed through every limb, all the way to her fingers and toes. Normally, she would focus on an object and transfer that cold to concentrate on it. Without a focus at all, without creating a sphere of cold in between her hands even, like she had done to Miss Brooke, all that cold had spread through her entire body.

"Frostbite." She breathed out a steam of cold white. "Necrosis. What have you done to yourself, Wen? Was it all worth it just to win a fight?"

Letting out the cold air and breathing in the warm jungle air around her made a little of the haze go away, but it also brought feeling back through her limbs. The tingling, itching sensation ran across her entire body, and she had to turn her head to let out another stream of cold white air.

"What did I ever do to you?" she demanded, unable to move from where she lay.

She tried to cry, but cold stuck to the edges of her eyes as her tears fell. Even her tears couldn't flow because she was too cold. Wen tried to take in a breath, but between her eyes stopping and the shaking that now spread across her body, she only managed to hack and release another stream of white air.

"You were always an ice queen," she whispered as she began to shiver. "Isn't that what he always said? Too cold for anyone to get close too. Too sealed off."

She tried to blink away the ice forming at the edges of her eyes but couldn't. Her eyes wouldn't fully close anymore. Even though she had closed her gate, her body was just too cold. She shook uncontrollably on the ground as the effects of going so far into her curse ravaged her body.

There was no way out.

It was as she lay there, the bird woman forgotten, her fight and her crewmates long pushed aside from her head, that a different sensation ripped into her heart. A sharp pain pressed down into her chest like an elephant had decided to sit down on her to crush her. Wen gasped, her head looking left and right as she searched for the origin of the pressure. However, there was nothing in the jungle clearing but her.

"Please," she whispered, letting out another plume of white air. "Whatever this is—please make it stop."

A burning heat erupted from her heart along with the pain. A rational part of her mind thought it might be a heart attack. Perhaps driving her body into the extreme cold had triggered something inside her. Perhaps it had driven her heart to seize and sealed her death. She wasn't a medical expert, and Erin wasn't there to look over her. For all she knew, she would lay there, her heart seizing and pain gripping her until she breathed her last puff of white vapor.

"Please," she whispered, forcing one numb arm up into the air before dropping it onto her heart to grip it tight. "Please, don't let this be the end. There's so much I don't know. There's so much out there. I just used it for the first time."

Darkness wrapped around her eyes, and the pain faded away to nothing. She felt like she was lying on a cloud, floating away from her troubles as swirling lights rushed around her. She lost all sense of place or time. She might have lay there for a few minutes or for hours. Both were the same in her mind.

Wen blinked. When she opened her eyes again, she was nowhere near the jungle. All the pain had faded away from her limbs, but she still had that bouncy feeling of lying on a soft pillow. After a few more blinks, she forced herself to look up at the world around her. To her surprise, she found herself on her feet in the middle of a park.

In the distance, she could see a brown tower with a pointed steeple. She knew immediately where she was, but she didn't believe it for a second. She spun around, noticing she was surrounded by windowed walls in a large circle. Wen furrowed her brows as she tried to focus. There was no way she could be there, but she knew in her heart.

She stood in the center of the Great Quadrangle, the Tom Quad. She stood at Christ Church in Oxford, in the small recreational area surrounded by walls. Wen looked around, noticing several ducks waddling in the distance and the normal benches that she expected to be there.

Then she saw the man sitting on one of the benches. One she recognized from a different world. Wen stumbled forward, unsure of what words to say but knowing him as surely as she would her own face in the mirror. She couldn't let herself doubt it. She was back on Earth. She was home.

"Dale!" she yelled as she ran toward the man.