It was a sensation Lucy had experienced all too often on the precipice of sleep: the feeling of falling through her bed and dropping like a stone. But here, it wasn’t a bed, but the boat and the stormy sea and whatever lay beneath it, beneath the very foundation of Cole’s Dream.

  Her body flinched, limbs flailed, and her eyes shot open. Red and grey concentrated at the centre of her shaky vision, surrounded on all sides by white and azure.

  The castle. She was falling through the sky of her Final Dream toward the King’s castle—face-first, somehow, despite having laid on her back on Cole’s boat. Specifically, she was hurtling like a meteor toward the King’s audience chamber. Landing there made sense, but that momentary click in her mind was soon overridden by another, more pressing realization.

  There was no floor in the audience chamber to land on.

  If she kept going, she would end up falling all the way down to the surface of the world below. And while she knew now that her Final Dream would always give her a way to travel back up, she didn’t want to find out first-hand whether she would still feel what it was like to hit the ground at terminal velocity.

  Fighting through her ragged breathing and racing heartbeat, Lucy willed the clouds to come together and form a kind of net to catch her. But she was falling with such speed that the cloud net didn’t have time to fully form, so she ended up crashing through it. More nets formed, one after the other, but they all broke from the impact of Lucy’s unstoppable descent.

  Lucy couldn’t react fast enough to rescind her command and stop more useless cloud nets from forming—but were they really useless? It was subtle, but each net she broke did slow her down slightly. She grimaced, wishing she had realized and acted on this sooner, but at this point she had no choice as she only had enough time to try this one idea before missing the audience chamber completely.

  Focusing, Lucy willed the cloud nets to form more rapidly and closer together. Sure enough, the drag from all of these rapid impacts slowed her down, until eventually she saw the King and willed with all her might for a platform to appear, as strong and solid as she could muster. She landed on the platform without breaking it, though the impact made her armour clang and her head throb as she stumbled to her feet and struggled to stay upright.

  The King, seeing Lucy jostle about in her boots and rub the back of her head, said: “Welcome back, o great knight. You have done well to return here, though I must advise you work on your landing for subsequent returns.”

  Lucy tried to smile, though it probably came out strange due to her quavering mouth and overall body shakes. “Th-th-that’s for sure.”

  She grasped her temples and tried closing her eyes, though she regretted the latter immediately as the lack of vision only made her head spin more. So she stared ahead at the King and the endless sky behind him, breathing deeply as she waited for the King’s illusory double to disappear and for the horizon to straighten out. Once her vision returned to normal and her legs stayed firmly in one spot, she said: “Am I going to fall like that every time? Is there any…reason for that, at all?”

  “Indeed, there is a reason,” said the King, surprising Lucy with his quick bluntness. “Each time you travel to another Dream, your Final Dream draws to a close because you, the Dreamer, have left. However, both your mind and the Lattice of Dreams holds onto an impression of your Dream as it was when you left. Normally, this is not the case for a Dream that comes to an end, but Dream Knights are an exception due to the enduring effects of their influence.”

  “All right,” said Lucy, nodding as it made sense to her, though she remained frowning. “But I don’t see what that has to do with falling hundreds of feet.”

  “When you return to your Final Dream,” said the King, “it is rapidly recreated, and you must re-enter it from the world’s highest point. Every entrance into a Dream is a descent: the descent into sleep. In normal circumstances, you will have already fallen through the Dream to your fated origin point before your senses reawaken.” He nodded toward the door that led to Cole’s Dream. “I am sure you experienced this when you stepped through your first Dream Threshold.”

  Lucy nodded, noting that these doors were called “Dream Thresholds.” Aside from that, what the King said about the “descent into sleep” was true, as she recalled that total, soothing darkness that had enveloped her after stepping through the door.

  “However,” the King continued, “because your Final Dream must be reconstructed upon your return, the descent into sleep happens only momentarily. Hence, your descent through the skies to return to this audience chamber.”

  “Is…” Lucy hesitated, wondering if this would sound too spiteful. “Is it really expected that Dream Knights have a crash landing every time they come back?”

