Kenneth sniffled, then wiped vigorously at his eyes so that they were no longer leaking, but still misty in the light that filtered in through the stained glass windows. He said, “Miss Lucy hugged me, and said she wouldn’t leave me. And…”

  Diana knelt down slightly, gazing expectantly at the boy with a smile that carried premature triumph. “And?”

  Kenneth swallowed, his chest rising and falling in silence for some time, then said: “She said that the queen was lying. That it wasn’t my fault.”

  By the time he finished speaking, tears had begun streaming down his cheeks again. But instead of looking dejected rueful like he had been a moment ago, he instead had the animated look of being overwhelmed with emotions, both negative and positive.

  “So it was that last part that mattered,” Diana said, looking to Lucy with a knowing smile.

  Lucy wasn’t sure why that mattered to Diana so much, but just hearing her sound so haughty about it made Lucy reflexively want to refute her claim. “You can’t say that for sure.”

  “Pfft, you’re really going to give me that? Just look at how much he started crying the moment he said it.”

  Lucy opened her mouth to retort against this assumption, but Ricardo spoke first: “Just to cut to the chase, why’s it matter that Kenneth cared about that part most?”

  “You Standies really don’t get it, do you?” Diana sighed, then flit her gaze between Ricardo and Lucy. She raised her spear slightly, slamming it down into the floor with an authoritative thud, and stood up straight to emphasize her towering figure. Like the blazing sun glaring down at a world that had foolishly forgotten its existence, her gaze fell on Lucy again. “It wasn’t your coddling that helped him. It was telling him that this so-called queen is a lying piece of shit. Same thing with that ridiculous eyeball. You don’t talk to it, let it burn you, and say, ‘Gee, thanks.’ You do what I did and get it to fuck off out of existence.”

  Lucy grit her teeth, her disdain for Diana’s ruthlessness clashing with the undeniable revelation that Diana’s words had brought. “That’s—”

  “Think I get it,” said Ricardo, giving Lucy a firm look before locking eyes with Diana. “What you’re saying is Kenneth needs to reject whatever he’s told in this Dream.”

  Diana nodded with a smile, then furrowed her brow. “Not just reject it. Pulverize it, obliterate it, make it so there’s no trace of whatever these bastards were trying to poison the kid’s mind with.”

  Her grip on her spear—her Ideal—tightened to the point that Lucy could see Diana’s hand tremble. “Don’t give them even an inch, or they’ll go the whole yard. You can not have even an inkling of mercy or patience. Annihilate everything they’re trying to fabricate without a second thought.”

  Lucy breathed in deeply as she looked at Diana’s unyielding expression, taking in the clean, rustic church air now that the fire and its fumes had vanished to give way to a fresh air of clarity. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, all of Diana’s acts of defiance had gotten them out of the binds they’d encountered in this Dream so far. If Lucy were to set aside her hostility, working together on this would likely show them to path to rescuing Kenneth once and for all. But if defiance was the goal here, there was one big roadblock before them.

  “So if we defy the queen,” said Lucy, “we might be able to defeat her.”

  Diana shook her head while clicking her tongue. “Not ‘might.’ We will kill her as soon as her words have no power.”

  “But what are we defying?” said Lucy, her voice echoing through the church hall as Diana went speechless. “Besides all those little things the queen was reading off, she must have something big over Kenneth. Something that has Kenneth convinced it’s all his fault.”

  Diana looked at Lucy, her expression hard-set, but in a manner that showed deep pondering. At length, she sighed. “You’ve got a point there. Arguing against something you don’t even know is always going to sound hollow.” She brought her free hand up to her temple and frowned. “But what in blazes could it be?”

  “The queen said some stuff about Kenneth being a killer,” said Ricardo, his arms crossed. “Could that have something to do with it?”

  “I thought that was just the queen exaggerating,” said Lucy. “Because she said he was ‘killing the planet’ by not finishing his food.”

  “Maybe. But hear me out.” Ricardo looked to Lucy, then Diana, his eyes wide with a seriousness that appeared stark on his usually laid-back face. “When Kenneth was apologizing over and over, he also repeated that he was the killer. I don’t got much to back it up, but to me, that sounds like this ’killer’ business was a huge deal to him.”

  As Lucy nodded, Diana cocked her head in thought, then pointed her spear at Ricardo. “You’re onto something. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Ricardo had barely stuttered out his words before Diana approached Kenneth, who had been staring at the burnt patch of floor where Keilani had been.

