Lucy had to be hallucinating what she’d just heard. She had to be.

  What she’d heard was the claim that she shouldn’t worry because everything would be all right, spoke by a voice. A voice that was heavily filtered as if it were being spoken through a megaphone underwater, but a voice nonetheless. Not an infernal rumble or the industrious clanking and rumbling of gears, but a voice speaking intelligible words she was meant to understand.

  Objectively, this was far less worrisome than the alternative, especially as the voice itself was that of a chipper, energetic man like the sort one would hear in an infomercial proselytizing about a super mop or mess-free egg cracker or some other ridiculous but innocuous product. But in reality, this did nothing to quell Lucy’s fears but rather intensified them with wanton confusion that left her in utter disarray.

  Just what was this machine and what was it about to do to her?

  To Lucy’s surprise, this second dose of shock must have unfrozen her frightened neurons, for she had jolted backward, grabbed her Ideal, and clambered back up to her feet all without conscious thought. In desperation, she held her Ideal up with both hands, shaky as they were, pointing right at the machine’s scaffolded head. She considered activating Concentrated Illumination but quickly decided against it, for she did not want to see any more of this grotesque mimicry of a head that already looked disconcerting in the gross yellow light it emitted.

  The head’s glowing “eyes” continued to peer at Lucy, and she could swear the head angled itself downward to more directly keep her within its looming gaze. Lucy couldn’t tell how long this staring match went on for, between her panicked eyes and the machine’s unfeeling light bulbs, but she was wholly unprepared when the saw blades stopped whirring and, from what Lucy could make out in the dim light, went still—only for their noise to be replaced by an even more ear-splitting sound.

  It was a groaning squeak accompanied by the slight but high-pitched dragging sound of metal sheets sliding along each other with nothing to dampen the contact. Lucy could see the machine’s silhouette changing in some way, but it wasn’t until the machine’s head angled downwards even further to cast its light on its own body that Lucy saw what was happening.

  The enormous main body component of the machine was opening up.

  Lucy barely had time to process this before her hair whipped into her eyes, obscuring what little she could see. All she could hear was a shrill howling, like that of the fiercest of gales, overpowering even the machine’s deafening cacophony. Lucy felt her boots dragging across the floor, and when she frantically brushed her hair away from her eyes, she saw immediately that she was being sucked in, for the opening in the machine’s body grew nearer and nearer no matter how much she struggled.

  She gulped. That opening before her wasn’t normal. Where were the extra saws and slicers, or even the shining silver walls of the machine’s innards? Despite the head’s light shining directly upon it, that crevice was completely, utterly pitch black. A darkness darker than the darkness itself, for even light could not abate it.

  It drove Lucy mad. It was like a Euclidean nightmare of twisted and impossible shapes, like an abstract film project put through a corrupted rendering engine that made every frame distort into uncanniness. Her mind was trying over and over to reconcile the yellow light that just disappeared the moment it met that emptiness, the way it appeared as a solid black box like a piece of reality itself had been cut out.

  In this feverish panic, Lucy barely held onto enough rationality to dig her boots into the floor and fight against the wind pulling her into that nightmarish void. It was this same panic that drove her to clutch her Ideal with both hands once more, point it straight at the machine’s abyss, and chant the words in her mind:

  Concentrated Illumination

  It was utter insanity. Or perhaps it was because she’d let go of reason and calm that her chaotic state of mind was able to conjure enough focus for this desperate action. Her Ideal glowed pure white, its luminosity beaming forward at once to meet its target.

  She saw nothing.

  And everything.

  What the light revealed inside the machine’s abyss was not unlike the walls Lucy had seen earlier: every conceivable thing in existence all crammed together and overflowing like heaps of refuse in a landfill. But it was more than that—or rather, far less than that. For Lucy could see through it all, past their fleeting and brittle forms, to see that it all amounted to an absence of substance. The void was still there, behind it all, and the light from Lucy’s Ideal showed all too clearly how all those things were shadowed by the darkness, how they all led to it, how they were all transparent windows to the outside of everything.

  Lucy jerked, so violently she was worried she was literally leaping out of her own skin, but then her entire body went still, every joint stiffening as if turned to ice. She wondered, in pitiable irony, if this was how it felt for a deer caught in the headlights. And just like how a deer was powerless to stop the oncoming vehicle, Lucy had no means of resistance left against the wind that bested the friction from her boots and finally dragged the Dream Knight into the infinite dark chasm.

  Panic.

  With all of her sensory inputs suddenly nullified, all Lucy could focus on was the darkness—the abyss she had been pulled into—and her own pure, uninhibited thoughts. And that terror, that strangling fear of what would come next now that she had undeniably given into it, that pure unbridled emotion was what ran from the beginning to the end of her conscious being like a searing pain that takes over all the senses and makes the ensuing scream indistinguishable from the constant white noise of existing.

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  But this only lasted for a moment. The change was sudden; it was as though someone had pushed a button to reconfigure the “Lucy Lockhart” system completely. For now Lucy felt nothing, nothing except the knowledge of absence. In a rational sense, it was identical to the experience of crossing through a Dream Threshold, but this was markedly different. Where the darkness of entering a Dream recalled the warmth and soothing malaise of sleep, this darkness, deep within the belly of the machine, was colder and emptier than a lonely hospital room that curtailed any attempt at sleep.

