Stepping up to the edge of the boat, Lucy held her sword with both hands and wound it up to her right. At the same time, she staggered her stance and placed her right foot forward, shifting her weight onto it. Her transformation into a Dream Knight hadn’t bestowed any knowledge of how to effectively wield a sword, unfortunately, but she hoped that this would allow her to put as much force into her swing as she was imagining.

  The arms in the water continued their relentless pace of shredding through the waves, though with Lucy’s intense focus it seemed as though that small distance took an eternity for them to cross. She gulped, seeing those fiendish forms grow larger and larger in her vision as they drew nearer, so she focused on the man’s continued wailing behind her, on how she was doing this to stop him from getting into this mess ever again. The closest batch of arms were now within distance of her sword, so close that Lucy could see all the fingers wriggling madly, all the wrinkles and creases in the palms show that they were definitely human arms or at least made to resemble one, and this made her skin crawl.

  “Nooooooo!”

  The man’s cry jolted Lucy into action just as those arms lunged in toward the boat. Gritting her teeth and tightening her grip on the sword handle so hard it hurt, Lucy swung diagonally in a wide, curving arc.

  “Hnnnngaaaaahhh!”

  The blade carved a gleaming arc through the air at Lucy’s eye level. Although she had been doubtful about her aim, the arc traced a line right through the palms of all the arms closest to the boat.

  But there hadn’t been even the slightest hint of resistance during the swing.

  Had she missed? Swung too early and only grazed the air? The wind picked up then, howling as if giving voice to the frustration and helplessness she felt as she prepared for those monstrous arms to close in at once—but the arms had not budged.

  Across every fiendish palm, where the arc of Lucy’s blade had passed through, there appeared a dark, dirty line like a deep gash from an actual knife wound, except there was no blood. As those gashes appeared, all of the arms went motionless, even the arms dozens of yards away.

  “What did you…?”

  Lucy looked back to see the man, who had fallen back on his haunches, gazing up at her with what seemed to be a mixture of surprise and uneasy anticipation. Before she could ponder over why there wasn’t any hint of satisfaction in his reaction—she had actually hit their enemies, after all—she whipped her head forward as a horrific sound flooded the air.

  The hands that had been sliced twitched with furious intensity, the fingers wriggling and curling with reckless abandon. To Lucy, it seemed as though they were recoiling in the same sort of pain an actual human hand might feel. All the while, a horrendous ruckus that was at once ear-piercingly shrill and infernally deep rattled through the air, flooding Lucy’s hearing in much the same way as the King from her own Dream. Clamping her hands over her ears did nothing to alleviate this aural assault as she fell to her knees. But as the demonic wailing continued, Lucy could barely make out a third layer to the cacophony, barely audible but swimming at the precipice beneath everything as if skirting along the borders of the unconscious.

  A human voice, crying out with a mix of emotions so belaboured and intense that it almost completely lost all humanity to meld with the shrills and guttural roars of the sounds encapsulating it.

  This, more than anything up until now, made Lucy freeze, hands still over her ears, and bow her head down lamely as if accepting inevitable death. This was a Dream; a place with no limits on what she could encounter, on what could happen to her. That much was clear, but until now she hadn’t fully grasped the danger—and foolhardiness—of diving head-first into these places that could be literal hellscapes.

  All she could do now was watch, wordlessly, actionlessly, at the embodiments of nightmare before her—which had suddenly gone silent. Stillness hung over the ocean, ensnaring all from the wind to the waves to the rocking of the boat and the mass of disembodied arms not far from there, until havoc broke out amongst the arms. They moved erratically about the water as if in panic and fear, but slowly and surely they all turned around and backed away, farther and farther across the murky waters, like a hive of bees that had encountered an indomitable fire.

  Could it be that Lucy, and her swing of her sword, were that fire?

  Standing back up, Lucy continued watching with vigilance, sword held tightly in her hand again just in case they came back. As if having seen this, the arms appeared to flee even faster across the waves, and soon they had all gone into the crest of a distant wave. When that wave crashed down and passed, they were nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by the boundless ocean once more.

  Lucy let out a deep sigh, letting the flying droplets of ocean water whipped up by the wind cool down the warmth of intense adrenaline still burning within her. She turned around and saw the man still thrown back onto his haunches. He was no longer screaming, but his eyes were still wide and his breathing still rapid and ragged.

  “I think we can relax now,” Lucy said as she helped him back up to his feet. “They’re gone.”

