Ron lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. The eraser he couldn't move even a millimetre before was now floating in the air just above his head.
In the past week, Ron had bent hundreds of thousands of blades of grass, destroying a large part of the park before he was banned from going there again.
However, with so much practice, his abilities were indeed improving.
Ouch.
The eraser fell, hitting him right in the eye. He jolted upright, rubbing it.
"Fuck, still too weak and unstable..."
This was the result of seven days of unchecked practice. His abilities had strengthened, but barely. At least now he had hope.
He stood up and pulled a jar full of marbles from under his bed. They were from his childhood, he remembered from the original memories; as a poor kid, marbles were the only toys he could afford.
Ron kicked the jar, spilling hundreds of marbles across his room. They rolled into every corner.
He placed the empty jar on his study desk, then sat on the bed in the lotus position. After a few deep breaths, he opened his eyes and focused on a particular marble.
One with blue patterns inside it. He focused on it and used his telekinesis.
The thing about marbles is that they are spherical, meaning the slightest force is enough to move them. Especially on a smooth surface like Ron's marble floor.
"Move...!" he willed. The marble moved immediately, but not in the direction he was hoping. It shot backwards and rolled under the bed, out of sight.
Ron sighed and tried again, this time with a green marble.
The same thing happened. It moved, but erratically. The problem was his unstable control; the marble would spin, altering the direction of the applied force and changing its trajectory.
"Well, that's the point," he muttered. "The harder it is, the better the training."
Ron tried again. Then again. And then again.
His whole body was soon covered in sweat, his head stinging, his eyes red. He occasionally took breaks and lay down for rest. But it wasn't for more than ten minutes at a time.
On the floor, slowly but surely, the word "Persevere" was forming, written with marbles.
Another week passed, and now Ron's control had improved significantly. He could write whatever he wanted with the marbles on the floor. Now, if he floated the eraser again, he could push it away from his eyes at the last moment.
--
After that, he focused on strength and control together. His next goal was to lift all the marbles into the air and, one by one, put them carefully back inside the jar, which he still kept on his study desk, about a meter high.
He got to work.
Lotus position.
Breath in—four counts.
Hold—four counts.
Breath out—four counts.
Hold—four counts.
The first marble wobbled upward like a drunken firefly, rose three centimetres, then clattered back down.
Ron didn't flinch; he simply started the cycle again.
By the fifth hour of the first day, the room sounded like hail on a tin roof—marbles jumping, rolling, ricocheting off walls.
By the seventh hour, the hail had softened into an irregular patter: a single marble would hover for three heartbeats before it dropped.
On the ninth hour, Ron's nose started to bleed.
He dabbed it with the cuff of his sleeve, smearing red across the grey fabric, and kept going.
Day two: he could keep five marbles in the air for ten seconds.
Day three: twenty marbles for twenty seconds; every time one fell, he forced himself to do ten push-ups before he was allowed to continue.
This complemented the heavy mental activity with physical activity, useful to keep a balance in his body.
Day four: he could spiral them—slow, deliberate orbits around his head like a miniature galaxy—until the headache split his vision in two.
He taped a sheet of notebook paper to the wall and wrote, in shaky biro:
"Pain is just information.
Interpret, don't surrender."
Day five: the nose-bleeds stopped.
The marbles rose in a single, soundless column—one hundred and thirty-seven of them—each suspended an exact hand-span above the floor.
Ron's eyes were half-closed, pupils rolled back, his breath so shallow the dust on the windowsill didn't move.
He lifted the glass jar from the desk—not with his hand, with his mind—centered it beneath the column, and began to decant.
One by one, the spheres peeled off the bottom of the stationary stack, slipped down an invisible funnel, and landed with the softest tok into the jar.
When the thirty-second marble dropped, a crack appeared in the jar's rim.
Ron hesitated; the remaining marbles shuddered in mid-air.
"Again," he whispered.
The crack widened, but the jar held.
Sixty marbles.
Eighty.
The hundredth marble was a cat's-eye red that used to be his favourite as a kid; it hesitated as if remembering the boy who had once flicked it across the dirt, and then slid gently home.
One hundred and thirty-seven.
Click.
The jar settled back onto the desk, intact except for the hair-line fracture.
Ron exhaled for the first time in four minutes, and the marbles inside the jar chimed like a distant glass bell.
He opened his eyes fully.
The room was perfectly still.
Sweat had soaked through his hoodie and dripped from the cuffs, but he felt cold, electrically cold, as though someone had poured starlight into his veins.
"Next," he said to the empty room.
He stood, knees cracking, and walked to the window.
Outside, dusk had folded the city into violet paper.
Across the alley, the old brick apartment block stared back at him with a hundred dark eyes.
He picked out a single brick—third row from the top, fifteenth from the left—and focused.
Nothing happened for three seconds.
Then the brick quivered, shed a puff of crimson dust, and slid outward a single millimetre.
Ron smiled, the expression brittle and bright.
He left it jutting like a loose tooth; a promise to tomorrow.
He turned back inside, crouched, and with his real fingers began to gather the marbles that had escaped to the corners.
As he dropped each one into the jar he spoke to them, softly, like a shepherd counting sheep.
"Persevere… persevere… persevere…"
When the last marble was home, he screwed the lid on, set the jar beneath the bed, and lay down on the covers without bothering to change.
The ceiling, cracked and water-stained, looked like a map of somewhere he intended to go.
He raised one hand, palm up.
The cracked eraser lifted off the desk, drifted across the room, and settled onto his open palm.
Ron closed his fist around it, brought it to his chest, and held it there like a talisman.
"Tomorrow," he murmured, "I start on bricks."