This was already a difficult situation. The Dreamer was definitely a few generations older than Lucy, but he seemed thoroughly defeated and sure of it. And that was a bad combination, to be sure, as Lucy recalled how her mother would funnel every possible action she could take toward negative outcomes and, when scrutinized for her thinking, would lash back and say that Lucy had no place speaking to a proper adult with decades more in life experience. Of course, it was a big leap to assume that this man would act in the exact same way, but the stilled, already-drowned blue of his eyes suggested that he was far from being in an optimistic state mind.

  What had the King said? That she could return to her own Dream at any time, as long as she was at the spot from which she’d entered? Maybe she could return, and from there, travel to a different Dream, where the Dreamer wasn’t quite so resigned already, or at least one where she wasn’t stuck on a single boat out in the middle of raging seas that were making her breathe sharply from the fear of capsizing or slipping off and sinking into the depths…

  Lucy shook her head, then brought her hand up to her temple. It was tempting to bail on this Dream right now, but something about giving up this early into her very first foray into the Lattice of Dreams didn’t sit right with her. It wasn’t just that it was a waste of the time she’d already spent here, but more than that, she couldn’t stand the thought of abandoning. This Dream, and its Dreamer, who evidently was in far greater distress. It was easier to justify it in the waking world, where she had nothing but a feeble body and voice to her name, but here where she was in full armour, carrying a sword, and aligned along axes that granted her supernatural proficiencies?

  To turn tail now so suddenly would be especially betraying the axis she was most aligned with: Understanding. She, at the very least, owed it to the Dreamer to understand his plight to the best of her abilities. If, after that, she judged that her current state lacked the aptitudes to rescue him, then she could leave and travel elsewhere and return once she was strong enough.

  But now was not that time. Not yet.

  “My name is Lucy,” she said, drawing closer to him while crouching down so that their eyes were level. “What’s yours?”

  She expected this to be an easy to start things off and open him up to more positive conversation, but the man said nothing. Instead, he stared at Lucy with confusion and doubt that were visible even through the rains and mists that wafted over the boat between them.

  At last, he said: “Don’t mess with me. I should be asking you that question. Who are you supposed to be?”

  “Huh?”

  “Kind of looks like Anna…but not really…Agh, goddammit, am I hallucinating even in a dream?” The man grabbed fistfuls of his hair, then slammed one fist down on the boards below.

  “H-hey, calm down!” said Lucy. The words came out too forcefully—likely from lingering memories of dealing with a younger Thomas prone to tantrums—and she immediately regretted the effect this would have.

  “Calm down, huh? Calm down?” The man laughed, looking away from Lucy and out to the restless seas, then fixed Lucy with a hard glare. “You’re the one who’s too calm, you know that?”

  “I-I’m sorry,” said Lucy, instinctively straightening back up and shrinking backwards. In doing so, she fumbled and dropped her sword, inciting panicked movement in her until she managed to catch the handle just before the blade landed and possibly cut a hole into the boat.

  “Wait, what is that?” The man stared wide-eyed at Lucy’s sword, then got to his feet and backed away. “S-stay away! God, I already had enough to deal with!”

  “No, no, you have it all wrong! I, um…” Lucy looked at her sword, noting that it did look intimidatingly long and sharp, and slid it into a sheath that she discovered just now at her hip. “I’m not here to hurt you. I swear.”

  She started walking toward him, but stopped when he took a step back.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You’ve gotta be some messed up thing my mind made up. Maybe it’s because I stopped going to church? And now there’s an angel of death punishing me for it. Ha, my mind can be so childish.”

  Lucy was too bewildered by his insinuations to say anything in response, though she felt a strange mixture of pride and disappointment at being called an angel of death. But at least he seemed more talkative now, and was thinking about what Lucy actually was instead of outright closing her off. The fact that he feared and felt animosity toward her was a bad way to start things off, but this right now would likely be her best chance to both clear things up and explain her mission.