  “On that matter,” said the King, his voice taking on a quieter and surprisingly bantering tone, “it is expected that Dream Knights learn to gradually…manage their landings in a more graceful manner.”

  Lucy stared at the King. It was hard to tell, as his all-encompassing voice and lack of a face still remained largely the same, but he seemed to have more…life to him, for lack of a better word. His words and the tone of his voice had more character to them, no longer a still lake of placid calmness. And, though it was only the faintest of faint impressions, so slight that it may only be a trick of the light interlocking with a hallucination of the mind, but Lucy swore she could barely see the imprints of eyes and a mouth on the featureless surface where his face should have been.

  “There is, however, a more meaningful motivation behind this tradition,” said the King. “For you see, it provides a way for a Dream Knight to express their abilities upon returning to their domain. As well, the gradual control over one’s landing provides a consistent measure of personal progress.”

  Lucy thought back to the dozens of clouds she had smashed her body through in a desperate attempt to break her fall. It had worked, but it was both embarrassing and literally headache-inducing. For her own sake, she hoped she could land more “gracefully” in the future.

  “Now that you are here,” said the King, “it is time to claim your rewards for successfully rescuing a Dreamer.”

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  “Rescuing a Dreamer…” Lucy mumbled to herself. She had been pre-occuppied with the shock of falling and the pains and aches of her rough landing, but now she remembered all too vividly the raging waters, the endless rain, and the monstrous hands that, in the end, had been the key to reuniting two separated brothers. The last thing she could remember was seeing Derrick laid down on the boat’s surface, his hand weakly reaching out to touch his older brother’s shoulder. That older brother, Cole, had also laid down and, unlike Derrick, had fallen soundly asleep. But as Lucy replayed this last memory in her mind, there was the unmistakable image of Cole’s face still being scrunched up and tense as he slept.

  “Will Cole…really be all right?” Lucy let the words emerge on their own, unsure if she were asking the King directly or simply speaking out to the sky, as if sending her query out beyond the horizon to the Lattice of Dreams, where Cole’s Dream may or may not still persist.

  “Yes,” said the King, firmly but gently. “Though he will not remember you when he wakes, the impact of being freed from that recurring dilemma after several decades will no doubt have a profound effect on his waking life. To that end, you have done everything a Dream Knight must do for him.”

  “I see…” Lucy paused, gazing out across the sky, her grip on her Ideal a bit looser than before. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I should’ve done better.”

  It wasn’t that she disagreed with the King on having successfully rescued Cole from that ages-long nightmare. But she remembered how much Cole had argued with her, doubted her, how difficult it had been to get him to talk about himself or even say his name. And though it had worked out in the end, there was that moment shortly before the final confrontation where she had almost completely destroyed her goodwill with him, as Cole angrily ordered her to leave him alone to wallow in his own Dream. When Lucy thought back to how scathing and hopeless that moment had been, she couldn’t see this ordeal as being a roaring success, but rather a near-failure that she had only barely smoothed over through sheer dumb luck. She realized, with an internal scoff at herself, that this wasn’t too different from how she’d been barely scraping by in life even before she was hospital-bound.

  “There is nothing wrong with feeling that way,” said the King. To Lucy’s surprise, he was floating at her side, gazing out at the sky alongside her. It startled her, but only momentarily, for this arrangement evoked a sort of warm connection she hadn’t felt here before. Keeping his gaze distant, the King said: “It is a common experience amongst Dream Knights, of all sorts, to feel that more could have been done to aid a Dreamer even after a successful rescue. Although Dream Knights bear great power and an important responsibility, the reality is that they are only able to help with one dilemma out of the many an individual may suffer from. And even then, that is only the case until the Dreamer returns to the waking world.”

  Hearing this, Lucy couldn’t help but imagine Cole returning to a life that, while no longer haunted by lingering regret over Derrick’s demise, was still plagued by other issues. Financial ruin, a troubled relationship, other family that had passed away in unfortunate circumstances…She knew that worrying to that extent over someone she had just met was far from healthy, but she knew her own life was in its twilight hours in the waking world, and this made her wish for Cole, who still hopefully had many years ahead of him, to be happy in a life that continued on even after she herself had faded. The thought that this wouldn’t come true made Lucy’s heart ache with a new, world-heavy pain she had never known before.

