“Kenneth. Come here.”

  In the deafening silence that matched the queen’s perfectly still figure—her body frozen in the motion of pouncing forward to wrap her taloned hands around Kenneth’s neck, her mouth agape in a confused expression halfway between roaring anger and overwhelming terror—Diana’s command struck like a bolt of lightning in a barren desert.

  Lucy was still reeling from the supersonic rush of all of the things that happened in only a matter of seconds. Frankly, she was surprised she was still standing on two feet; perhaps it was her Ideal channelling strength from its handle through her hand, or possibly a benefit from her Primary Axis. But despite her ability to withstand collapsing from sheer shock, she was left just as frozen as the queen as her gaze fell on Kenneth.

  Kenneth, too, had gone motionless save for the rapid rise and fall of his chest. He stared into the eyes of the queen, her cruel face close to his and her sharp-edged fingers even closer to his neck. Backing away just enough to avoid puncturing hsi throat, he looked at Diana and, after a spell, made his way to her.

  The sludge had stopped pouring from the walls and ceiling, the level having stopped at just above Lucy’s knees, but it showed no signs of receding. Because of this, Kenneth had to wade through, a task that he clearly struggled with as the tainted liquid was well up to his waist. Diana watched him and did not move to offer any sort of assistance; she appeared to want him to work for whatever it was she wanted him to do.

  “Here.” Diana took her hands off the spear, the other end still plunged in between the queen’s eyes several feet away. Grabbing Kenneth’s side and hustling him over to where she had been standing to deliver the killing blow, she took his hands and made him wrap them around the spear’s handle. “Pull it out. And when you do, keep looking at her.”

  Lucy, finally finding her voice in light of Diana’s bizarre demand, said: “Why are you making him do that? Are you trying to traumatize him even more by messing with a dead body?”

  “Take a look at his face and stop projecting,” Diana said with effortless derision, gesturing to the placid calm on Kenneth’s face despite standing face-to-face with the queen’s murdered body. “He wanted this to happen. And just now, his wants connected with reality. So now he needs to disconnect. For good.”

  Kenneth’s hands held the spear firmly and steadily with none of the tremors that had been present when he was holding Lucy’s hand. But Lucy could see his face go through a range of emotions from despair, to anguish, to seething rage that threatened to broil over, his brow furrowed and veins bulging in his neck as he grit his teeth.

  He wants to destroy. And he will destroy. What fun! What fun!

  Hazy voices, and that momentary lapse of consciousness, both reminding Lucy of those strange moments she had experienced when updating her alignments that even the King couldn’t explain. But this was enough to make her skin crawl with the portents of an ill premonition for what Kenneth was about to do.

  “Wait! Kenneth! Don’t—!”

  “Aaaaaaaugh!”

  While Lucy broke into a few desperate steps forward, her movement severely slowed and almost made to fall due to the sludge all around her, Kenneth yanked the spear back with all the strength he could muster in his small figure. He lurched backwards and the weapon slid out of the statue-esque body with a sliding and tearing sound that filled the air in seemingly every direction.

  “Kenneth!” Lucy redoubled her efforts through the sludge, reaching Kenneth and holding him up just before his legs gave away from the recoil and would have had him fall and drown in the murky depths. She made eye contact with him to confirm he was all right, then the two of them looked up.

  Blood streamed out of the gash between the queen’s eyes, and though she remained motionless, her eyes regained their intensity, as if she were shocked back into life to witness the final moments of her demise. Her body rose into the air, but unlike when she was floating in mid-air with confident command, here she was subservient to an invisible force hoisting her up like a puppet on strings.

  Then, in rapid volatility that was like watching a star go supernova in reverse, the sludge began rising up and collecting onto her body, large clumps of it flying up and splattering onto her figure. This continued until the room was spotless once more, and the queen had become an unrecognizable ball of putrid liquid.

  This sphere remained floating in mid-air, and the more Lucy gazed at it, the more unstable it seemed, waves and currents thrashing upon the surface, with parts of it bulging out and stretching from deep below. Lucy’s body tensed, for it seemed ready to explode at any moment.

