The church asserted itself as a dour stage, its primary actors locked in tableau, their forms fit for depiction on a tapestry or stained glass window. Diana stood solid and straight as a monument, her arm raised above her head to drive her spear high and forward through the air. Lucy intercepted her, both hands holding up her sword to block the spear’s path with its blade, Lucy’s knees bent to dig her boots into the floor and resist the pushback from Diana’s impressive might. All the while, the flame engulfing Keilani burned and simmered not two paces from where their clash took place, its stark light highlighting the sweat and lines of stress on Lucy’s and Diana’s faces as they glared at one another.

  Lucy lightly whimpered as she parried Diana’s strike. Holding her sword up with both hands made her left arm throb with sharp, needling pains. Focusing on it, feeling the discomfort that welled up and wouldn’t let up, made every cell in her body scream at her to stop and let go, to escape this unsavoury situation with one easy movement.

  But focusing on the pain also led her to remember that image of the Knight of Understanding in the mirror from her Final Dream, standing steadfastly with unlimited patience. She recalled the King’s words, describing how those aligned with Understanding can endure the longest because they know the attacks coming their way and how to withstand them.

  And at this point, Lucy was sure she knew Diana well enough to endure her attack, no matter how long it would take. And she knew, from all her interactions with her so far, that responding to Diana and that scornful look in her eye with fear and subservience was a surefire way to hand her victory. To endure, Lucy held Diana’s glare without faltering, letting the fire show in her eyes as a flame that refused to be extinguished.

  Diana studied her, then her eyes glowed—with acknowledgement, amusement, or fresh animosity, Lucy couldn’t tell. Regardless, she appeared to have sensed Lucy’s refusal to back down, as she brought her spear back and let the tail end touch the floor with a controlled but pronounced thud.

  “Listen to you, huh?” Diana echoed what Lucy had said before their silent struggle, making her words of conviction sound like a little girl’s plea. “I already know what you’re going to blather on about.”

  “They’re not my words,” said Lucy, bringing her sword down to her side with a quick, firm flourish. “They’re Kenneth’s. He told us not to attack it.”

  Diana opened her mouth, but Lucy cut her off: “It’s his Dream, so you understand we should probably follow what he says, don’t you?”

  Diana gazed at Lucy with her mouth still open, her expression as steely as ever, but soon she smirked and gave a slight but mocking chuckle. “And who was it that made that annoying queen gigantic and invulnerable?”

  Lucy tried to shoot back a retort, but now she was the one with her mouth open and no voice to show for it.

  “This may be the kid’s Dream,” said Diana, “but that doesn’t mean he understands it himself. And clearly, neither do you, or Keilani wouldn’t have burst into flames right in front of you.”

  “I—”

  “Enough! You’ve wasted enough time as it is.” Diana side-stepped around Lucy callously, as if she were a mere pillar in the way, and set her sights on the eye of God once more. “Now, shut your trap while I finally put an end to this.”

  Lucy grimaced, knowing she had to act fast. She gave a quick glance at Ricardo, who looked at both of them with a conflicted look on his face. In this situation, even he was unsure of whose side to take.

  Despite this, Lucy decided she wouldn’t concede her own side.

  “I’m warning you,” Diana uttered in a low voice as Lucy stepped in between her and the eye. “Move, or you’re ending up worse off than Keilani.”

  Lucy shook her head, the contrasting light from the flame making her young features look hard-set and resolute. “I’m not budging until you listen to the Dreamer we’re supposed to rescue.”

  Diana stared daggers into Lucy for what felt like an eternity, her white toga and crimson plume set against the fire making her resemble an angel of fire. Then, without a hint of hesitation, she raised her open-palmed hand toward Lucy.

  And stopped.

  The flame had stopped wavering and crackling, the eye was not blinking hideously, and Ricardo was frozen in his doubling back from shock and disbelief at Diana’s actions.

  Lucy already knew—had anticipated—that Cognizance (I) would activate right about now.

  At Lucy’s chest, right around the same height as Diana’s outstretched palm, what appeared to be the stringy, translucent tentacles of a jellyfish stuck out from Lucy’s torso. This raised many questions about what this Feat of Diana’s could possibly be, and what Diana had intended to do to Lucy with it, but Lucy was glad she didn’t have to find out the answer to any of that.

  Time resumed, and for the first time Lucy saw complete and utter shock shatter Diana’s unperturbed confidence. “What the fuck?”

  “Hyaaaagh!” Lucy didn’t waste any time running up to Diana, raising the sword of her Ideal with both hands, and bringing it crashing down on Diana’s spear arm.

  “You little…!” Diana barely managed to get two words out before squeezing her eyes shut and groaning in pain.

