It was nothing short of breathtaking.

  The glass from the window melted, becoming paints of the handful of vibrant primary colours that had been part of its illustration, spreading all throughout the space before Lucy’s and Ricardo’s eyes. An unseen brush painted spread green beneath their feet, where the formless mass of colour rapidly took on more shades and hues as well as a sense of lighting and shadow so that, in mere seconds, Lucy found herself standing over a field of moonlit grass. Accordingly, blue engulfed the space high above, darkening to the navy blue of a sky on the verge of dusk, the silhouette of a city skyline on the horizon. A mere four or five feet from where Lucy and Ricardo stood, obsidian black streaked over the grass, cleaning itself up into a clean and seemingly endless line split into two halves with a broken yellow line.

  A road.

  Lucy looked off in one direction down the road, then turned around and looked down the other. But no matter where she looked, the road was completely empty.

  Lucy stared blankly into the distance. The window they had been brought “into” depicted a car, she was sure of it, and yet there were no vehicles on the road. This whole situation was strange—were she and Ricardo in another Dream, or some small subset of the current one that functioned as a separate realm?—but Lucy was sure there had to be a correlation between the stained glass windows and where they found themselves now. Surely, Kenneth’s mind couldn’t be that random.

  “Kenneth?” Ricardo called out suddenly. “Is that you?”

  There, on the other side of the road, a small lone figure cast their silhouette against the deep blue sky, like a pitch-black fragment of the night sky that had not yet arrived but inevitably would. Despite Ricardo’s projected voice, the small figure continued staring down the road while walking across the grass. There was no ebb to his stride, no rise and fall of his figure, so that he very much appeared to hover over the grass.

  Lucy looked to Ricardo. “Should we go up to him?”

  To her surprise, Ricardo said nothing. He stared at the lone walker, the one he assumed was Kenneth, his eyes wide and eyebrows knitted while his lower lip trembled ever so slightly.

  And Lucy knew, partly from the similarity to Keilani’s circumstances a short while ago, and partly from his arrested and stiff posture that went against his animated facial expression, that Ricardo was seeing an image far more significant to him than a young child walking alone by a road.

  Ricardo slowly brought his arm up, reaching out with his hand. Then he lowered his head, shook it, and looked back up at the lone figure with what, from his face, expressed itself as renewed resolve. Except, to Lucy, it wasn’t a resolve born of surefire conviction, but rather the scrabbling together of fleeting fragments composure held precariously in place by desperation.

  It was in this state that Ricardo took off on his own, with Lucy following after a short moment of being taken aback by surprise. Ricardo bounding off toward Kenneth wasn’t unexpected, but it was the manner of his initiative that threw Lucy off: no nod of acknowledgement toward Lucy, no short phrase of understanding, not even a quick glance her way. It was very unlike him, as the most cooperative of this Dream Knight team, and already Lucy felt shivers down her spine as she recalled how different Keilani had looked and sounded while standing before the eye of God.

  “Ricardo!” Lucy cried as she ran after him. “Wait!”

  By the time the second word had left Lucy’s mouth, the lone figure had stopped—while Ricardo knelt down in front of him.

  “—don’t go,” Ricardo’s words faded in as Lucy approached the two of them. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you in time.”

  Lucy, stopping and catching her breath, knelt down beside Ricardo and took in the target of their chase. She recognized his face and hair immediately as Kenneth’s, and this came as a relief. However, though he had stopped because Ricardo had caught up to him, this Kenneth did not regard him nor Lucy at all. His gaze was still pointed forward, his eyes fixed on the interminable length of the road ahead. His face held that boyish innocence Lucy had come to know, yet there was a paradoxical sense of both listless wandering and directed conviction in his eyes and in his frown.

  Ricardo, meanwhile, still had his eyebrows knitted, his eyes wide and strained as if on the verge of tears. This was the first time Lucy had seen his composure completely dissolve, and the first time his all-encompassing gaze had narrowed to focus on only the one thing in front of him: Kenneth. His white gi, originally a vibrant symbol of his skill and readiness for combat, now highlighted the sincerity and pureness of the emotions he displayed, especially as such a bright shade lit by the moonlight looked out of place against the darkening horizon.

  Kenneth began walking again beside the road again, still paying the two Dream Knights no heed. Ricardo was taken aback in shock, as was Lucy, but she got back up to her feet and hurried after the boy.