  “I can see why you’d think that,” she said, staying where she was and standing in as dignified a manner as she could without appearing intimidating. “But I’m not part of your Dream. I’m from…another Dream, from an entirely different person. Someone who goes to other people’s Dreams to help them out.”

  “Really now? Really, now?”

  There was that uncomfortable silence again as the man looked Lucy up and down, staring deep into her eyes as if they were a Magic Eight Ball that would reveal the truth if he looked beyond the surface somehow. Just when Lucy thought he was going to brush her off again, he burst into laughter.

  “Well then!” he said. “Why’d you take your sweet goddamn time getting here?”

  Lucy froze, completely taken aback by this man’s whiplash in behaviour. She wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic, but if he was asking her about herself directly, she ought to use this opportunity to finally start explaining herself. “I’m, uh, new to all of this. Being a Dream Knight, I mean. Only some people do what I’m doing, and I only started a little while ago. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to you sooner, but I am here to rescue you.”

  The man laughed again. “Sounds like you prepared some answers for the job interview. Well done! But no, really. You just don’t get it, do you? I’m just bullshitting you the same way you did me just now. You really think I’m gonna believe this crap about ‘knights’, and ’rescuing’ me? How old do you think I am?”

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  “I know it sounds hard to believe, but—”

  “Shut it!” The man yelled, and in the distance a flash of lightning and clap of thunder erupted. “Just go back wherever you came from and leave me—gaaahhh!”

  A loud rushing sound rung through the air, then Lucy was put off-balance and forced to wave her arms frantically in the air to retain balance. Thanks to that and changing to a staggered stance (and perhaps also something special in the boots she wore), she didn’t fall—but the man was very nearly on the verge of doing so, tipped backward at the very edge of the boat with his arms flailing about. A tidal wave had just passed under the boat, Lucy surmised, probably from the far-off storm she had just seen, and though that wave was now gone, the man’s perilous position and impending course overboard were still very much happening.

  “I’ve got you!”

  Lucy sprung forward from her position, planting one boot firmly on where she landed while using the other to take another huge stride that was practically a leap. In this way, she took only two steps to make it to where the man was struggling to maintain balance, and grabbed his wrist with both her hands.

  Satisfaction filled her, only for it to turn ice-cold as the man fell backward and pulled her along, submerging the two of them.

  Bitterness caught in Lucy’s throat and her eyes stung. Salt water. She should have expected this given that they were out to sea, but she herself had never been to one in the waking world—yet another aspect of herself that made her feel naive and small, easy to crush under the waves that now forced her down.

  “Help!”

  It was the man’s voice—garbled as it was in the water, his panic was all too clear.

  “Can’t…breathe…”

  His words were cut off by gurgling sounds, and Lucy knew that if he were to inhale any more water he would likely pass out. By no means was she an expert on this or a past lifeguard, but that insight flashed into her mind immediately upon hearing his voice. Was this how her Understanding alignment worked? It was far from a telepathic link, but she certainly had a far keener sense of this other person’s physical state.

  Amdist this, she realized that she herself had stopped sinking and had risen up to the surface—whether that was due to some ability bestowed upon her by her alignment or Higher Reflection, or some surreal property of this Dream was difficult to say—and more importantly, she herself had remained calm and collected with her strength intact. The latter most likely was chalked up to Understanding, and it was that same axis that gave her a hint as to what compulsion had caused her knightly gears to kick in:

  She had to stop him from drowning.

  And she could stop him from drowning.

  Her arms were already windmilling before she realized it, her legs kicking up a storm as she propelled herself as fast as she could to the man drowning.

  Pain struck her in the side. The man’s flailing legs had kicked her. With his limbs moving wildly like this, he had created a barrier that pushed away anything that attempted to get near him.

  “I’m here!” Lucy yelled, so strongly that she inhaled a bit of seawater and hastily spit it back out. “I’m here, so please, stop moving!”