  Lucy looked down at where her sword had struck. She had made a big show of her swing, but in truth she had decreased the force of the slicing motion upon making contact with Diana’s arm. The goal was to maim her just enough to prevent her from using her spear, but evidently Lucy and her sword had done more than that: the blade had sunken into Diana’s flesh several inches deep, with thick red blood flooding out of the gash and onto the church’s as-yet spotless floors.

  Lucy’s eyes went wide. She had expected Diana’s body to have enhanced resilience, but Lucy’s blade glided through Diana’s skin with almost no resistance, even when Lucy lifted it up to take her sword out of Diana’s new wound and bring it back to her side.

  Lucy stepped back a few paces and shook the blood off, focusing her gaze on Diana as she clutched at her arm with a grimace. Diana was aligned with Rebellion, that much was sure, but just how much had she neglected to put points into Understanding? Such a deficiency was clearly dangerous, unless the strategy was to guarantee stomping out foes in one fell swoop.

  And as Diana stomped forward, her face alight in the fire with vehement rage, Lucy suspected that she was about to demonstrate that very strategy on her.

  Lucy’s racing heart pounded in her ears as she braced herself and took a two-handed grip on her sword.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Agh!”

  Lucy flinched her left arm away as it erupted in sharp, burning pain that seared through every nerve. She glanced down at her hands, cursing her injury for still being unhealed, then glanced back up just in time to see Diana step right in front of her with a wicked smirk.

  “Nice try,” said Diana, “but if you’re making this a one-armed fight, you miscalculated something. I don’t need a weapon.”

  Before Lucy had any time to react, Diana reached out her left arm—her non-spear arm—and grabbed Lucy’s face, her palm ensnaring the younger woman’s features. Without any hint of strain or effort, Diana raised her arm up, bringing Lucy up off the ground with it.

  Lucy couldn’t see, and anything she tried to say was muffled by Diana’s palm and the vice-like force of Diana’s grip around her cheeks. Her legs dangled uselessly, and though she tried to kick forward, her feet struck only empty air.

  Diana gave a drawn-out grunt of effort and the next moment Lucy’s face was free from Diana’s grip—only for her back to explode with pain. She lay sprawled on the floor with one of the church pews knocked over underneath her.

  Lucy’s head spun and her entire body throbbed with discomfort, but she grit her teeth and propped herself up with her arms so that she could look forward.

  Several sections of pews lay between her, Diana, and the eye now; evidently, Diana had thrown her farther than one would expect was physically possible. Clenching her teeth through the aches and pains, Lucy clambered back up to her feet.

  But Diana had already swapped her spear to her left hand and raised it toward the eye—this time, with nothing to obstruct her spear’s trajectory.

  “Don’t do it!”

  Lucy’s breath came rapid and hot as she scrambled through the pews. She side-stepped through the narrow spaces between them, but soon jumped up on top of the bench portion, sprinting as fast as she could despite the smooth surfaces causing her to nearly trip more than once.

  But before Lucy was even halfway through the distance she needed to cover, Diana wound her arm back, her flexed tricep trembling with tension like a drawn bowstring. Like a flash of lightning, all of that tension was released in a straight, unrelenting forward motion, and the head of the spear hit its mark.

  With a grimace and a glare, Diana held onto the handle while the blade sunk all the way into the eyeball’s pupil. This was accompanied by a loud splashing noise that sounded murky and viscous, like dropping something into a vat of jam or nearly-dried blood.

  The wind died and the pipe organ stopped playing. A shrill whistling sound pierced the new silence, like air or steam being shot out at high pressure.

  Then the eye of God shrunk.

  The whites of the eye rapidly decreased in radius, yet the iris and pupil remained the same size. When there were no whites remaining and the eye consisted only of the blue-gold iris and the dark pupil, only then did they begin to shrink as well. The pupil was the last to go, a concentrated darkness hanging in the air, giving the sense that the observer—wherever He was situated—kept watching down to the very last second before the pupil disappeared from sight.

  Lucy and everyone else was left awestruck, but it didn’t take long for Kenneth’s voice to fill the air.

  “Miss Kei!”

  He ran up over to the fire, or rather where it had been, quickly followed by the Dream Knights as they crowded around the site of the extinguished blaze. Keilani lay on the floor, her clothes badly singed and her skin dry and nearly coal black, but the rising and falling of her chest showed that the burns hadn’t snuffed out her life’s flame.

  “She told me she put a lot of points in Understanding,” said Ricardo, kneeling down beside her, his voice stiff. He put his hand out toward her face, but pulled it back, likely from feeling in the air that her body was still hot enough to burn anything that made contact. “Kei. Kei. Can you hear me?”

  After all the clamour of the past few minutes, the silence that followed was deafening. Eventually, Keilani’s eyes slowly flew open, her gaze going to Ricardo, then the others, and back to Ricardo.

