Bringing her Ideal back down at her side and letting the light fade out, she hastily wiped at her eyes to curb the embarrassment she felt once again, and smiled at the King with forced composure. “It works well. That was all I wanted to check.”

  “Understood. However, it might have been advisable to abstain from deactivating your Feat just yet.”

  All the winds swishing around Lucy went dead silent as she gave a look of perplexity. “What do you mean?”

  With a heavy and somewhat ominous slowness, the King raised his hand and pointed behind Lucy. “Please, take a look once more at the Dream Threshold you are planning to cross.”

  With pinpricks of anxiety running down her neck, Lucy did as he requested and turned around to gaze at where the Dream Thresholds stood. The thick, ink-black mist was still billowing out of the Threshold for the Dream of total darkness. Lucy wasn’t quite sure what the King was alluding to, for she had already seen the present circumstance and discussed the urgency of it with him. But then, when Lucy’s eyes drifted to the door itself—and found that she could barely make out its form beyond the very top of the frame, as the encroaching darkness had turned that entire space into a formless void—it suddenly clicked in her mind why she should still have her new Feat out and casting its powerful light.

  “I can keep my Feats active while stepping through Thresholds?” Lucy found the logistics of it hard to wrap her head around. “Wouldn’t the different rules and physics and everything cause me to need to ‘reset’ my Feats?”

  “Your Feats are as much a part of you as your Ideal and Higher Reflection,” said the King. “Although the influence of another’s Dream will certainly affect your being in many ways, it cannot fully override the state of a Feat that the collective unconscious has already granted you.”

  “Huh…” This was news to Lucy. With this revelation, she knew that if she ever drew a difficult enemy toward a Dream’s return point, she could do a round trip and return to that Dream with her Feats all ready like guns blazing. But in this particular circumstance, there was a glaring problem she could see. “This new Feat I got, it needs me to maintain concentration to keep it active. But then as soon as I step through the door, I lose consciousness for a while. So wouldn’t that make my Feat pointless here?”

  “On the contrary, your Feat’s effect is necessary in order to cross the Dream Threshold.” He gestured again toward the door that was barely visible through the miasma of darkness. “In order to successfully cross over, you must be able to clearly see the door itself, as well as the moment you pass through it. Entering another’s Dream is as much a mental crossing as it as a physical one. As you have likely noticed, each Dream Threshold is uniquely crafted to adhere to its respective Dream, as it is a part of the Dream itself. Therefore, you must be able to see it so that the Dream can enter your consciousness.”

  “I…see.” Lucy understood the gist of it: that she needed to actually see the door when crossing over, and so she would need a Feat like Concentrated Illumination to combat the darkness obscuring the door almost entirely. But all this talk about consciousness and mental states and such felt, admittedly, excessive and extraneous while also being largely vague. How much of it could she even trust, after the King had openly admitted to omitting information from her? This requirement of needing to see the Dream Threshold’s door might very well be a lie, though at least in this case she couldn’t see a reason for the King to lie about it. Still, she was wary about whatever other limitations the King had told her expecting her to follow without questioning.

  Lucy took hold of her Ideal’s handle once more, facing the encroaching darkness on the far side of the audience chamber. All this questioning could wait: for now, she needed to resolve that Dream to prove to herself she could still succeed by her own merits and beliefs, and also, of course, to stop the Encroachment that threatened to flood her Dream before she had a chance to explore this whole Dream Knight business with clearer, un-naive eyes.

  With her right hand still gripping her sword’s handle, she began making her way across the audience chamber. As she drew closer, she was struck by the contrast between the bright, celestial white of the clouds forming into platforms at her feet, and the black void of darkness that swirled and swarmed over the sky like ink that had been forcefully spilled over a watercolour illustration. When she was just a few feet away, some of the ebbing darkness swam in over her cloud platform like a tide lapping at the shore, erasing the platform’s brightness completely wherever it went.

  Lucy gulped, staring down at her boots. The dark miasma barely touched the toe compartment at first, then it pooled around her soles and her toes were gone completely. An intrusive thought flashed through her mind—of that miasma rising up fast in an upward torrent like an upside-down waterfall crashing over her, drowning her in the complete absence of vision, of the way forward, of having any sense of place or direction—and she reeled so violently she nearly fell backward off her cloud platform.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Righting her footing, Lucy looked out at the spot where the door should be. At first, she thought it was her eyes playing tricks on her, but soon it was clear that the darkness had started moving more erratically, almost violently, as soon as she was within stepping distance.

