Gravity's Pull

Hanibara Sui was not born into legacy or wealth or ruin—only motion.
She came from a place that didn’t appear on maps, tucked high in the Hingashi mist, where frogs croaked louder than gossip and the riverbed glittered with plum-colored stones when it rained. There were no signs, no visitors, no fixed paths. Only stories passed down like threadbare cloth and girls like Sui, too strange to stay still.Her mother sold cloth and dye from a window that never latched properly. Her father vanished before her memory could affix a shape to him. Sui grew up not in silence, but in sound—fingers tapping, teeth clicking, the soft rustle of sleeves as she pantomimed stories no one asked to hear. Her expressions arrived before her words. Her words arrived before her meaning. She once tried to teach a boulder how to swim, and when it nearly broke her foot, she called it a “lesson in reverse force” and limped home laughing.She was not unwelcome, but she was avoided. The villagers called her spirited. The older children called her strange. When the stones she threw began to change direction in midair, the space around her widened. No one said fear. But no one said her name either.She never studied magic. She didn’t trust things that asked for permission. Her movement didn’t come from incantation or discipline—it came from knowing, somehow, how things wanted to move. Where weight wanted to land. What would happen if she lied to gravity just long enough to throw something true. She didn’t write it down. She repeated it. Until breath became pattern, and pattern became instinct, and instinct became law.She left without ceremony. No announcement, no robe, no coin. Just her mother’s threadknife, a bundle of dried kinkan, and a series of bows to frogs she refused to name. She didn’t walk toward anything. She just walked away.The road treated her like a suggestion. She wandered along footpaths and shrine tracks, sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Her sense of direction was based on instinct, gut, wind, weight. When she grew hungry, she traded stories or helped merchants sling cargo. Most people forgot her. Some remembered her, but not clearly. She moved strangely. Her delivery changed each time.Eventually she arrived in towns large enough for guards to stare and for laws to notice the way her hands moved. She failed at selling. Failed at silence. Failed at busking without terrifying the crowd. But she never stopped. She flirted badly, tripped artfully, and once built a makeshift lever to throw a sandal at a crow that had been judging her since dawn. The sandal reversed midair. The crow screamed. Sui declared it a victory.When a shrinekeeper asked what school had taught her how to bend motion, she told him: no school, just a bad habit she’d gotten good at. He gave her needles. She didn’t say thank you. She would’ve fumbled it.The word courier came by accident—offered by a merchant who paid her to retrieve a fallen ledger and never quite understood the frogs. But it fit. Not because she walked straight, but because she liked the idea of being in between. Of connecting points without needing to belong to either. Start, end, Sui in the middle, like a breath between thoughts.She moved toward Ul’dah the way she did everything—without plan, backwards, sideways, through motion alone. When she arrived, no one was looking. When they turned, she was already there. Her deliveries weren’t always clean, but they were always exact. Her satchel grew heavier. Her tools grew stranger. Aether-etched pins, balanced to the gram. Inked stones. Silk wraps cut from temple flags she’d never entered. A threadknife that remembered the weight of her mother’s hands.She does not advertise. She does not explain. But in a city fueled by secrets and movement, her name floats in alleys, carried by those who need something delivered and know better than to ask too many questions. She’s handled lockboxes, love letters, sealed contracts, and velvet pouches no one dared open. She never looked inside. She never needed to.People describe her by feel.
The twitchy one. The frog girl. The one whose hands won’t stop. The one who stares at birds like she’s waiting for an answer.She still flirts with guards she shouldn’t. She still forgets her pricing. She still arrives where she shouldn’t be and leaves before anyone’s sure she was there. Most think she’s harmless. Some think she’s lucky. A few know better.Her art still has no name. But if you ask her what it is she does, she might shrug, tap her knuckles twice against the stone, and say:
“It ain’t about throwin’. It’s about where it lands.”