  “No, you don’t get it!” he said. Lucy waited from him to explain further, but the man clutched his head and repeated: “Damn it, damn it, damn it…”

  “Really, they’ll come back? But it looks like they got scared away. And that wave they went into…doesn’t seem like anything could come back from that.”

  “No! Quit talking like that! Quit thinking like that!”

  In the midst of his wild cries, the man grabbed Lucy by the shoulders and shook her, which, given the weight of her armour, spoke the amount of panicked adrenaline coursing through him. Clearly, he was serious, even though his last words left Lucy completely perplexed.

  “Wh-why? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you see? They’re cowards at first, or at least, they act like it.” He let go of Lucy and stumbled over to the edge of the boat, where he swung a winding punch with such instability that Lucy almost jumped in to hold him back. He said: “I’ve given ’em some good whacks before. Not as menacing as a swing from that big fancy sword of yours, but any kind of hit makes them turn tail like a little wimp. But…”

  Here, he turned back around and looked at Lucy dead in the eyes, distant lightning illuminating one half of his face with stark luminescence: “But as soon as you feel they’re gone, as soon as you convince yourself you’ve sent them away and that you’re safe…That’s when they get ya. When you’re at your most vulnerable.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Really…” To Lucy, it sounded like a far leap with a string of too many assumptions. What he was describing relied on the notion that this legion of demonic arms was sensing their thoughts and emotions at all time, but that just seemed like too much.

  But then again, these were detached arms that moved like a hive, gave an ungodly scream when hurt, and didn’t bleed when cut. They were highly-apparent evidence of the boundless possibilities of Dreams, and perhaps it was time for Lucy to accept that bizarre and byzantine concepts were among those very possible possibilities as well.

  “Alright,” she said, “I’ll keep bracing myself in case they do come back. That should be good, right?”

  No response came. The man wasn’t even looking at her, as his eyes were instead fixated on the distant horizon in the direction at which the arms had fleed, and his jittery eyes were matched by constant, uneven swears he kept mumbling under his breath.

  Lucy sighed, but this time it wasn’t in relief. This man, this Dreamer, had been entirely uncooperative the whole time despite Lucy having come all this way just to help him. Of course, Lucy could understand his reaction somewhat, since nothing in a Dream could be trusted, and she herself in all her radiant attire certainly stood out against the dark and stormy setting in a way that drew suspicion. But would it be too much to ask for him to have some faith in her and what she was trying to do for him? Lucy wiped some of the salt-tinged water off of her face, realizing that although she had expected the Dreams to be an obstacle, she had not expected the road to a Dreamer’s trust to be this rocky.

  But maybe it was just this particular Dreamer. Maybe she had just rolled an unlucky outcome for her first outing. Surely, if she were to go elsewhere in the Lattice of Dreams, there was a good chance she’d encounter a Dreamer who was less…problematic. Re-rolling the die wouldn’t take a great deal of effort, either, as the way back to her own Dream was just on the other end of this boat. Her eyes were already looking there, her body already turned toward it. She could leave right now.

  “When will it end…when will it end…”

  The man’s voice cut through the wind and the waves again, but instead of the screams and wild mutterings, it was a feeble plea, the kind Lucy would often say to herself because she just needed to hear the sound of her own voice, to know that she was real, and mattered in that moment, and pretend she wasn’t completely alone during her episodes of self-doubt and depression. Without even consciously willing it, her gaze had moved from the other end of the boat back toward the Dreamer, and her hand reached out in front of her as if she were going to put a hand on his shoulder as he hung his head low in defeat once again.

  Bitterness scorched its way down Lucy’s throat: not from seawater, but guilt. How could she have even considered leaving him behind in that state? She imagined that a Dream Knight aligned with Ideation would latch onto the line of thinking she had just been going through, of entertaining all the other possibilities out there in the Lattice of Dreams. And perhaps a Knight aligned with Rebellion would defy the expectation of helping someone so outwardly against help, or otherwise use force to earn compliance from the individual making their efforts difficult.

  But Lucy was aligned with Understanding, and like a storm closing in, this aspect of her newfound existence reverberated throughout her entire being in this quiet, vulnerable moment amidst the chaotic seas.

  She stepped over to the Dreamer’s side carefully. She intended to crouch down to his eye level, just as she had done before, but a strange, inexplicable sense ran through her mind telling her to stand tall and confidently instead. He is sensitive to people who show pity and vulnerability in from him, that notion in her mind said. Displaying strength and stability are more likely to earn his trust—and reprieve for himself.

