*Trigger warning for consideration of suicide*

Breakfast slipped away far too quickly. I tried to enjoy my food—to chew as slowly as humanly possible, thoroughly tasting every single bite of it—but I just couldn't. Finally I gave up and scarfed down the rest of it as quickly as I could.

Then we began to plan.

To say we had no ideas at all would be a lie. We certainly had ideas—plenty of them, all full of cracks and holes. At the first prod, they crumbled to pieces.

So we made new ones. And these ones were worse than the first ones, barely even formed at all, abstract ideas like: "What if we collapsed the tunnels?" (which was a bad idea because we didn't want Reed to die), "Could Lark hypnotize the Magician with her music?" (which was a bad idea because Lark had never tried it before and might accidentally mess up), and, "Why don't we sneak into the tunnels and ambush him as he comes around a corner?" (which was simply a bad idea).

By lunchtime, we had no ideas left. I think I can safely say that none of us enjoyed a single bite of our food. We were too busy mining our minds for the last bits of ideas, trying to find something—anything—that would allow us to rescue Reed, undo the curse on our town, and get out of the Magician's cave unscathed.

After lunch, we dove right back in again.

"Do we have anything we can threaten him with?" Lark asked.

I shook my head.

Bran said, "What if we somehow get a nearby village to join us?"

"Too risky," wrote Lark. "There could be casualties."

"What if we just kill the Magician?" I asked.

Lark stared at me in horror.

Bran shook his head at me. "We couldn't be sure that it would work. Even if we managed to overpower him and... kill him, Reed might remain stone. The curse on our town might not lift."

"It's also wrong," Lark wrote. "I don't want to kill anyone."

"Me either," I said, "but we might not have a choice."

Lark huffed in annoyance. "Who would do it?"

Bran and I looked at each other nervously.

"Well?" she asked. "Because I wouldn't. I don't think I could. Bran?"

"I couldn't."

"Fyra?"

I hesitated. "Maybe?"

Lark looked at me sadly. "Even if I believed you, I wouldn't want to hinge a plan on a maybe."

"Fair enough. But what if it's the only plan we've got?"

"We have other plans," Bran said.

"Do we? Can you name one other plan that has any chance of working?"

"We just haven't thought of one yet."

"Maybe we're not going to think of one at all." Bran frowned at me; I felt a twinge of shame, but I could do nothing but continue. "Maybe there is no other plan. Maybe there is no plan at all. Maybe, just maybe, it's impossible to beat the Magician, and we should all focus on living our lives rather than wasting them trying to do something that we simply cannot do."

"What about Reed?" Lark wrote.

"We can't just leave him there," said Bran.

"I know!" I shouted. "I know. But you don't really think he'd want us to kill ourselves trying to rescue him, do you? He said we should rank our safety above everything else. He said, if it was too dangerous to do so, we shouldn't try to come back for him at all. I think we should honor that. His sacrifice is worthless if we destroy ourselves trying to get him back."

A short, awkward silence pressed in on us for a moment.

"What happened to you, Fyra?" Bran breathed. "When we started on this quest, you were all for risking our lives for the people in our town. You said we could save them. You said we could beat the Magician. You said we had a job, and we needed to complete it." His voice twisted, suddenly callous and angry. "Do you really think so highly of our town, and so little of Reed—one of the few people who has been on our side this entire time? Are you so cowardly that you'd prefer to let him grow moss as a statue while we sit here and- and live out wonderful lives on a ship in the clouds?"

"I don't-"

"Reed is our friend," Bran snapped. "Maybe you just can't see that. Maybe you're just like our village—too afraid to do the right thing and face the problem yourself."

Lark put her hand on his arm—trying to stop his torrent of sharp, painful words—but he shook her off.

"Reed saved us over and over again. And you want to leave him with the Magician, to a fate he doesn't deserve. You know, it's your fault he's there in the first place."

Something within me snapped. Maybe I couldn't feel hope any longer, but I could certainly feel anger.

"My fault?" I asked. The words came out in a low, furious growl, and I could see by the look on Bran's face that he knew he'd gone too far. "My fault? Of course I know it's my fault. You don't think I realized it the moment the rope fell to the ground? You don't think I knew it as I fumbled to retie the knot and save your sorry life?"

A wave of anger rolled through me, and I screamed a tangle of syllables, half-formed words that were too broken up and mixed together to be understood. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to hurt someone. There was no hope within me, and suddenly I knew: if I didn't get out of here now—remove myself from a situation that was deteriorating a little more every moment—I was going to hurt someone. It didn't matter whether I did it with words or with fists. It would be devastating either way.

I stood, and I ran.

Through corridor after corridor.

Up several flights of stairs.

I burst through the door to the deck and kept running, toward the side of the ship. When I reached the rail, I leaped over it and let gravity take me.

For a moment I moved forward, upwards, toward the blue sky that seemed only inches away. I imagined brushing it with my fingers. Would they come away blue? Would they sink in? Would they stick, and tether me here—a girl hanging from the roof of the world, thousands of feet above the ground?

None of the above. I began to fall.

The wind was exhilarating against my skin. I tucked myself into a ball and began to spin, relishing the flashing effect as the sky and the ground melted into each other. Blue, green, blue, green—until everything was the same blue-green shade. It was beautiful.

It was beautiful.

I wanted to live on, to continue to appreciate this beauty, to scrape my fingers against the roof of the world and fly through the air forever.

Somehow, I managed to stop spinning. I don't know how long it had been. Maybe only a few seconds. There was still a lot of air beneath me. The ground was growing closer and closer.

I didn't want to end it.

I also didn't want to die.

I closed my eyes and called my deathbirds to me. They came quickly, fearfully, and though my momentum could not be stopped altogether, they slowed me enough so that, when I crashed into the canopy of leaves, I came through intact.

We hit the ground together.

The breath exploded out of me.

My heart was racing in my chest, beating a rough staccato against my collarbone. I smiled. A real, wide smile. For a moment, as I'd hung between the world and the ground, I'd felt something. I'd seen something. I'd felt the beauty of it—the hope of it. And then it had been gone.

I lay there for a little longer as my breath and heartbeat slowly evened out. The momentary glimpse of hope faded away, until I had only a general idea that I'd felt it. It was tantalizing. The memory hung just outside my grasp, like a stolen headband in the hands of a boy who was taller than me.

I needed to go back.

I stood, spreading out my limbs, and the deathbirds grasped them and carried me upward.

Whew, they're all under a lot of stress, aren't they? To relieve some of my stress, vote if you liked this chapter. Just so I know that I'm not totally failing all you lovely readers.