  Diana knelt down at his side. “Kenneth. Can you tell us why the queen called—”

  “Diana!” Ricardo grabbed her shoulder and whispered urgently. He nodded in the direction away from Kenneth, to where Lucy was standing. Diana glared at him, but ultimately stood back up and followed.

  “What?” Diana shot out in an annoyed tone with her arms spread out in a shrug. But there was no actual hatred to her voice, and her eyes were inquisitive rather than dismissive. Lucy had to suppress a smirk, for she knew now that Diana was self-conscious about how she came across to kids.

  “You can’t just ask him straight like that,” said Ricardo, looking back over to his shoulder to confirm that Kenneth was still lost in thought rather than listening in on them. “What if it brings up bad memories? Don’t forget ‘killer’ is a keyword here.”

  “So what if it does?” said Diana. “It’ll make him uncomfortable for a bit, but we’ll have the info we need.”

  Lucy couldn’t believe how insensitive Diana was, but at the same time she could see where she was coming from in wanting to get that crucial piece of information. Still, she answered Diana firmly. “If he ends up crying and breaking down before he tells us what we need to know, we might lose our only chance to hear it from him.”

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  To Lucy’s surprise, after Diana regarded her silently for a moment, Diana gave a smile. Not a mocking smirk or a wicked grin, but a smile of genuine appraisal. “So you can knock some sense into someone instead of going the big happy family route. Good stuff, princess.”

  Lucy scowled at her, deciding that she did legitimately hate Diana for talking down to her as if she were a child, but her reaction only made Diana’s smile widen.

  “But I concede you two have a point,” said Diana. “But if we can’t get answers from him, where else?”

  Diana looked at Lucy and Ricardo for several moments, then the three of them looked off to different parts of the church, each pondering separately. Lucy found her eyes drawn to the burn spot Kenneth was fixated on, not only because of her lingering remorse, but also because she wished Keilani were here to deliver some fast-paced ideas. As it stood right now, she and her two fellow Dream Knights were stumped. And, from what she understood of Diana and Ricardo’s journey to get to the church, they didn’t have much time before the royal guard climbed the hill and surrounded them.

  Lucy sighed, tapping her foot impatiently, her eyes wandering around the church’s infinitely patient and unhurried setting. Although Ricardo and Diana hadn’t said anything, she felt a pressure on herself to come up with at least one idea to make up for her ineffectiveness so far. But even this she did not want to admit to herself, for it would lead to agreeing with Diana that Keilani’s demise was all her fault. If she hadn’t stood back and watched, hadn’t given into her curiosity and avoidance, had done something instead of letting the eye of God have its way with Keilani…

  No, now was not the time to dwell on what had already past. All Lucy could do now was find a path forward, one so great that it would bury the tracks of all she hadn’t been able to do. For that, Lucy would have to sacrifice her overwhelming desire for agency against the immovable power of time past. Even though time wasn’t a definite entity like the eye of God, it felt wrong, wrong to submit and acquiesce while she still donned her Higher Reflection and held her Ideal. But, just like how Keilani had allowed the flames to burn her as she felt euphoric release, Lucy found herself returned to those Sunday mornings of her childhood when the words she heard recited were absolute and there was no other truth to ponder and agonize over. And if the words of time said it was useless to spend mental energy on what she could have done moments ago, Lucy received it with all the unquestioning acceptance of a child receiving the broken bread.

  Focus forward, focus forward…That was all Lucy had to do. In her struggle to do this, she found her eyes dwelling on the stained glass windows high above the altar. She could inspect them more clearly now, and yet the vivid arrangements of shapes and colours still appeared as nondescript abstractions and vague impressions.

  But what if they were more than just vague impressions?

  “Lucy?” said Ricardo.

  Something in her expression must have changed, or her sudden fixation on the stained glass windows must have been more apparent than she thought. Regardless of why she was drawing attention, Lucy silently ignored them and focused, not wanting to let this hunch slip her grasp no matter how much of a waste of time it could be.

  It was highly unlikely for a Dreamer’s subconscious mind to come up with something wholly original. And this was likely more true for a child, whose mind was still primed for absorbing as much information about the world as possible.