  But soon, there came a bright flash, followed by the hiss of incredible heat, and the ball of sludge was engulfed in a crackling fire. It burned wildly and intensely, but with clean and absolute judgement, consuming the sludge and nothing more. This went on for what felt like an eternity, but when at last the fire disappeared in wisps of smoke, there remained no trace of the sludge nor the queen it had surrounded. Even the bags of snacks that had laid haphazardly around the couch disappeared, and the TV had shut off on its own.

  “Finally…It’s gone.”

  Kenneth clasped his hands before his heart and smiled. It was a cautious smile, one consciously restrained out of the fear of garnering undeserved attention, but it was this restraint that made sincerity of emotion shine all the brighter. His cheeks shone with fresh tears, and soon he was crying again. Unlike the other times, when he those tears forced themselves out of him to mourn the life he had forever lost, now he was nothing more than a boy clearly expressing the overwhelming vulnerability of his own emotions, now that he finally felt safe to indulge in them.

  Lucy gazed at Kenneth, her heart aching in her chest, but she soon hung her head. She wanted to be happy for him, and truly in her mind she was, but at the same time she was overcome with a deflating sense of failure that made her entire body feel frail and wasteful. When Kenneth had pulled Diana’s spear out of the queen’s body, it was as if a part of Lucy had also vanished as part of that act, and her very soul was shaking in panic like one who knows the ground beneath their feet is about to give away.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Kenneth stopped crying abruptly, and when Lucy looked up she saw Diana taking her spear back from the boy, firmly but with a considerate slowness.

  “You know what you need to do when you wake up,” said Diana. With her spear standing tall in her hand and her entire figure looming large over the boy, she looked every bit like a deity proclaiming divine instruction. “Not with actual violence. But everything you yelled just now. Tell your teachers, the police, and especially yourself.”

  “He’s not going to remember any of this,” Lucy said, seizing the chance to build up some defiant agency while getting Diana off her high horse with knowledge that every Dream Knight should know.

  Diana looked at her, her eyes piercing in, and said simply: “Not if you leave an impression that can’t be forgotten.”

  Lucy grit her teeth even as Diana looked away from her and back to Kenneth as if their exchange had been a mere trifle to her. Where did Diana get this idea that she was the exception to the rule? She was opposed to every single thing Lucy could think of, even the concept of Dream Knights it seemed, and this brought back her earlier frustration from before their encounter with the queen.

  But, in that earnest and vulnerable space of her mind, she knew that part of that frustration came from the implication that she herself wasn’t capable of leaving such an impression on a Dreamer. Was Cole’s waking life actually impacted as much as Lucy had hoped? And would any remnant of herself stick in Kenneth’s mind on the unseen road he was about to take?

  As Lucy’s eyes drifted to Kenneth, he nodded at Diana. “I promise I’ll remember.”

  Then, in a motion that seemed to leave even Diana a little flustered, Kenneth smiled up at the larger of his guardians.

  “Thank you, Miss Diana,” he said. Although his eyes weren’t beaming the way one might expect for a child overflowing with joy, they instead held a warm and sincere light. “I feel so much better now. I can finally…relax…”

  Kenneth wiped at his eyes and let out a silent yawn. He hung his head and leaned forward, his body rocking back and forth as he struggled to stay on his two feet.

  “Kenneth!” Lucy rushed to him, knowing that the sleep induced by the end of his Dream was about to make him fall face-first.

  But even without the sludge to slow Lucy down, Diana was faster, having already cradled the boy in her arms. She gave Lucy a quick look that said she had this, and Lucy struggled to return a neutral look of acknowledgement as Diana carried the boy to the couch.

  As Diana laid Kenneth down on his back, making sure the back of his head rested on top of a pillow, Lucy’s cheeks inexplicably ran hot with fresh tears. She wanted to tell herself they had come due to something as banal as finding it hard to say goodbye, but there was no denying that there was more to it. And it wasn’t just that this was happening so fast, without her getting to know Kenneth on at least the same level she had known Cole. No, she knew it was because of the other Dream Knight beside her, and how inadequate she made her feel about this purpose that was supposed to be the very meaning of Lucy’s new existence. They had all done so much for Kenneth, if not Diana’s final victory over the queen, then there was Keilani’s and Ricardo’s sacrifices to protect Kenneth or reveal more about those who would harm him. Against that, how was Lucy to say she had made any meaningful impact, when even now, just like always, she was just standing and watching?