  The man looked at her, continued breathing hard and moving erratically, but soon his arms and legs stopped moving about. Lucy could see his arms still trembled in place, though, as she saw the last small distance between them and wrapped one of her arms around his shoulders. Swimming back while carrying him was difficult and sluggish, as was to be expected, but Lucy found that she wasn’t feeling as much strain or fatigue as this should have placed on her body. Was this an effect of one of her Alignments?

  Before she could ponder this further, wild screaming exploded right by her ear—the man was suddenly going hysterical.

  “Wh-what’s wrong?” Lucy said, staring wide-eyed to catch his attention, but it was no use as his eyes were flitting about in nervous terror. “Please, stop! I’m going to lose hold of you!”

  “It’s here! It’s here!” he cried, over and over.

  Lucy was about to ask what ‘it’ was, but then she was aware of a nearby presence underwater. It hadn’t been there before, but nor had it just appeared; it had been there since before the man started losing his mind, perhaps it had always been there lurking in the depths, but only now had it allowed itself to enter—invade—Lucy’s conscious awareness.

  Despite the sudden indescribable terror that took hold of her—or perhaps because of it—Lucy swam as fast and hard as she could to close the last few metres to the boat and, grimacing against the strain, hoisted the man up so that his arms and torso were aboard. She was going to dive under and prop him up from the feet, but was ripped away from her intention by an unearthly loud splash that erupted behind her and had her wheeling around to face the other direction.

  Across the wide watery expanse, where only a dim light fell despite the complete absence of a moon, the waves seemed to have been bunched up, twisted, and distorted into tendrils that shot up screaming from the depths into the skies. In the breaks between showers of displaced water and cloying mist, Lucy saw that these tendrils were not the water itself, though the lightless bottoms of their stalks that joined with the waves seemed to meld almost too perfectly. No, they were a lighter, tanner colour that flailed about not from the wind’s violent gusts but of their own unpredictable accord, like arms reaching up and looking for anyone, anything, to catch onto.

  And they were arms, for atop each and every one of them was a hand. Fingers curling, palms folding, grasping and letting go without end.

  And they were going to grasp Lucy, all the hundreds of them that had burst forth in legion, as they cut through the water like serpents toward her and the boat.

  “Hey!”

  From behind her—probably the man’s voice. But it sounded distant to Lucy, lost in the unfeeling rush of the waves, as abject fear injected ice-cold into her veins. Before here was the stuff of nightmares: true nightmares, something that shouldn’t have any lasting weight to it since it could only ever exist within the confines of a transitory dream—but when her entire existence was this Dream, where was the subconscious acknowledgement that those detached arms would be detached from reality soon, eventually? There was nothing to wake up from, and that inescapability froze Lucy in place.

  “Come on!”

  Lucy choked and gasped as a pressure around her neck pulled her backwards. Turning, she saw the man tugging at her cape, and the moment they locked eyes he thrust his hand forward. Lucy gasped and sputtered, coughing out some water, and yet by some miracle her arms moved on their own to where the man grabbed her wrists and hoisted her up on board.

  Lucy landed face-first, more liquid leaking from her mouth and onto the boat’s surface as she coughed profusely, but another scream from the man jolted her back up to face the way she had come.

  The arms were all closing in on the boat, a swarm of lanky silhouettes that pierced the angry storm-grey skies. What she was seeing made all of her imagined monsters from childhood pale in comparison, and with that her knees felt prone to collapse and her grip on her sword rapidly waned.

  “No! Not again! Not again!”

  The man had lost all reason now, crying out from the very core of his being out to the skies, but the only effect it had was making apparent how his voice was silenced by the roaring tides and howling wind, how his figure was minuscule compared to the endless depths and the rapidly-approaching mass of malice that had emerged from it. But it was this helpless voice, combined with the look of abject anguish straining across his face, that counteractively instilled a force within Lucy, one that made her stand up strongly and take an unyielding hold on her sword as if it were truly a part of her.

  She knew, then, what she must do.