  “Because the time together with each Dreamer is limited,” said the King, “it is easy to fixate on words unsaid. Actions not taken. Alternatives to conflicts and situations that linger in the realm of, ‘If only…’ But regardless of the struggles made on the path toward rescue, the end result and its impact remain intact. So for each Dream Knight, it is imperative to learn—not all at once, but in gradual increments—how to be content with what one was able to accomplish, so that they may descend into their Final Dream without trouble. After all, a Dream Knight is still a Dreamer.”

  As the King slowly drew away from her side, Lucy took a deep breath, letting the air flow out from deep within to spread out over the sky. She brought her sword up toward her, using her other hand to hold the flat side of the blade. Her reflection stared back up at her, eyes glassy and eyebrows knitted, as she reflected on the King’s words. Even with the circlet shining on her forehead and the tops of her shoulders’ golden gardbraces always visible in her peripheral, there was no denying that the face looking back at her was still that of a young woman, an ordinary person, a Dreamer.

  Could she, with the mind and spirit of an ordinary person, keep on connecting with other people at such a deep level, only to say a permanent farewell mere moments later and never get to see if all the time and effort and care that went into each rescue ever amounted to anything?

  It was a harrowing question, one with enough force to shatter all sense of ease at the armour she wore, for her body was surely too small and too weak to wear it. And this sword in her hands: could she really continue wielding it, continue using it on this path that necessitated a superhuman amount of emotional resilience? Her hands shook, her reflection in the blade shaking in every direction, until the blade flew from her hands.

  She leapt after it.

  It was pure instinct, function following before reason, for the relief of wrapping her fingers around the handle was soon dwarfed by the realization that her feet had gone past the cloud platform. She screamed—or was about to, before her momentary descent came to an abrupt halt. Another platform had formed at her feet just in time, though she teetered on the edge of this new one.

  Catching her breath and regaining her balance, Lucy’s gaze fell downwards, past the clouds to the long stretch of deep blue ocean far below. Most of it had receded back when Lucy took up her Ideal for the first time, revealing the vast lands that had been submerged, but there was still a hearty breadth to the sea waters that remained. Instantly, she was taken back to that stormy sea, to the single boat left stranded on those endless waters, and all that had transpired on top of that tiny boat’s surface. But in contrast to the image of Cole’s discomforted sleeping face, another image wouldn’t leave Lucy’s mind in this moment of contemplation.

  The look of sheer, unending relief on Cole’s face upon seeing Derrick pulled up by the arm that Cole had finally, finally been able to reach out and grasp.

  With Lucy’s help.

  Taking another deep breath, Lucy brought her Ideal up to her face, tightening her grip around the handle. She hoped that the relief she’d felt at grabbing her fallen Ideal was merely a thousandth of the relief Cole felt after waking up from his Dream.

  “In your Final Dream,” the King said suddenly, “you may take as much time as you require to recuperate and gather your thoughts after each rescue. We can delay the next steps until the time is right.”

  “I’m all right,” said Lucy, turning to look at the King with a tall, confident stance. “I’m ready to continue.”

  She’d had more than enough time to let the weight of her knighthood bear down on her, and now she couldn’t afford to continue wallowing, not when that fleeting memory had given her a spark of hope. She didn’t want to discredit the importance of what she had just been anxious about, but at the same time, she just had to keep going if she didn’t want to completely crash and burn. It was like going onto the next textbook from the next course instead of calling it a night, or taking the extra shift to fill out her paycheck instead of spending a day in bed alone with her thoughts. Here, she just had to trust in the belief that everything had worked out, stop thinking about it, and then move onto the next Dream.

  The King regarded her silently, for what felt a little too long. It was an odd, misplaced silence, and Lucy felt irritation bloom from how he was forcing her to wait despite her express desire to keep going.

  But at last, he said: “Very well. Let us proceed to update your alignments and grant you your first Feat.”