  Through her cloudy eyes, she saw Kenneth stir, then the next moment his young but tired eyes met hers. He mumbled something incoherent, but then he spoke again with words that rung quiet but perfectly clear in the slumbering silence settling in all over this world:

  “Thank you, Miss Lucy.”

  Lucy gasped, and a warm fire—calmer and more soothing than any of the myriad fires she had encountered in this Dream—welled up within the core of her soul. Wiping at her eyes, she placed her hand on Kenneth’s shoulder as he closed his eyes for the last time. Once she saw the gentle rise and fall of his chest, she drew her hand back and let it hover without purpose at her side as she continued staring down at his peaceful face.

  Silence passed, and though Diana’s figure remained as perfectly straight as usual, she soon gave a yawn. “Glad it’s finally over for him, huh?”

  Lucy said nothing. She desperately wished that it was just her and Kenneth in this moment, and that this other presence, who was made her shiver and feel uncomfortable and unhappy like a window left open to an unforgiving world, would no longer exist and cease to have ever existed in the first place. She remained looking down at Kenneth without a word despite her own building drowsiness and the eyes trained on her.

  “What, giving me the cold shoulder because I ended up being right in the end?”

  Lucy resisted the urge to look up and meet her gaze, to let it work its way into her and dismantle her foundations of being again. Diana laughed a low laugh, but one utterly devoid of remorse or humility. Lucy took a white-knuckled grip on her Ideal’s handle. How could someone like Diana be a Dream Knight? And why was she the one to succeed, the one who was ultimately “right” in this Dream where Lucy and Keilani and Ricardo had given their lives to protect Kenneth like proper guardians?

  Whether from the buildup of loathing and resentment turning the world white-hot with anger, or simple drowsiness, Lucy’s legs went weightless and she was falling backwards. But instead of her back crashing down onto the floor, there was the flutter of crimson cloth, heavy but quick footsteps, and before she knew it she was laying back in Diana’s arms with the greater Dream Knight gazing down at her.

  “Why?” Lucy grunted with as hard a voice as she could muster while fighting her heavy eyelids. “It’s pointless helping someone you hate. That’s what you’d say if our roles were reversed.”

  “Lucy, my dear.” The way Diana said her name for the first time made Lucy’s blood run cold but simultaneously also hot with rage, especially as it was accompanied with a wide smile. “‘Hate’ is far from the right word to describe our little companionship. It would do me no good at all to hate you. We’ll be seeing each other again, after all.”

  Through the heaving swamp of drowsiness, Lucy’s eyes flew wide open. “Again? What…what…”

  Her voice failed to sustain more than a single word, her lips twisting into the awkward, deflated shapes of one who already had a leg dipped into the pool of slumber.

  “Don’t push yourself,” Diana said with a chuckle, pressing her gloved finger to Lucy’s lips. “I look forward to our future reunion. But make sure you’re stronger by then. Next time you stand up to me, it needs to be an actual fight.”

  Lucy’s vision had long fallen into soft, formless darkness by the time Diana finished speaking, but this only made those last words reverberate all the more through her mind. The most earnest part of herself made her mouth wordlessly mimic what Kenneth had been screaming only moments earlier: “I hate you I hate you I hate you.” Among that hatred was Lucy’s appalled reaction to Diana saying “the next time she stands up to her,” as if another fight between the two of them was inevitable. Did that mean Diana was deliberately looking to stir the pot between the two of them, to fervently reject anything and everything Lucy meant to enact through Understanding?

  In that feverish haze that drowns the mind just before falling into the precipice of sleep, Lucy thought: maybe she would break this Knight of Rebellion down when next they meet, in order to crush all the words, refutations, and criticism that hung over Lucy like a storm of spears just from her presence alone.

  She would crush Diana.

  This was the final thought echoing over and over, like a scream in a cavern with nowhere for it to escape, as her body flared up with an intense heat like fire before falling once more through the fabric between Dreams.