Several minutes have passed before I even think to look down, and when I do, I grip the rungs of the ladder in terror. I see my house already tiny below. I decide not to look down again, and I keep pushing onward, getting more and more out of breath, my arms sore.

But there is also something dreamlike about the climb. I’m already much farther up than I should be. It’s impossible to climb the distance before me, and yet with each rung I get noticeably farther from the land below. Up this high, the air should be cold and thin, but I feel warm and my lungs are full. My legs shake with exertion and fear, but the ladder does not disappear.

After a while, I can see the entire coast of Maine, then the shape of North America, far beneath me. There’s no sign of cloud shepherds except very far in the distance and already below me.

I keep going up, up, up into the dark night just beneath the stars.

The moon looms bigger and brighter above me with every step, its light welcoming me. Soon I’m close enough to touch it. And then—impossibly, unbelievably—I’m there. I step down onto the moon’s surface, all aglow.

Before me, the Moon Goddess is sitting on a chair—a throne, of sorts, but a modest one. She has long curly silver hair and silver skin and eyes that seem to stare right into me.

“You came,” she says. Her voice is a whisper, yet so powerful and confident, I think I could hear it from a million miles away. I have a feeling that whatever I answer the Moon Goddess, it will be something she already knows.

“I know what was waiting for my mom in the water,” I say.

“Yes,” she whispers, “you do.”

“And I think now, it’s still waiting. But for me.” The Moon Goddess watches me silently. “I don’t want to go. I want to be safe and hidden and small. But my brother is out there somewhere, and I think so is Ebb. And the witches are out there somewhere too. And all the terrible things are out there somewhere. And I might be the only one who can help with any of it.”

“Yes.”

“And there are eleven of them. And all I have are a flashlight and some stories.”

“A story can have more sway over the world than an evil man,” she says simply, as if I should already know it. “It can touch more lives, change more hearts, build more courage than a dark force. The witches tell a story of emptiness and malice and mistrust and hate. You could tell the opposite story.”