  “Kenneth,” she said, still walking briskly after him, “can we ask you something?”

  “Lucy, don’t!” Ricardo’s voice took on a pleading tone as he ran up in front of her. “We need to stop him first. Or else nothing we say will get through to him.”

  Lucy searched his expression. She could see why it made sense to make sure Kenneth wouldn’t wander off while speaking to him, but Ricardo’s words and the desperation on his face spoke of an untold certainty to what he was claiming. “How do you know that?”

  Ricardo remained silent, and in his eyes Lucy saw that he was carefully crafting his response. Presently, he dropped his gaze to the grass, the blades dancing wildly in the evening wind with such fervour as to look like they would soon be uprooted and blown down the road. “Let’s just say this is something I know well.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lucy hadn’t meant to sound so impatient, but she was genuinely offended by how he put so much effort into dodging her question. “We’re all working together, aren’t we? I can’t co-operate with you if you’re being vague like this.”

  Lucy looked into his eyes and knew that she needed to add one word to emphasize that this wasn’t an attack, like what Diana might have done, but a gentle nudge to open up with honesty. “Please?”

  Ricardo sighed, looking off into the distant horizon, his gaze seeming to become lost amongst the towering silhouettes of the city skyline, then locked eyes with Lucy. “Have you heard how our Final Dreams are still just Dreams?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy, “the King, the one who guides me, told me something like that.”

  “All right. So if I told you that we’re Dreamers ourselves, does that make sense?”

  Lucy nodded. She wasn’t sure where Ricardo was going with this, but an ominous anxiety took hold of her, inching closer and closer just like how she could see Kenneth walking on and on in her peripheral vision.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Well,” said Ricardo, moving closer, lowering both his head and his voice, “if I told you that we each have something in our Final Dreams to be rescued from, would you believe me?”

  Lucy stared at him, wanting to nod, but failing to fight the paralysis that had taken hold of her body. It did make sense, based on everything she understood about the realm of Dreams and the nature of Dreamers and Dream Knights. But what did that mean for them? What did that mean for her and her own Dream? She thought back to the King’s castle, and the boundless sky, and the world below, and a shiver ran down her spine as she now knew she had all along been missing something so crucial, so fatal in her understanding of that world she supposedly owned.

  “In my Final Dream,” said Ricardo, his eyes locked onto Lucy’s but also gazing far, far beyond them, “there’s a road, just like this one. And every time I come back, I have to stop my father from walking down that road so he can listen to me. Or else…”

  “Or else?” said Lucy. It was clear from Ricardo’s face and voice that this was a sensitive topic, but her curiosity pushed her to take a chance and try to pry deeper.

  “Sorry.” Ricardo grabbed his forehead with both hands and shook his head. “I’d…rather not get into that head-space right now.”

  “That’s all right. I should be the one apologizing.” Lucy clutched her left wrist, letting the slight pang of pain wash over her. Looking at Ricardo like this, she wished she could go to his Dream and rescue him, rescue Ricardo the Dreamer.

  But when she looked at Ricardo’s face, she saw that even now, his focus was on the boy drifting off farther and farther into the distance. Regardless of everything, Ricardo still shared that duty unto others that propelled Lucy forward, and this ignited a fire in her as she brought her hand back to her Ideal’s handle. “I understand what you mean. Let’s go stop Kenneth.”

  Ricardo remained silent and still, his eyes closed as he breathed in deeply. His body language told Lucy that what she wanted to accomplish would not be easy. Still, he opened his eyes and gave Lucy a hard nod before turning around and facing both the road and Kenneth once more.

  Walking at the same brisk space, the two Dream Knights set out to catch back up to the boy, who had covered a surprisingly great distance since leaving them behind.

  While walking, Lucy initially focused her sights on Kenneth’s figure, but soon her eyes drifted over to the road beside them. It stretched on seemingly forever, yet curiously enough, Lucy found herself fixated on the the place the road narrowed to a single dot on the horizon. It was impossible to tell in the waning evening light, but there seemed to be something there, a definite destination at the end of this endless road. Was it a way out of this microcosm of Kenneth’s Dream? Was it a secret to defeating the queen? Or—from the vaguely ethereal and soothing light that seemed to shimmer in and out of that spot on the horizon—was it the miraculous thing Lucy needed right this moment to clear up everything, from her recent failures to her uncertainties about being a Dream Knight and her fear of what she might find back in her Final Dream? Lucy’s heart soared in her chest, and she was determined to find out the answer.