  Lucy’s blood ran cold. How had she been able to not only stand calmly and think in that Dream, but also have the composure of a goddess to actually walk through it? Perhaps it was the difference between being unwittingly plunged into the unknown and having to face up to the darkness out of one’s own volition. She hadn’t thought much of it in the former, but now Lucy couldn’t allay the fear of being consumed entirely by a formless and raging void, which swirled and thrashed about more intensely with each passing second. Despite her trembling arms and legs, and her choppy pants, she found her grip on her Ideal once more, using it to steady herself physically and mentally, and forced herself to regulate her breathing. After a few seconds of this, she noticed something.

  The darkness beginning to calm down.

  Was it a coincidence, a momentary lapse in chaos and volatility? She tried momentarily bringing her thoughts back to those fears of drowning and being consumed, and sure enough, the miasma went ballistic once more. Then when she shook those thoughts away, wrestling herself out of the grasp of fear and helplessness, the miasma went calm as an evening mist.

  “I understand now,” Lucy muttered to herself in a low voice.

  She couldn’t doubt herself. She couldn’t let herself fall into despair again while moving down the path before her. That was why she now unsheathed her Ideal, exhaled a breath from the very depths of her soul, and held the sword up to her eye level with two hands, all in one slow but fluid motion without any hesitation. This was the image she had to not only become, but be comfortable in, as if it were a second skin. A sense of self that neither Diana nor the King’s hidden intentions nor the darkness before her could take away.

  Looking down at the armour of her Higher Reflection, Lucy remembered the pyjamas she had donned before becoming a Dream Knight, back when she was a nondescript girl spinning her wheels through existence. She’d had no “image” to uphold back then, nor the means to construct one. And yet, despite that, she had reached for one, endlessly and earnestly, like a child reaching their hand up to catch the stars billions of miles away. When she looked out through the darkness, which was becoming stiller by the second, she could picture that night sky she had gazed up at so many times in her younger years, wishing she could be as brilliant and far-reaching as the stars, lighting the way for others even in the dark of night.

  Thomas…her mother…Kathy…Lucy had wanted to be their star, the one they could look up to and find comfort in even on nights of hopelessness and loneliness. But how could a star light the way if it flickered in its brightness, letting itself become swallowed up by the night sky? Even as a Dream Knight, Lucy had no hope of providing that security and assurance to the people dearest to her if she herself lacked security and assurance in herself. She had already gone through the consequences of that kind of self-doubt when Cole had sensed her own lack of confidence and threatened to completely cut her off as a fake heroine.

  And during Kenneth’s Dream, perhaps her most effective action was when she had embraced Kenneth to calm him from his inconsolable state—an action born from Lucy’s natural inclination to be a figure of compassion, of empathy, of the embodiment of that patient and wise Knight of Understanding. The embrace, and Keilani’s reaction, still triggered pangs of embarrassment, but Lucy also felt a growing sense of pride at what she had done, for she had been unquestioningly true to herself, and it had paid off for herself and the person she was helping. This was a fact that no one could argue against, not even Diana. And so, right here and now, it was imperative for her to break through the darkness before her and maintain that shining image, the shining image she could now finally grasp if she could only believe in her powers, her goals, and the notion that she would find success as Lucy, the Knight of Understanding.

  And so, to complete that shining image, Lucy summoned forth the piercing bright light from her blade. It shot forward, cutting through the dark mist, which had now gone perfectly still. In its luminosity, Lucy could once again see the Dream Threshold in all its familiar glory: its brutally angular form, cast in pitch-black material, with a circle adoring the top centre with a dark colour that was darker than darkness itself.

  Lucy remembered then, all too clearly, the last encounter she’d had before fleeing back to her Final Dream: the sound of heavy footsteps, then the thrashing and grinding just before she had barely escaped. If she were to return now, would she…

  Lucy shook her head. Now was not the time, and she needed to maintain focus. Both for the sake of keeping her Concentrated Illumination active long enough for her to cross over, and for her own sake so as to not lose the composure she had finally found.

  So with heavy, measured footsteps, each adorned with cloud platforms that could now break through the darkness with help from the light of her Ideal, Lucy marched through the parted darkness, took hold of the door handle, swung the Dream Threshold wide open, and stepped inside.