  Was this how it felt to die?

  Lucy wanted to feel something about this realization. More fear, a fresh anger, a crippling sorrow. But none manifested, no matter how much she exerted her conscious engagement, for it was all being washed away with a calm but brute force, over and over, like blood and tears swallowed up by tides on a moonless night sea.

  *Clack*

  Lucy gasped for air so forcefully and savagely she feared she would cough up a lung. It was as though she had been submerged for countless eternities, and forcefully brought back up to the surface. Her senses were still barely returning, but beyond her desperate breathing and choking she was acutely aware of an explosive pain at her back, like she had just landed on a hard surface. Some semblance of physical connection to her body returned, and the first thing she felt was the familiar cool hardness of her Ideal’s handle in her hand; somehow, through all that had happened, she was still holding it.

  But if that were the case, didn’t that mean she was alive?

  With adrenaline pumping through her veins, Lucy popped her eyes open, only to be greeted by the same familiar darkness that had haunted her all throughout this Dream. Was she somewhere inside the machine? Raising her arm that held her Ideal, she reached up, trying to poke at where she imagined the ceiling of the machine’s inner cavity would be, but there was no bounce back nor resistance as her blade only met empty air. She stretched her arm out far to her right, making her sword extend out several feet to her side, but there was nothing beside her, either.

  Where in the world was she? Was this really still the machine?

  As those questions blared in her mind, she became aware of a low but consistent thrumming vibration at her back, and the sensation that her whole body was sliding forward. Come to think of it, what was she lying on top of? She had assumed it was the floor, for it felt as uniformly hard and smooth as what she had seen earlier. But when she placed her free hand palm flat on the surface, running it up and down, she felt several width-wise gaps at regular intervals. And, without a doubt, they were moving forward, in the direction of her feet, matching the faint sliding sensation she was feeling.

  A conveyor belt.

  That had to be it, and it would match her earlier assumption that this Dream, at least in part, was made to resemble a factory or some other industrial facility. But how did she get here? There was no way this was inside the machine, for even with how large it was, any conveyor belt inside of it would have only lasted a few seconds at most. Perhaps that mind-numbing void she had seen was actually a wormhole that transported its victims elsewhere—but for what purpose? “Everything will be all right,” the head had said. Maybe the bizarrity of it all had finally broken Lucy mentally, and this was a hallucination she was experiencing before her ultimate demise within this Dream. But if that were the case, where did the Dream end and her new “final” Dream begin?

  Her forehead ached from overthinking, so she put aside that higher-order skepticism for now and focused on more immediate quandaries. What was this conveyor belt for? Where was it taking her? Did she even want find out, given that it had a connection to that machine with three grisly saw blades?

  Lucy propped herself up so she was on her feet, crouched down, with her hands still holding firmly to the conveyor belt’s surface. She intended to stand up, carefully, then step off—but into what? She couldn’t see what was below the conveyor belt, or even whether there was anything there to begin with. One wrong move that tipped her off-balance, and she might be hurtling through either a long fall to a fatal landing or a long fall without a landing. She tensed at the thought that the former possibility was probably the better outcome, but either way, she did not want to manifest either one as her fate.

  Her hand twitched involuntarily, leading her to become aware again of the sword she was holding. The solution was clear, but she hesitated to raise her Ideal. She had no idea where she was, and not a single inkling of what could be lurking hereabouts. If there was anything like the machine that had just sent her here, she would only be putting herself into mortal danger yet again.

  She gulped. The safest way to test would be to sidle up to the edge of the conveyor belt, bring her foot up and over the edge, and let her leg dangle down until she hopefully felt a solid foundation underneath. All of this done as quietly as possible, mitigating her presence to the utmost degree.

  But as Lucy got down into a sitting position, her palms laid flat at her sides and her legs stretched out as she prepared to propel herself off to the side, she hesitated yet again. She had gotten a Feat that granted her Ideal a legendary, divine light, the kind humanity had been in awe of over centuries of myth and legend. And yet, ever since she had returned to this Dream, all Lucy had done was fumble around and shrink back and allow her light to go out, literally and figuratively. And when she thought back to how she handled her encounter with the machine, she couldn’t erase the image of how weak and pathetic she must have looked, cowering in fear without even making an attempt to swing her Ideal at it.

  What happened to the patient and enduring Knight of Understanding that was supposed to be Lucy’s image before the collective unconscious?

  With regret, admiration, and self-loathing, she recalled how Ricardo had shouted out to the royal guards in church just before activating his Iron Skin Feat and taking them all on. Of course, it didn’t work out well for him in the end—a detail Lucy tried to shelve before it forced the urge to bawl out—but she couldn’t forget how confident he had looked and sounded in that moment. He had been dependable, reliable, and willing to put everything into protecting what he believed was right and truly valuable. And when Lucy focused on that, on the unbreakable qualities evoked by Ricardo’s image, it was as though a darkness had lifted from her mind and heart as she said one thing to herself.

  Lucy Lockhart needed to be at least as inspiring as those who had inspired her.

  And it was for this reason she raised her Ideal, aimed it squarely into the darkness of the unknown, and conjured her light once more.