  “Sir,” said Lucy, hoping that she sounded authoritative without aggression or condescension.

  He gave a quick turn of his head and looked at her with a motion that suggested he would give only a passing glance, but instead he dropped both of his hands from his temples and looked at her in the way one might observe a painting or artifact that was suddenly in their midst. The awe was apparent, especially in how he hurriedly turned his whole body to face her.

  “Earlier,” Lucy continued, “I said I was here to help you. Do you believe that now?”

  She unsheathed her sword and held it by her side, and she could see the light in his eyes as he put together the addendum she was implying: Do you believe that now, after what I’ve just done for you?

  “Yes. Sorry,” the man said, weakly but politely while bowing his head. He brought his head back up and locked eyes with her, and Lucy felt that this was the first time he was truly looking at her eye-to-eye. He said, “I still don’t really get this ‘knight’ stuff and why you’re dressed like that. But I can’t deny that you helped me. And that you’re still here.”

  Lucy smiled, for what felt like the first time since she was cast adrift in this Dream. She reached her hand out to him, and though there was unease in the anticipation that followed, with the Dreamer looking at her in silence, a warm current of hope ran through her, flowing from intangibility to reality when he reached up and took her hand.

  As she helped him up to his feet, a high tide passed underneath the boat, and the resulting offset of balance made the Dreamer stumble and fall forward. Lucy caught him by the shoulders, hoping that her gloved hands’ grip wasn’t as painful of a vice grip as it had seemed, and used the sturdier foundation afforded by her boots to hold him steady as he found his footing once more.

  He took a few moments to calm his breathing, as the sudden lurch of the boat had evidently caught him off-guard.

  “Thank you.”

  He spoke the two words quietly and sombrely, his outward tone expressing no major difference from what Lucy had heard before. And yet, there was a depth of sincerity that buoyed those words forward, a gratitude that Lucy had not heard from him until now. The wind settled and the constant spray of seawater calmed as the Knight and the Dreamer regarded each other—seemingly for the first, real time.

  “My name is Lucy,” she said. “I know it’s…a bit weird to be doing introductions now, but if we’re going to get through this together, I think we need to get to know each other.”

  The Dreamer looked at her with eyes that were like a lost diver scanning the depths. It was to be expected, given that he and Lucy were ultimately still strangers, but Lucy was hoping he would close at least this first, small gap between them. She wanted to say that she was truly, heartfully there for him, that she didn’t mean any harm, nor did she plan on abandoning him—and then, even though she had not spoken a word, his expression shifted as if he had heard everything, better than if Lucy had spoken it all aloud.

  Was this another boon given to her by her alignment? Before Lucy could ruminate on that, the sheet of rain before her was cut through by the Dreamer’s hand as he reached out to her.

  “Cole,” he said, with a smile. The first smile Lucy had seen from him in all this time. And though the storm-clouded darkness made it difficult to see, Lucy felt that smiling suited him far more than his perpetual scowl.

  “Nice to meet you, Cole.” She returned his smile as she took his hand and they shared a firm but amiable handshake. Since he was older and bigger, his motion was a little too rough and tumble; Lucy was reminded of her father, and that made her smile more.

  Gazing down at their interlocked hands, however, an overwhelming dread crawled across Lucy’s skin, like a million minuscule insects that had found their way under her armour and would not leave her consciousness, no matter how hidden they were from sight. A million tiny insects—a hive—a horde—a horrific legion, like the hands that pierced through the waves shrieking…

  “Something wrong, Lucy?” Cole had stopped shaking her hand, but still held onto her firmly with concern.

  Lucy breathed, banishing the phantoms in her mind of the hundreds of hands wading through the dark horizon. “No, no, it’s nothing. I was just thinking…Those things that attacked us…They looked a lot like arms. Human arms.”

  Cole regarded her with a hard expression, but only for a moment before letting go and turning away to look into the distance with a sigh. “Well, you’d be right. They are a person’s arm.”

  “What?” Lucy was mortified by the confirmation, but not at all surprised. But she was confused by his choice of words. “A person? They all belong to a person?”

  Cole heaved another sigh, bigger and deeper than the last, as if he had intended to swallow up the entire sea. “Yes,” he said. “It’s my brother’s arm.”