SOME ADVENTURES BEGIN EASILY. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.

Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.

Jacqueline and Jillian descended the stairs until their legs ached and their knees knocked and their mouths were dry as deserts. An adult in their place might have turned around and gone back the way they had come, choosing to retreat to the land of familiar things, of faucets that ran wet with water, of safe, flat surfaces. But they were children, and the logic of children said that it was easier to go down than it was to go up. The logic of children ignored the fact that one day, they would have to climb back up, into the light, if they wanted to go home.

When they were halfway down (although they didn’t know it; each step was like the last), Jillian slipped and fell, her hand wrenched out of Jacqueline’s. She cried out, sharp and wordless, as she tumbled down, and Jacqueline chased after her, until they huddled together, bruised and slightly stunned, on one of the infrequent landings.

“I want to go back,” sniffled Jillian.

“Why?” asked Jacqueline. There was no good answer, and so they resumed their descent, down, down, down, down past earthen walls thick with tree roots and, later, with the great white bones of beasts that had walked the Earth so long ago that it might as well have been a fairy tale.

Down, down, down they went, two little girls who couldn’t have been more different, or more the same. They wore the same face; they viewed the world through the same eyes, blue as the sky after a storm. They had the same hair, white-blonde, pale enough to seem to glow in the dim light of the stairway, although Jacqueline’s hung in long corkscrew curls, while Jillian’s was cut short, exposing her ears and the elegant line of her neck. They both stood, and moved, cautiously, as if expecting correction to come at any moment.