The light from Lucy’s Ideal extended far out laterally from the direction the conveyor belt was moving. Lucy’s eyes trailed the beam of light through the air, far off into the distance, until eventually, it shrunk and softly faded out of Lucy’s range of vision. When Lucy angled the beam upward and downward, the same phenomenon appeared. Regardless of where she shone her light, one thing was resoundingly clear.

  There was nothing around this conveyor belt except empty air and the ubiquitous darkness.

  That ruled out the option of climbing down, for if there was a floor down there, it was far enough away to exceed the limits of her vision. Either that, or whatever surface was down there was not normal, for it seemed to be able to swallow light whole without reflecting any of it back. Lucy was not in a rush to test out that hypothesis.

  Still, she breathed a sigh of relief, letting herself sit back on the conveyor belt. At the very least, she had ruled out the possibility of being surrounded by hostile foes. Being utterly alone in this oppressive darkness was far from a desirable situation, but it was a massive improvement from having no time to breathe or think or even feel due to a thousand-kilogram death machine restlessly giving chase.

  Still, this meant the only reasonable course of action was to follow the conveyor belt to its destination, whatever it was. Lucy cast her light out in front of her, but again her eyes could not see what lay beyond the shadows. The conveyor belt was absurdly long, and Lucy would have no choice but to follow it to the end.

  And she absolutely despised the idea.

  All she could think about were those hazy days that all melted together like wax from short-lived candles. Those days where her body transitioned like a formless smoke between squeezing into her cramped desk, hunched over her laptop and notebook, to shuffling across the same walkways and doorways on campus to lecture halls that were full but empty of anything lasting, to running around the department store in that stiff uniform restlessly moving her arms and legs while stocking even though the seconds hand of the cracked clock never seemed to budge. And through all of that her mind was only barely awake, a spectator forcing itself to watch and engage, for it could not escape the caged creature it was attached to. She could only follow the path through mundanity that went on and on and on, for if she dared step away from it, she would henceforth be sacrificing her survival, her means of getting anywhere in the future.

  And how she had loathed it.

  Just like her present situation, she could only wait and endure. But wait for what? And for how much longer? Would there ever be an end to this anxiety, this fear that she could fall off the side if she was so much as lightly pushed by a gust of wind or her own clumsiness?

  So many times she was sure she couldn’t take it anymore, that she could no longer keep enduring like that was the only purpose her life served. She wanted to scream out in anguish, but her voice would go nowhere except into the dark where no one could hear her. For Lucy knew all too earnestly that no one else would care when they themselves were barely making it through their own conveyor belt through darkness.

  But that was then, and this was now. And back then, Lucy was admittedly complicit in letting things get to such a severe state, for she had given up on struggling against the course of time’s stream once she had been pushed downstream far enough. She was the sunk cost fallacy in action. But now, Lucy wasn’t too far gone yet, or at least, she hoped so. And with that self-awareness, she would finally have the motivation to do what she should have done long ago.

  Climbing up onto her feet, Lucy lowered her Ideal to her hip so that it was in a more comfortable position, though she angled the blade upward slightly so that the light beamed forward at about her eye level. Then she took a deep breath in and out while patting her knee with her free hand. Finally, she began walking in the opposite direction of the conveyor belt’s motion. Soon, she picked up speed into a light jog, before eventually breaking into a run. She kept to a moderate speed, for she was still worried about losing balance and falling off the edge. Watching the lines of the conveyor belt’s tiles emerge from up ahead and stream past her feet, she was determined to keep at a pace that let her outrun the conveyor belt’s opposing motion.

  So far, so good, it seemed. She was passing conveyor tiles at a fast pace and her Ideal’s light did not falter, even as she began pumping her right arm backwards and forwards to help give her stride more propulsion. If she kept this up, she might be able to catch up to where the machine had dropped her in and perhaps climb herself back out. Or perhaps she could find the beginning of it all, along with whatever its control system or power source was, allowing her to shut down this conveyor belt for good. This was fuelled by a cavalcade of assumptions on her part, but she so desperately wanted it to be true, for she could not take the mere thought of being on a conveyor belt without a feeling of deep repulsion.

  Just like the machine, it had to be stopped, for the sake of saving lives.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  But the grey line of the conveyor belt, broken up by thin black lines of tile gaps, was becoming so monotonous that Lucy felt completely disconnected between mind and vision, as if everything she was seeing was a virtual reality game in a separate plane that wasn’t real.

  Would she ever reach it? Was there an “it” in the first place? Was there a beginning?

  The latter question was silly, of course, for Lucy must have been dropped close to the start, and even if that weren’t the case, physically there had to be a starting point where the conveyor belt’s surface looped from underneath back up to the top.