  “You…remember right.” Keilani croaked out her words, which were followed by slow but deep coughs. “But…even so…I don’t think I’ll make it…”

  “Miss Kei?”

  Kenneth held tears in his eyes as he raced up to her, but Ricardo put his arm out in front of the boy’s legs to keep from getting too close. “Kenneth, I know you’re worried, but be careful. Miss Kei’s burning hot right now, like a stove. If you get too close, you’ll get burned.”

  Kenneth opened his mouth, but he stopped himself and nodded, his eyes still teary as he gazed down at the knight who had been his caretaker for most of this journey.

  Diana stepped up closer to Keilani, standing straight up while her gaze dropped down with an inscrutable expression. Lucy followed Ricardo’s example and knelt down beside Keilani, seeing for herself how charred and ashen Keilani’s skin had become, how her breathing became more and more of a struggle.

  “Keilani…” said Lucy, wishing she could extend her hand, “I’m so sorry…”

  Keilani coughed and locked eyes with Lucy. To Lucy’s surprise, she found the strength to shake her head. Slowly opening her mouth, Keilani said; “I’m not actually going to die…But I hope we can meet again.”

  She let out a slow, deep sigh, then flitted her gaze to Kenneth. With a weak but sweet smile, she said: “Kenneth…I’m sorry. Be a good boy, okay?”

  Kenneth opened his mouth again, looking ready to bawl out, but he swallowed and nodded emphatically. “I will, Miss Kei. I promise.”

  Seeing this, Keilani let her smile grow wider, then closed her eyes—for good, this time.

  A bell chimed, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere, as if from another dimensional plane. Its resonant tone was unnaturally clear and struck every frequency in the upper range of human hearing.

  It rung again.

  And a third time.

  That was when Keilani’s body sunk through the church floor. There was no resistance, as if Keilani were a ghost completely detached from the material realm fabricated by Kenneth’s Dream.

  The whole world seemed to hold its breath for an interminable amount of time. Then Ricardo, kneeling beside Lucy, put his hand on her shoulder. “She’ll be back in her Final Dream. Don’t worry.”

  Lucy nodded slowly, her gaze fixed downward at the massive burn mark on the church floor that had not disappeared. She knew Ricardo’s words were true, for the King had told her the same about Dream Knights who perished in others’ Dreams. Still, that didn’t mean the experience of being burned alive for minutes on end was erased from Keilani’s memory, nor did that make the excruciating pain she must have felt any less real. The charred and ashen skin showing through her thoroughly singed jumpsuit were still fresh visuals. And in the midst of Keilani’s body, mind, and spirit being set ablaze, Lucy had stood and watched as a mere spectator too caught up in her own curiosity and indecision.

  “This is all my fault.” Lucy bowed her head, thankful that the eye of God was no longer around to hear her admission, but at the same time wishing that something could burn away this sin of hers for real.

  “Good.” Diana’s voice was sharp as usual, but where hostility would make her eyes glow and her scowl pronounced, now they held the strain of effort, of struggling to hold together. “You’re finally accepting it. And you had damn better never forget it.”

  Ricardo took his hand off Lucy’s shoulder and stood up, facing Diana. “C’mon, give her a break. There’s no point in rubbing it in.”

  “No point?” Colour and feeling returned to Diana’s face as it took on her scornful expression once more. “She needs to get this through her pretty little head. Waiting and talking through everything gets people killed.”

  “Hey,” said Ricardo, “for what it’s worth, while you were unconscious—” He abruptly paused as Diana shot him a glare, and he raised his hands defensively in response. “I know, I know. But what I’m getting at is, Lucy was the one who got Kenneth to stop crying and making that queen get bigger. And she did that by talking to him.”

  Lucy looked to Diana, expecting her to look either surprised at this new information, or frustrated at her lack of a response to it.

  But instead, Diana’s hard-set expression remained unfazed, and there was even a glimmer in her eyes. She looked to Lucy, her eyes piercing, searching, ruthlessly investigating. “Really? And what did you say that got the kid to calm down?”

  “I…” Lucy glanced at Kenneth, then brought her gaze back to Diana with searching eyes of her own. What was Diana trying to get at? In the absence of any sort of answer, Lucy could only answer plainly. “I told him I would be there for him. And…I embraced him.”

  “Oh, how cute!” Diana smirked, then shook her head. “Spare me the picture book summary. There’s more to what you said.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Lucy, her patience dwindling. “That’s exactly what happened.”

  “Kenneth.”

  At Diana’s lighter-than-normal but still firm voice, the boy looked from where he had been watching all three Dream Knights, wiping away tears spilt over the fourth knight who was no longer with them. Despite his clear grief, he turned to Diana attentively.

  “Tell us,” said Diana, “what did Miss Lucy do while you were crying in front of the queen?”