  With this in mind, Lucy strained herself to look past her initisal observation of the stained glass windows’ images being nothing more than frivolous collections of colourful shapes. She had to read deeply into their forms and arrangements while formulating new ideas as to what they could represent. For this, she was glad she had a good amount of points in both Understanding and Ideation.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ricardo turn away from her and focus on the stained glass windows as well. Spurred on by his mimicry, showing that perhaps what she was doing wasn’t completely foolish, Lucy redoubled her efforts to decipher this church’s greatest mystery.

  In the left-most window, an oblong blue shape lay horizontally over four red ovals. The latter made Lucy think of wheels. Was this a wagon? Or a bus? Or perhaps it was a car. The way the body of this vehicle slanted forward made it look like it was lurching, propelling itself at great speed.

  The middle window consisted mainly of dark blues, with an uneven line of greens and yellows at the bottom. With some artistic licence, Lucy could interpret this as an open field, perhaps under a night sky. At the far right side, just above the “grass,” there was a collection of oranges and reds. The shapes were unusual, but taken altogether they vaguely resembled a person standing.

  Compared to the other two windows, the right-most window had no sense of composition, no discernible subject nor concept of foreground and background. It was merely a hodgepodge of red, oranges, and yellows swirling all about the window’s surface area, with no rhyme nor reason nor pattern to it all. The very lack of arrangement suggested an indulgence in chaos and volatility, and in this Lucy was prepared to be stumped. But then, after wiping some lingering sweat off her brow, Lucy jerked as it all clicked into place.

  Fire.

  The right-most window was depicting a fire.

  One so great that it consumed the entire space of illustration, practically breaking out of its artistic confines.

  Sweat ran down Lucy’s neck, pooling at her back as she thought back to the enormous flame that had taken Keilani from them. Just as Lucy had remarked to herself mere moments ago, it was unlikely for a child to have come up with such a thing all on their own. Which meant Kenneth more than likely had witnessed a fire just as great in the waking world.

  “Explains stuff, doesn’t it?” said Ricardo, his gaze also locked onto the right-most window with wide eyes. “Like why that eye of God chose to do that to Kei.”

  Lucy nodded gravely. “This is horrible…What could Kenneth have seen? And what does the queen have to with it?”

  “Hey Standies,” said Diana, her tone a mix between confusion and impatience, “mind filling me in?”

  Before anyone could respond, there came a sharp gasp, and suddenly Kenneth appeared before Lucy and Ricardo.

  “You…can see?”

  Lucy shifted her gaze from the right-most window to Kenneth’s eyes—but found that the window’s depiction of the fire was still at the centre of her vision. No: it wasn’t that the image had followed her gaze, but that the very same image was reflected in Kenneth’s eyes.

  “Wh-what the hell?”

  Lucy looked to Ricardo, only to match his utter shock once she felt what he had noticed first: they were both rising into the air.

  “Hey!” Diana shouted. “What are you doing? Quit wasting Feats!”

  “It’s not us!” said Lucy, struggling to look over her shoulder as her entire body shook from continuously rising up and forward through some mysterious force. “Kenneth? Are you doing something?”

  The boy didn’t respond. From what Lucy could see several feet behind and below her, Kenneth was keeping his mouth shut, his body eerily calm, while the reflection of the stained glass window shone vividly in his eyes.

  Gazing at them, Lucy realized that the reflection had changed: from the wild fire of the right-most window, to the speeding vehicle of the left-most window.

  When Lucy turned her head to look ahead of her, she saw that very same window not far from her, engulfing her entire field of vision. She and Ricardo were rapidly being brought into this window.

  “Get back here!” Diana yelled, her voice rife with anger, but also desperation. “You’re really going to leave me to deal with them?”

  Lucy must have been in some sort of daze, for now she was aware of how she had heard the church doors swing open. Now, the church hall was filled with the clanging and jingling of boots hurriedly marching forward and the sounds of metal armour and weapons moving in rapid, eager cycles that drew closer and closer.

  Lucy wanted to look back. For as much as Diana had extinguished her sense of self-worth ever since reuniting here, Lucy couldn’t bare to just completely abandon her. At the very least, she wanted to give the support of seeing what Diana was up against—but the mysterious force carrying herself and Ricardo through the air kept her head locked stubbornly forward.

  Toward the vibrant, painstakingly-beautiful surface of the stained glass window that sunk through Lucy’s body upon contact, and then spread out in every direction like an entire world being constructed right before her eyes.