I roll onto my back, and close my eyes again, but just as my eyelids flutter shut, I catch a glimmer of something, and open them again.

In the faint glow from the hole at the top of the cave, I see them. In the crags and corners of the cave, in the little nooks here and there.

I think I’m imagining them at first, because they are words floating in the air on nothing, and that makes no sense.

But as my eyes adjust again to the flicker-light, I see that the words are not floating on nothing. They are woven into the thin crisscrossing silk of webs—just barely visible in the gossamer threads:

I am responsible for my rose.

The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.

Hoping is such hard work.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

I stand slowly, on shaky legs. The words are so familiar, even though I don’t remember them. I think they are from stories.

They’re woven all around me, hundreds of them. And then I see their creator—a tiny, ghostly spider working steadily in a corner of the room. He is putting the finishing touches on another one.

Nevertheless, as they climbed higher and higher, London unfurling below them like a gray-and-green map, Harry’s overwhelming feeling was of gratitude for an escape that had seemed impossible.

I don’t understand it, but one moment there’s such a hollow place inside me, and the next moment the words are filling that place up. Something inside that was empty and lost a moment before feels un-lost. It’s like the words remember something for me that I can’t, and give something to me I can’t find by myself. The words build something out of nothing. They put something beautiful and strong inside my chest, and the beautiful and strong thing starts to overflow into imagining.

I imagine rescues against all odds and lights in the darkness. I imagine help is coming even if everything is broken and all hope is lost.

I imagine that stone walls can’t hold me. I imagine that I am the one who makes the rules, and that I am bigger and stronger than I think, unbound and unstoppable. I imagine that with nothing to lose, there is also nothing to hold me back. I call help to me, believing I can.

And then I hear a tiny… the tiniest… of sounds.

A small shape comes fluttering through the hole of the cave. A luminous bluebird whose name, it suddenly occurs to me, is “Little One.” And though she’s too small for it, she’s carrying a flashlight in her mouth.

“Little One,” I whisper to her as she lands on my finger. She drops the flashlight into my hand. “I don’t remember what to do.”