The clang of Diana’s boots—following the heavy thunk of the general’s own—jolted Lucy back to the present as they began climbing the staircase.

  As Lucy was about to climb onto the first step, she felt a tug on her right hand. Kenneth was looking up at her with worried eyes.

  “Kenneth,” said Lucy,“do you have trouble climbing stairs?”

  “Y-yes,” came Kenneth’s meek response, nearly drowned into the effervescent green. “I have, um, a condition with my knee.”

  “I had figured this would be the case.”

  General Hawthorn surprised them by appearing right beside Kenneth; he must have climbed back down while Lucy was distracted. Giving Kenneth a soft smile that the green light revealed through his beard, he extended his hand toward Kenneth. “I shall help you ascend together with your guardian.”

  Kenneth gazed at him in wonder, and then in a move that came about quicker than Lucy expected, he nodded and firmly took hold of the general’s gauntleted hand.

  With this new formation, they looked back up the stairs at Diana, who nodded at them from the third step and then began leading the way herself. The first few steps were awkward to coordinate, but the general was quick to synchronize with Lucy and Kenneth, and soon they were keeping pace with Diana.

  Lucy was grateful for this, and it was yet another display of the general’s kindness. Perhaps he really was based on a caretaker Kenneth had fond memories of, and he was reimagined into a high-ranking soldier in this Dream in order to add some levity, especially here in this wicked expanse of darkness and green light.

  But something the general had said just now rubbed Lucy the wrong way. “I had figured this would be the case,” he’d said. That implied the general knew of Kenneth’s knee condition and was quick to come back and help. Given that in the lore of this Dream, the general had never met Kenneth until now, this remark was more than a little suspect. Perhaps that caretaker he was based off of also knew about Kenneth’s condition and helped him climb stairs? It was a little bit of a stretch, but it was the only explanation Lucy could come up with.

  One could easily perceive the climb as endless. Each dozen steps made the platform of the castle’s top level inch only a mere sliver closer, if at all. Lucy was torn between the comfort and assurance provided by having both Kenneth and the general at her side so that they were not climbing alone, but at the same time, the seeming futility of moving forward added to the unforgiving atmosphere afforded by the darkness. What did not help with Lucy’s chill was the fact that their destination—an ornate marble door with intricate carvings of flowers and vines—was lit by an array of lanterns glowing green on either side of the door like an overgrowth of hellish eyes.

  Without any conscious thought, Lucy’s left hand found its way to the handle of her Ideal and gripped it hard for a moment, despite the pain from her still-unhealed injury. She resolved that if Diana could keep going through the sheer rejection of failure from opposition, then she too would keep going from the viewpoint of withstanding anything and everything to help this boy whose hand held hers tightly. If Diana was a candle flame burning away the enshrouding darkness, then Lucy was the moonlight shining in through the window, not as aggressive in its purpose but powerful in its immovable presence.

  Once Lucy made this resolution, their ascent began looking more palpable. Every step was a step against immobility, or going back down out of fear or futility. She would reach that door—and at last, she did.

  The array of lanterns drowned the climbers in their light so that the entire world appeared submerged in that ungodly green energy. Despite the brightness, the darkness to either side of the door was impenetrable, revealing nothing else that was on this top floor.

  “Before us stands Her Grace’s private chamber,” said General Hawthorn. He gazed up at the door with a distant expression that, to Lucy, was inscrutable. The lack of a furrow to his brow and the calm squint of his eyes suggested there no contempt, but at the same time his face did not seem relaxed in the manner of one who held deep reverence. To Lucy, he did not give off the air of someone who would outright betray his ruler’s wishes, yet he did not appear entirely betrothed to her command like the other guards.

  Diana locked eyes with Lucy, this time with a reproachful expression. Let me handle this, she appeared to be saying.

  Lucy glared back. While she had been grateful to Diana for bringing them this far, now she was overstepping her bounds in calling all the shots without giving Lucy any input. And what was even more worrying in this instance was that she had no idea what exactly Diana was planning to “handle.”

  “What do you m—”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “That will be all, general,” Diana said in a loud, projected voice despite everyone’s close proximity, deliberately drowning out Lucy’s voice. “You’ve kept to your word. You are a truly noble man, just as we thought. Now, if you would please return to your men outside.”

  Despite her polite words, Diana’s voice spoke not a request but a demand, her voice commanding and her spear held ever so conspicuously at her side.

  “Why…?” Lucy shot her question sharply at Diana, but let it fade away in exasperation as she turned to General Hawthorn instead. “Sorry, General. We don’t mean to be, um, unkind to you in any way. Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us.”

  The general looked at her with a neutral expression, his gaze no longer distant but still betraying none of his true intentions. He looked then at Diana with that same face, held silent for a moment, and laughed.