  A hand grabbed her by the shoulder, turning her around to meet Ricardo’s face.

  “Don’t stare down the road,” he said with a hushed urgency, “and don’t try to follow it. Focus on Kenneth only. We need to follow him without getting caught up in the same thing.”

  Lucy stared at him blankly, then her whole body shivered as all her senses returned to her without her having noticed their absence. “Do you know that from experience as well?”

  Ricardo gave a single sure nod. “Trust me.”

  They started walking again, with Lucy making a conscious effort to veer her gaze off to the side to keep Kenneth always as her focal point. She wondered what this road could mean, a road that swallows up those gaze at it so they have no choice but to wander down its endless length. The fact that such a thing existed in Kenneth’s mind was already intriguing in and of itself, but Ricardo apparently had a very similar road in his own Dream, despite the two of them being completely unrelated as far as Lucy knew. Was this related to the collective unconscious, somehow? The more deeply she thought about it, the more her eyes were tempted to drift down the road’s obsidian infinities again, and so Lucy shook her head and focused on the task at hand, at the hopelessly lonely boy they needed to save.

  At last, they were at Kenneth’s side again. Lucy looked to Ricardo while maintaining her brisk pace to keep up with the boy. “How do we stop him? I mean, what do you do in your own Dream?”

  “Well…” Ricardo looked away, his voice trailing off.

  “Ricardo?” Lucy grit her teeth, as she didn’t want to push too far, but in this instance where the two of them and Kenneth were still walking down the road to some unknown destination, Lucy’s sense of urgency won out. “Please. We need to do something now .”

  “All right, all right.” Ricardo sighed, not with annoyance, but with careful acceptance. “I…open up to my dad. Let him hear that I’m being totally real, totally vulnerable. Don’t know why it works, but maybe if you give them real, heavy emotions, it weighs them down enough to stop walking.”

  Lucy looked at him over Ken’s figure with wide, unblinking eyes. “That sounds mentally exhausting.”

  Ricardo gave a murmur of assent. “That’s reason number one why I don’t look forward to returning, sometimes. But I think I get better the more I align with Understanding. Heck, maybe one day I’ll finally save myself from that damned Dream.”

  Lucy’s gaze veered slightly away from Ricardo’s face as she pondered his words. Would she one day be strong enough to overcome whatever was tying her down to her Final Dream? But what about her goal of acquiring Into Dreams and rescuing the people she knew needed to be saved more than herself?

  “Sorry,” said Ricardo, “that was way too much about myself. I usually hate doing interviews. To stop Kenneth, one of us will need to open up to him.”

  Lucy immediately knew the implicit question: But how? Neither of them had enough of a personal connection to Kenneth to warrant such deep, heartfelt words. From what she remembered earlier when Ricardo had approached the boy, Ricardo had tried to express guilt over not being there for Kenneth sooner. It didn’t work, because it hadn’t felt right—not because Ricardo was manufacturing emotion, but likely because his words came from a different origin, like the words he meant to say to his father.

  As Lucy stared at Kenneth, looking past his emotionless expression to see the youth and innocence of the boy beneath that veil, she realized there was one thing she could express sincerely to him.

  But there were problems. Did this Kenneth have all of the memories of what transpired during the Dream, or, with how this Kenneth appeared to be younger, were his memories limited to what he knew at this point in his life? Besides the logistical issues this posed, there was also the matter that Lucy would be dredging up intense emotions that she had not yet had time to process at all, and she feared being crushed under the weight of her own heavy heart.

  Ricardo shot her a glance, his gaze hard but reassuring. It’s okay to feel this way, but we need to do this, his eyes said.

  Lucy almost tripped over her own feet from feeling overwhelmed, but in the end she caught herself, stood up straight as she caught up with Ricardo and Kenneth again, and gave Ricardo a nod. Clutching the handle of her Ideal, Lucy resolved to finally act.

  “Kenneth,” she said, walking a few paces ahead of him and turning to look him in the eye, “about Miss Kei—”

  A loud rumbling and low hum from the distance cut her off. When Lucy looked down the road to find its source, she was nearly blinded by two bright lights.

  The headlights of an oncoming car.