((Yes this chapter has been revised. My friend and I agreed that this chapter was far too rushed. Two chapters were written for chapter 4 and if this one actually got to stay, well I hope you like the revision!))

Rue and Mytho had separated to search for Ahiru to cover more ground. Rue and Mytho weren't sure whether to look for Ahiru, the human girl, or Ahiru, the duck. Fakir hadn't given many details, though Rue suspected he knew more than he let on.

Mytho decided to look through the city while she covered the lake. She was impressed with herself about how much she remembered about the school and the town. It had felt so long since she had been here. When she had seen others in class, she was amazed about how much they had grown up. Mytho and herself hadn't aged at all because of the storybook so she felt young compared to her former classmates.

Rue reached the lake and looked at the water since it caught her attention. She didn't remember it being so dark. The water from her memory was much more clear and blue but this water resembled nothing like that. Rue then heard a quack that distracted her from her thoughts and looked around and saw nothing. She heard another quack but this time she was able to pinpoint it to somewhere beyond the reeds.

"Ahiru?" She shouted as she ran to the other side of the lake where the reeds formed. She separated the reeds to look for the source of the quack. She grew almost desperate and knelt in the water up to her knees to look. The quack almost echoed in her head as though driving Rue insane. Her eyes twitched with determination and impatience as she ripped multiple reeds out of place and threw them to the side either landing a little bit off shore or into the water. She continued to rip the reeds out to find the duck.

"Where are you! Come out already!" Rue ripped out bigger chunks of the reeds and almost gasped at the sight that lay before her. She fell back, landing in even more of the dark water. Her eyes widened with fright. Rue brought her hand to her face in shock. Beads of sweat began to run down her face. She could feel her head pounding as she felt like she had instantly spiked a fever. She brought both hands to the sides of her head and closed her eyes tightly. Her head shook with doubt and she felt herself sobbing at the sight. Her eyes shot open hoping that it was just an illusion but they still lay there among the reeds. Her mouth opened slightly and muttered, "Why?!"

Rue's body began to shake as goose bumps covered her arms. She could feel something twisting in her stomach, making her very ill. Her eyes remained wide and shook almost as much as her body. Her vision started to blur because of the shaking and that's when Rue knew she had to get away from those shoes.

She frantically got out of the water without turning her eyes away from the reeds. Since Rue was not paying attention to where she was going, she slipped and fell back into the water. She quickly got up and turned toward the shore and climbed out, now covered in mud. She was covered from the waist down to her shoes with mud. She swallowed hard causing an even greater tension in her body.

Rue tried to rationalize a reason why those would be there. There had to be a reason. Maybe they weren't the ones she thought they were but the more she thought about them, the more she was certain, those were Kraehe's pointe shoes. Rue turned back toward the reeds and saw that the shoes were now gone. She fell back out of shock and frantically looked around, had someone else came and gotten them? Rue shook her head finding that impossible since she would have seen another person, if that were the case. Rue then pulled herself up, calming down a bit but still shook and had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. The pounding in her head started up again remembering all the memories of the monster raven that raised her as his daughter. Tears welled up in the young girl's eyes and she closed her eyes tight to hold the tears back and shake the memories out of her head.

It was then that Rue heard another quack in the opposite direction. The quacking continued and this caused Rue to stand up and run toward the quacking which led straight into the forest. The noise echoed through her ears making her stomach twist and turn. She had started sweating once again. She wanted to stop the duck that was making the noise even if it was Ahiru. She didn't want to hear that noise anymore. Rue screamed as she ran through the forest while tears started running down her face.

'What's happening to me?' Rue ran toward the sound despite her thoughts on not doing so but she needed to know what was going on and that duck had to be an explanation for something. She also believed that if the duck would stop its noise, that the chaos would cease and her head would stop pounding as though it was matched with her heart beat which had started pounding faster which made the pounding in her head faster and louder.

Rue also wanted to be away from the lake where she had seen Kraehe's shoes. She wanted to be as far as she could from those shoes and those memories. As Rue raced off into the distance, a black duck emerged from the reeds and waddled its way to the shore toward a pair of shoes Rue had been wearing. The ones she had been wearing before she had fallen in the mud that is. The black duck watched the young girl run away in the black ballet shoes into the forest and disappear as she went farther and farther away.

The duck quacked and took the shoes Rue had unknowingly traded for Kraehe's shoes and waddled back into the lake, letting go of Rue's shoes and letting them sink to the bottom.

The small duck watched the shoes slowly turn into another pair of Kraehe's shoes. They slowly vanished into the dark water that seemed to run deeper than the lake of despair and the small black duck vanished back into the reeds. The water then seemed to grow darker and now the plants that lined the lake seemed to start changing color as well.

((Hope you liked, please review! Thanks for reading!))