A single streak of sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the King’s figure, now entirely motionless save for the waving and billowing of his vivid robes. His face, which had had the most fleeting impressions of a smile or neutral frown, now went blank as a new canvas.

  A chill coursed through Lucy’s veins. Even when she had first met him here, seeing him defy gravity and float in mid-air with no face to scrutinize, she wouldn’t say she was afraid. It had all been unusual and surreal, but there had been the unexplainable intuition that the entity before her was part of some grand design toward some benevolent purpose, or at least one that was for her own personal good. But now, now Lucy was hit with the eeriness of standing here alone with someone whose face was impossible to recognize, whose unknown depths were as opaque as a lightless ocean.

  Then, in the slight shift of the sunlight, the faintest impressions of facial features reappeared on the King’s face, and he brought his robed hands together to take on a gently thoughtful appearance. “As I have explained in our prior conversations, I am the manifestation of the many Dreams you have had in your earlier years. Childhood memories are wont to fade over time, so it is natural that you remember scarce few details about my person.”

  “I…I know that,” said Lucy. “But even if I only imagined you, you have to be based on someone, right? Sometimes, it’s almost like…like I can see part of your face. But never enough to remember.”

  Lucy paused, letting the cool air swirling all around her soothe her as she steadied her breathing, then said: “So, I’ll ask you again: do you know who you really are?”

  “I see,” came the King’s response with little delay. “It is a fair question to ask. However, the answer is not something I am permitted to share with you at this time.”

  “What?”

  Lucy’s mind spun like a gale and she struggled to keep herself upright as she felt as though she were hurtling down through the sky. The King had spoken it all without a hitch or even the slightest change fo tone to this voice, as if trying to nullify how his response went against everything Lucy knew the King to be.

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me?” Lucy’s mouth hung open, for any semblance of silence and ease within her soul was eternally disrupted by a cacophony of existential uncertainty. “You’re from my mind. You’re a part of me. You’ve always told me what I wanted to know. So why are you hiding this from me? Why?”

  “If I may clarify,” the King said, still with his perfectly neutral tone that bordered on unnatural, “there is a misunderstanding here. I am unable to divulge this information not because it is of my own volition, but because I am prohibited from doing so. This information is not to be made known to your conscious self, according to the rules of your Final Dream, and as a component of this Dream, I am bound to those rules.”

  “Bound to rules?” It sounded ridiculous in Lucy’s mind, that a being who defied logic and reason in a myriad of ways as numerous as the colours of his robes would be restricted from simply speaking. “What rules? This—this is my own Dream, so are the rules…from myself, somehow?”

  The echoes of the question that just left her lips made Lucy’s heart heavy as a stone falling through the air to strike its target. She heard what Ricardo had been saying on that endless road, over and over and over, about Final Dreams being a place to be rescued from. If this Dream of hers had imposed rules that kept things secret from her, that broke down any semblance of trust between her conscious self and the world around her, then was Lucy really the ruler of this domain, or its captive?

  “Everything here originates from yourself in one way or another,” said the King. “Regardless of the greater details, you stand here now as a Dream Knight, and one who has just completed their second successful rescue of a Dreamer. For that, you deserve much praise.” He gave a few small claps, but the sound of it was jarring to Lucy’s ears, the motion looking not quite real. “Now then, shall we proceed to update your alignments and repertoire of Feats?”

  Lucy remained standing still on her cloud platform, her hand wrapped around her Ideal’s handle while she stared at the King in silence. He was eloquent and well-mannered about all he said, and there was certainly truth to celebrating Kenneth’s rescue and reaping the rewards (though remembering the circumstances that finally led to Kenneth’s rescue opened a whole other can of worms). But no matter how conciliatory and persuasive the King sounded, Lucy was not blind to the fact that he was smoothly changing the topic after admitting something that put Lucy’s entire circumstances into doubt.

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  And to top it all off, the King’s suggestion was to keep on going just as before, no questions asked. Lucy looked around and behind the King, letting her gaze sink into the unbroken sky. It was vast, as anyone could see, but only now did it dawn on Lucy how truly endless it was. It stretched on and on, like a certain road in Kenneth’s Dream. If she were to continue on like the King was urging her to do, would she eventually see a glimmer of light beyond the distant horizon? And with nothing to stop it here in the empty skies, would that light continue to recede no matter how far Lucy wandered? Her soul rattled with chills.

