Kenneth dropped to his knees with a barely-perceptible thud, the sound shrinking into nothingness the split-second it was heard. As he barely stayed upright with his hands as support, the light from the swarming array of wall lanterns deepened, casting a hideous, mocking green glow that his wide eyes had no choice but to reflect. His breathing came in ragged gasps, and with each one the very fabric of the world appeared to quake and quiver like a TV screen on the precipice of losing signal.

  “Kenneth!” Lucy rushed to his side, dropping to her knees with clumsy speed that made her golden knee guards ring out against the stone floor as if it were her own cry for help. “I…I…”

  She searched every recess of her mind for words of comfort to speak, but every feeble attempt was broken by the sight of General Hawthorn’s body laying on the ground still bleeding out, and the indisputable fact that Kenneth had seen the deed clear as day. Gritting her teeth as tear welled up, Lucy looked at the wound on the general’s body, recalling the spear that had unceremoniously pierced through that flawless golden armour.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said with as much weight and sincerity as she could express from the depths of her soul. “This…this wasn’t right.”

  After keeping her concerned gaze on Kenneth a moment longer, she slowly looked up, past the general’s body, at the older Dream Knight standing proudly without remorse with her freshly-used spear standing as a dark silhouetted line in her hands.

  “I don’t know,” said Lucy, in a low but clear voice that echoed through the hall while locking eyes with the older woman. “I don’t know why Diana did that. But it was completely, absolutely wrong.”

  A smile crept onto Diana’s lips, the highlights and shadows accentuated by the intense lantern light. “You’re good at omitting information to suit your own judgements, huh? I’ve already told you why that bastard in sheep’s clothing needed to be dispatched. Immediately.”

  “And I told you just now why you shouldn’t have done that right away!” Lucy’s voice cracked, but she was too overwhelmed to put any stock into controlling her voice. “Do you see the state he’s in? Why are you so eager to kill all the time?”

  “Oh, and what would have been the alternative? Don’t tell me you actually meant to try talking to the poor sod.”

  “Yes, I did!” Lucy shot back without hesitation. A flicker rushed across Diana’s eyes, but Lucy didn’t back down, gripping her Ideal tightly and using the aching from her left arm to fuel her conviction. “The general was different from the others. He wasn’t hostile. And he was always willing to listen. He listened to you!”

  “Pfft.” Diana shook her head as if she were dismissing a blabbering child. “You can’t take one good quality and assume their whole character is whatever noble figment you have in that naive head of yours. Fact of the matter is: he had a problematic viewpoint. A really messed up one. And he was trying to pass that down to a child.”

  “But General Hawthorn is Kenneth!” Lucy yelled. “It’s not just some twisted man manipulating a kid. It’s another part of himself that was hurt. Really, seriously hurt. And you think it was right to cause him—both sides of him—even more pain?”

  “They were not the same.”

  Diana said this definitively without rushing for the sake of argument. She stated it clearly as fact, and her unbroken expression implied that this was supposed to be undoubtedly clear to anyone who knew the situation. Without giving Lucy time to finish her look of surprise, Diana continued: “You told me yourself. When you and Ricardo were fighting the boy’s aunt, he had the sense to see she was wrong. But that lousy general? He’d probably lick her boots clean without being asked.”

  “They’re both obedient to her,” said Lucy. “Doesn’t that only prove my point more?”

  Diana grunted, slapping her forehead as she responded in a raised voice. “God, how dense can you be? It doesn’t take a genius to see that the general fell way off the deep end. He isn’t just listening to what she says. He became exactly what she wants.”

  Became…The word struck Lucy like a lightning strike, and as she gazed at Kenneth, still grovelling on the floor, and pictured the general in that same helpless and spineless state, her skin crawled.

  “It’s a poison.” Diana spat the word ‘poison’ with sharp disdain. “One you can’t get rid of once a bitch like her forces it all the way in. And that’s why we’re gonna get the kid to tell her to stuff it. So she can meet the same fate as that golden kiss-up, just like she deserves.”

  “Stop it!” Lucy yelled, her voice echoing through the hall as her Ideal reflected the lantern light and momentarily blinded her. “Again. Why is everything killing? You just killed someone in front of him, and you want to follow it up with more killing?”

  Diana said nothing in response, her silent glare saying she had nothing to answer for.

  Lucy was riled up further by this, and continued: “You know, your explanation makes sense. I know that Kenneth needs to stop listening to whatever his aunt says, no matter what. But we need to focus on that. Not violence and anger. On rescuing him.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “And what’s wrong with violence and anger?” Diana spoke calmly and definitively, but her voice was raised as if she were stirring up a gale in the hall to crash down on Lucy. “You’re afraid to admit it. That in situations like these, the only way to rescue is to remove the dirtbags causing the problem. Immediately. By any means necessary. Because they’re that irredeemable.”

  Diana paused, then walked up to Lucy, her footfalls deliberately slow and heavy to sound like a titanic goddess approaching the summit of proclamation. Looking Lucy dead int he eyes, Diana added: “Because there’s nothing left to understand.”

  “That’s—!”

  “My, my, what a commotion to interrupt my beauty sleep.”

  The voice was distant, but strikingly clear, like a knife sharpened to perfection striking through the air. It was followed by the soft click of heeled footsteps striking what sounded like a marble floor, each footstep steadily growing closer.