  But what did that matter, in the realm of Dreams? After all, the alley way in Kenneth’s Dream had been far longer than was physically possible, and were it not for the queen’s influence making that alley a straight shot toward her entourage, Lucy and the others may very well have ended up running through it forever.

  It was all dependent on the Dreamer’s mind and their inner machinations. It was difficult, at times, to separate the physical realities of what one was experiencing here from the absolute truth that all manner of physics was malleable and adaptive to the Dreamer’s subconscious. Lucy sighed, for in this case she had no idea what to expect given that she had yet to meet this Dream’s mysterious host. But just as she was sulking about how she would ever find the Dreamer now that she was far from her return point, a realization struck her with a blinding luminosity that eclipsed even her Ideal’s light.

  The Dreamer had a very high chance of being at the end of this conveyor belt.

  It was a wild hunch at first, but the more Lucy thought about it, the more it made sense. If the Dreamer had been close to where she had started, more than likely the machine had gotten to them and swallowed them whole. It was pure speculation, but given that Lucy armed with her Ideal and Higher Reflection was no match for the machine, it was doubtful a frightened and vulnerable Dreamer would fare much better. Then the Dreamer would have been dropped onto this very same conveyor belt, and depending on how long ago that was, they would have already been carried off to the unseen destination.

  That was, of course, assuming the Dreamer didn’t fall off the edge. Lucy gulped, veering her gaze away from her beam of light to peek at the lightless depths on either side of the conveyor belt. She just had to hope the Dreamer had either fallen unconscious or was either too cautious or too afraid to do anything rash.

  Lucy groaned, giving her exasperated mind a brief reprieve. It all added up in her mind, but it would do a lot for her sanity to have any sort of hint that her envisioned sequence of events had actually taken place here. She turned around, casting her light on the conveyor belt’s surface, scanning it up and down as she began moving in tandem with it once more. She was hoping to find any signs of footprints or hand prints different from her own, or stray hairs that weren’t blonde, or—god forbid—fresh stains of blood if the Dreamer had been injured during the fall or before it. But no matter where Lucy looked along the unfeeling contraption’s length, she found nothing that indicated the presence of anyone who had ridden this conveyor belt.

  That included herself. So that didn’t rule out the possibility, even if it didn’t give her any confidence about it being true. In the end, Lucy would have to grit her teeth and bare it while being taken to the end of the ludicrously long conveyor belt suspended in darkness.

  But instead of letting her body sag into frustrated exhaustion, Lucy braced herself and stood up straight. Patience, even for an outcome that might not come to fruition, was a virtue that Lucy Lockhart the Knight of Understanding had ought to demonstrate.

  She walked on in tandem with the conveyor belt’s motion, keeping her light pointed firmly at where she was hoping to eventually see something, anything, to show that the end was near. Soon, she picked her pace up into a jog, then a run. It seemed fruitless at first, since she had done the same thing in the opposite direction and only ended up wasting her (admittedly large) stores of energy. But since she was going with the flow of the conveyor belt this time, her speed was magnified quite a bit, so there was hope that she would arrive at her unseen destination sooner than she would expect.

  How pathetic this is, a gnarled voice whispered at the back of her mind, louder than the thuds of her footsteps and the clanking of her armour. She had lived her whole life prisoner to this exact same mindless pathway that shuttled her through the days without an end or purpose in sight. And now, she was running down that sort of path at great speed, resigning herself to the belief that there was no way out except for the conveyor belt’s narrow, forced definition of “forward.” She looked not just tolerant of, but outright gleeful of being complicit in that sort of never-ending inertia that had trapped herself and countless others in the waking world.

  What would she say to Thomas, and her mother, and Kathy, and all the millions of other souls for whom their conveyor belt was a nonstop downward spiral?

  Lucy grit her teeth, biting back tears as her throat ached and her Concentrated Illumination flickered. She didn’t want to give in. She didn’t want to submit her body to movements and destinations that had already been decided for her. She stopped running on the conveyor belt, her left foot abruptly catching up with her right foot and staying there with such abruptness she nearly toppled over. In this standstill, she raised her sword to eye level, forcing herself to stare at it lest she lose concentration. She was worried that if she lost her light now, she wouldn’t have the wherewithal to conjure it again.

  But therein lied the answer—crude and harsh as it was—to this dilemma.

  Just like the last two years of her waking life, she would have to keep on going like this. But the difference this time was that she carried a light she refused to let go out. She carried hope with that light, hope that it would eventually—no, inevitably illuminate a destination, a way out.

  And, perhaps one day, this same heroic beam would light the way to the Dreams of the people closest to her heart.

  Through all the doubt, through all the pointless and exhausting running, through the darkness that promised not even a glimpse of an end in sight, Lucy would have to grit her teeth and bear it every step of the way. And so she resolved to do so, as she held her Ideal out in front of her and chased after the few metres of conveyor belt she could see, over and over again, for as long as it would take.