  “I don’t want to,” Lucy said, staring directly into the King’s face.

  “I see, that is quite all right.” The king brought his hands together again and nodded. “You may take all the time you require to recuperate. Once you are ready to proceed, you need only let me know.”

  Lucy exhaled a hot breath, her eyes narrowing. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not going to proceed, period.”

  “Lucy.” The King’s voice subtly took on the tone of a father sitting at her father’s bedside to give her gentle words of wisdom; Lucy knew for a fact that the King wasn’t her father, but still she fought against the urge to reminisce. The King went on: “It is perfectly understandable that you are too shaken by recent events and revelations to want to proceed. However, the alternative is to take the other path I offered you when first you came to this castle. The path that leads to languishing in blissful ignorance in the world below until your flame fades. You have already chosen to forgo that path, and that is because you know in your heart that you would never be satisfied with such an outcome. Do you mean to declare that that has changed?”

  “No,” said Lucy. She knew what he was doing, using this loaded question to funnel the conversation toward a certain direction, but the answer to this question arose with such striking clarity from the depths of her soul that it was impossible for her to talk around it. “Of course I wouldn’t be happy standing around doing nothing. I’ve had enough of that already…before and after I became a Dream Knight.”

  “Your words ring with utmost sincerity,” the King said with his robes fluttering out dramatically in the wind, as if to make Lucy’s answer sound like the definitive conclusion to this whole line of questioning. “You embody the soul of a true Dream Knight, one who sees through the veil of placidity and devotes their strength to doing the right thing. And there can be no greater use of such strength than aiding others on the deepest level. Your very existence, at present and for the foreseeable future, is tied to this most noble of goals. And the next step toward the goal is to update your alignments, acquire a new Feat, and prepare yourself for the next Dreamer in peril who shall welcome your gracious rescue. What say you?”

  Lucy’s mouth—her very soul—was sealed shut as she stood thousands of feet in the skies over the vast world. Internally, she was being pulled in opposite directions that simultaneously frosted her to the bone and boiled through every vein and artery. The King’s words—laced with truths about Lucy’s very being, the self she had always truly been and would have been had it not been for the limitations imposed on her real-life self—all of what he spoke was magical, a light from the celestial after a generation of ceaseless storms. Lucy wanted to believe in what she was hearing and follow it, because she knew, she understood, that this was all a reflection of what she had always wanted to be with every fibre of her being.

  But this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right. To be funnelled along this path of immense physical and emotional turmoil, made to believe she was the master of her own fate, when really the system and its operators kept control over everything by hiding things and abusing trust to make the balance of knowledge one-sided. She was already being prevented from knowing anything about the figment of her memories who was supposed to be her helpful and unconditional attendant. And now she was being coerced into continuing this process that, in the King’s words, Lucy’s very existence was now tied to inextricably. The way he spoke this with calm awe, as if it was supposed to be an indisputable positive, made Lucy’s skin crawl beneath her armour.

  All this time, the King was setting the stage, crafting the entirety of the viewpoints and beliefs that anchored the whole situation and moulded Lucy’s understanding of it all. His words had already transfigured her into a shining heroine who could never stop being a heroine. And even now, those words coursed through her veins like a binding poison, much like a gilded general Lucy had spoken to not long ago.

  And she refused to go the way of the general.

  She needed to excise that poison, destroy it. And the hand that perpetuated it as well. Denounce, dismantle, and destroy all that kept her bound to her pitiful state. This, unlike the King’s “next steps,” was the only true way forward in order to effect any meaningful change on herself, the self who had all these powers but could never do anything but follow and watch. To change, Lucy needed to vanquish it all, and she would enjoy it.

  Enjoy it?

  “No…”

  Lucy brought her hand up to her face, slowly but lightly smacking herself as she shook her head, not caring about her windswept hair getting in her eyes. This had happened far too often, and this time there was no doubt about her mind having consciously gone down that route. It was only moments ago that the King had suggested her “true” axis might not be her initial choice. Lucy ground her teeth into her lip as she asked herself the question she had been dreading to give the light of day:

  Was her Primary Axis meant to be Rebellion all along?