  As Lucy, Diana, and Kenneth froze to look at the door to the queen’s chamber, the array of lantern lights gave a high-pitched, almost imperceptible hum. The green lighting crested to near-blinding intensity, then, in a turn that made Lucy’s stomach drop, they suddenly dimmed in rapid succession. The hall was strangled by shadow when the door began to swing open with a creak so small, so quiet, almost mocking in its unassuming sound compared to the enormity of the approaching presence.

  The queen’s shadow fell over the two Dream Knights and their Dreamer, incredibly large and impossibly dark, as if the shadow had a weight and depth to itself.

  Amidst this, the queen herself was not enlargened, standing with the stature of a regular adult woman, but that did little to curb the gravity she exuded. Her flowing robes melded in and out of her surroundings, the garish purple cloth seeming to have no end. The crown on her head was as deathly sharp as before, and here with nothing but a featureless wall behind her, it stood out with an air of danger like the silhouette of a weapon ready for its purpose. But even that was secondary to the blunt, grossly-commanding feature that blared from her face like a frenzied lighthouse: her eyes, those cruel eyes seething with a realm’s worth of enmity, shockingly greener than even the torrent of light flooding over the space from her army of lanterns.

  But unlike the first time Lucy had seen her, where those eyes had been forged into a caustic wide-eyed glare, now they were squinted slightly in accompaniment to a wide, twisted grin dripping with decadent amusement.

  “Oh, how delightful!” she exclaimed, the flames in the lanterns dancing wildly as if sharing in her exaltation. “I was furious to have some wanton cacophony right outside my chambers rudely break my restitude, but to know that it was the sounds of you two scoundrels arguing amongst yourselves turns it into a divine symphony to my ears!”

  “Happy to see you too, couch lady,” Diana said with her own wicked grin, her posture perfectly straight and implacable even against the queen’s presence.

  The queen exhaled loudly, and the lantern light appeared to thicken and swirl into a green vapour as she flashed a glare at Diana. But in the next moment, this was all whisked away so that she was back to her state of amusement. “You never fail to address my divine countenance in the proper fashion, do you? But no matter. I shall let it slide this time, for I am a merciful and gracious ruler. Gracious, yes, for the gift you are delivering unto me.”

  She said “gift” with a shot of acrid sweetness in her voice, gazing at Kenneth with her smile wide and tooth-filled like a shark encountering a school of fish with nowhere to go.

  Before Diana or Lucy could say anything, the queen turned around, her robes whipping through the air to envelop the entirety of the doorway in a cloud of green-tinged purple, and began walking back inside. “Follow me.”

  Her voice was even in tone, not forceful, but with an air of measured expectation that said she was to be obeyed without question. This time, Lucy was the one to speak up: “Why should we listen to you? How do we know you’re not leading us into a trap?”

  Diana gave her a quick look and a slight nod. The anger between them from earlier was still seething beneath the surface, but in this moment, at least, they were united in their apprehension toward the queen and the express desire to protect Kenneth from any and all of her wiles. As Lucy gripped her Ideal’s handle, so too did Diana brace herself with her spear pointed forward toward their foe.

  “This is what you wished for, is it not?” said the queen as she stopped, though she did not turn around. “To have a private conversation with me in my private chamber. And as you have slain my most faithful knight, I am now outnumbered by the two of you. Does my invitation not pose much greater risk to my person?”

  “What if you have guards waiting inside to ambush us?” said Lucy.

  The queen laughed, the lantern flames dancing again, and the door to her chamber also appearing to quiver as if tickled. “It shall be a day of both infernal heat and ninth circle cold-storms before I ever allow one of those savage brutes into my sacred chambers. Consider an honour of the highest honour that I am even allowing you to gaze inside, let alone taint it with your personnage.”

  She began walking again, and Lucy noted that though she was making progress, the connecting hall to her chamber stretched on endlessly so that she could not see the end of it. It reminded her of that alley way back in the castle town that had stretched on and on, impossibly so, until they finally ran into the queen and her entourage. Now that Lucy had the sense that this connecting hall would continue stretching on with no destination until they caught up with the queen, Lucy was almost certain this was some Dream-bending power of the queen’s. The fact that she could exert dimensional warping of such magnitude did not bode well for how much influence she held over Kenneth’s subconscious.

  Lucy sheathed her sword and began walking, but before she could take even three steps, she was grabbed by the shoulder and whipped around to face Diana’s piercing glare. “The hell do you think you’re doing, putting that away?”

  “It’s easier to run and catch up when I don’t have my hands full,” Lucy said with the blunt, sharp tone of someone who didn’t understand why this even needed to be explained. When Diana didn’t look satisfied with her answer, Lucy added: “And she didn’t seem to be lying.”

  “You…” Diana took a deep, vehement breath, her entire figure winding up to prepare to smack Lucy in the face. But she exhaled slowly and eased her body back into its default state of pointed apprehension. “Let me make this perfectly clear. There’s nothing to trust in the words of someone like that. If you have an iota of sense, you’d keep your weapon ready at all times.”

  Lucy’s gaze sharpened. She still wasn’t over what Diana had just done in front of Kenneth—far from it. She recognized that there was more than a kernel of truth to Diana’s wariness, but she couldn’t bear to concede to the older Dream Knight’s demands anymore. Everything was hostile, everything was fatal, wherever Diana was concerned, and Lucy had had more than enough of it.

  Gripping the handle of her still-sheathed Ideal, Lucy said: “I’m keeping it here.”