Free [Half/Time 01] Half Upon a Time by James Riley

death-grip as he hung suspended over miles of empty air. He tried to yell at her to stop the broom, but for some reason his lungs wouldn’t work, and he couldn’t get out more than a wheeze.
    “Hold on!” May yelled to him. “And don’t look down!”
    Trusting that she knew exactly what she was talking about, Jack fixed his eyes forward again, expecting to see the horizon. Instead, he saw something large, gray, and rocky.
    They were headed straight for a mountain.
    Jack frantically sucked in some air, intending to make his voice work whether it wanted to or not.
“Pull up!”
he screamed.
    “What?” May yelled, the wind making it hard to hear much of anything. Unfortunately, hanging backward as she was, the princess couldn’t see the large amount of stone they were about to slam into.
    “Mountain!”
Jack screamed back.
    Not knowing what else to do, he flexed his arms, pulling himself up a bit, then dropped suddenly, jerking May and the back of the broom down as hard as he could. The front of the broom shot up, rising just enough for them to miss the mountain.
    At least, May and the broom would. Jack, unfortunately, lost his grip on May’s arms when the broom began to climb and down he fell.
    “Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
…” Jack heard May yell until the wind in his ears and the growing distance from the princess wiped out the last of her scream. As he tumbled through theopen air, his heart beat so hard it felt like it was going to break open his chest.
    Jack quickly reached over his shoulder and pulled off his grandfather’s bag with all the old man’s most powerful magic items. As the trees rushed up at him with an alarming speed, Jack knew he had time for just one try. He thrust his hand into the bag, grabbed the first thing he found, and pulled out … a feather.
    A
feather!
Jack’s eyes lit up and he smiled, the wind pulling at his cheeks. A feather might be perfect! If it was the feather from some kind of magical bird, maybe its magic would let him fly!
    Desperately, he wiped the feather all over himself, hoping to make the magic work that way. When nothing happened, Jack frantically blew on the feather, then crushed it in his hands, closing his eyes, and willing himself with all his might to stop falling….
    And as if by magic, he stopped! The sudden jolt sent his stomach into his shoes, and Jack glanced down to find himself maybe a dozen feet above the trees, swaying slightly in the wind. The feather had done it! He wasn’t dead! He was flying!
    Jack’s laughter grew almost hysterical, he was so happy. “I’m flying!” he shouted to no one, flapping his arms like a bird. “I’m
flying
! Up, feather! Let’s go up!”
    And just like that, he rose higher in the air.
    He flapped his arms a bit more, but it didn’t seem to be necessary, so he stopped. Not that it mattered: He was going to be just fine. “Princess!” he shouted, looking up. “Princess! I’m flying! I’m fly—”
    And then he noticed two log-size fingers pinching his shirt.
    He wasn’t flying. He was being lifted into the air.
    The excitement he’d felt a second ago up and took flight, unlike the rest of him. The huge fingers ended in an enormous hand, and that hand connected to a massive arm, which ended at … the mountain.
    Except it wasn’t a mountain. It was a giant.
    The mountain was a giant.
    The mountain was a giant.
    “Oh,
great
!” Jack screamed. The feather—the stupid, useless feather—fell from his hands and floated gently to the ground below, but that didn’t really matter. He’d probably managed to destroy whatever spell it had by crushing it anyway.
Fantastic
.
    As the giant lifted him higher, Jack could start to make out the creature’s proportions. What he’d thought were stones was actually a rumpled gray shirt, its buttons larger than Jack’s head. Hair jutted out from holes in the shirt, looking exactly like leafless trees.Surprisingly, the shirt had a pocket, and for a second, Jack considered what