  “I take no offence, young guardians.” He addressed both Dream Knights with that familiar easy smile of his. “Though our companionship was short, I had intuited that there are great differences in approach between you two. To be stalwart in ideal, or decisive in intention. I suppose both extremes are necessary in order to achieve total salvation. Wouldn’t you say so, young child of God?”

  “Total salvation?”

  Lucy’s question was interrupted by the clanking of boots on the stone floor as General Hawthorn approached Kenneth. Suddenly, a fierce red light pierced through the all-enveloping green.

  “I’m warning you,” Diana said, her spear held in both hands and now poised for a forward strike into the general’s side. “Lay a finger on the boy and you’re a goner.”

  Lucy’s breath hitched. Between Diana’s voice simmering with rage, the shadow that befell the general in his new position, and the harsh battle between the green lanterns’ light and the blood red aura of Diana’s spear, the situation had become a dizzying tempest of tension out of nowhere, and she was left feeling as though she were caught betwen dozens of tripwires that could go off at any moment if she made one wrong move. Hazily, she unsheathed her Ideal and pointed it at the general, following the focused direction of Diana’s spear.

  The general, whose face was now obscured by shadow and his own body as he faced Kenneth, stopped and went still. Then, as if a sheen of ice had been shattered, he came alive with his usual laid-back jubilee once more, turning to face the Dream Knights with a sheepish smile while he rubbed the back of his head.

  “My apologies if I was too sudden there!” he said with an embarrassed laugh. “I have you brought you here on the basis of our mutual trust, and I have no intention of breaking it now with fellows as gallant as yourselves. Truly, this child is blessed to be in the company of guardians so dependable, and I express great pity that he has been branded a heretic. For that reason, before he is to have a troublesome encounter with Her Grace, I wish to provide him with a few words of wisdom to raise his spirits.”

  “Words of wisdom, huh?” Diana drew her spear back, preparing for a thrust. “Kids at his age are very impressionable, you know. One misplaced idea—whether unintentional or intentional—could be all it takes to set them down the wrong path. This kid’s already had plenty of that, and it goes without saying we don’t need any more.”

  “Wait!” Lucy yelled.

  All eyes were on her now—including Diana’s look of disbelief that morphed into abject anger as she grit her teeth and barely restrained herself from turning around and pointing her spear at Lucy’s face instead. “What in the nine hells is it, little girl? Have you seriously not learned your lesson after you were wrong about these situations? Multiple times?”

  “This…this is different,” said Lucy, finding her renewed grip on her Ideal as well as her voice. “Before, I was ignoring obvious signs that what we were dealing with was dangerous. But General Hawthorn hasn’t done a single questionable thing, and all he wants to do is talk.”

  “That’s it? Anyone can fake being a goodie-two-shoes, love. If that’s all it takes to deceive you, you won’t last long—here, whatever life you had before, anywhere.”

  Lucy let out a long breath, tightening her grip on her Ideal even though her left arm still throbbed with pain. “I know. But it’s not just how I perceive him. When I was holding Kenneth’s hand, I could tell he was relaxed whenever he looked at the general. That’s not at all how he was around anyone else in this Dream.”

  Diana stared at her silently, and Lucy could see in the raising of her eyebrows that she was also piecing together the significance of the Dreamer himself showing no apprehension, even at a subconscious level, to one of his Dream’s figments. “Really? The boy was like that?”

  “Misfortunate child, you recognize me, don’t you?”

  Lucy and Diana both turned to find that General Hawthorn had knelt down and already begun speaking to Kenneth. He met Kenneth’s gaze, which had the same look of awe and admiration that Lucy had seen before, and said: “You knew all along, did you not?”

  The entire shadowscape of the castle went silent, save for Lucy’s and Diana’s breathing as they were still recovering from their argument and trying to focus on this sudden interaction between boy and army general. The darkness deepened but also eased, allowing the green light to fall more softly on Kenneth’s features.

  Then, at last, the Dreamer nodded, and said: “Of course. You’re me.”

  A deafening silence crashed over the hall, and the lights from the lantern grew in intensity, until it appeared that all the world was immersed in green.

  “What?”

  Lucy and Diana spat out the same question of disbelief, nearly in perfect unison. They were united in their sheer surprise at a revelation neither had seen coming, and so too were their gazes synchronized in observing the golden general in an entirely new light.

  “Indeed, it is as you say,” said General Hawthorn to Kenneth with his trademark squinted-eye smile. He briefly bowed his head to the boy in reverence. “Although my reality flows several decades later in the river of time, we the two of us share a common name, and a common origin. To be reunited with my self from days past is truly a blessing from God.”

  He spoke the last part with careful slowness and weight, the weight of meaning. And if Lucy had any doubts about the veracity of such an absurd situation, they were erased by his smile, which she recognized clearly from that one time Kenneth had laughed while falling through the space between the fabric of his Dream. Kenneth smiled back at him, and the resemblance was impossible to deny.