“Ha…”

  The sound escaped her mouth without any conscious thought, leaving Lucy unsure of whether it was an abrupt gasp or the stifled beginning of an uncomfortable laugh. She brought the alignment orb down away from her eyes, covering it completely in her fist, then hung her head low. She simultaneously wanted to laugh and scream. Just how insane, just how broken could she have become, to even consider becoming more like the very person she was committing her entire self toward denouncing?

  She returned Rebellion’s alignment orb back to its original position on the fourth slot of the Axis, the motion so quick and forceful she worried for a moment she might topple the alignment grid. But her sudden effusiveness was justified in her mind: bringing herself further down Diana’s Primary Axis was completely out of the question. It was practically admitting defeat. If Lucy were to have the complete moral victory, she would need to stick to her ideals—figuratively and literally—rather than abandoning them.

  With her now free hand, she returned the Axis of Understanding and picked up its alignment orb. Raising it off from the eleventh position, she moved her hand four spaces down the axis, hovering over the fifteenth position while marvelling once again at how simple and without question the whole process was. When at last she allowed her fingers to let go, the orb settled into its new position with a familiar clear chiming sound that had the celestial quality of the kind of bells one would imagine a band of angels would play, declaring: “All is right with the world.”

  Lucy smiled ruefully at the thought, given her current feelings toward the realm of Dreams, but she brought her attention back to the number showing at the base of the alignment grid. A large number “1” was printed there, indicating that she still had one more alignment point to allocate.

  Looking up, she glanced back and forth between the other two Axes. Currently, Ideation was her “Secondary” Axis based on alignment, and from all the solutions she’d had to devise so far in Cole’s and Kenneth’s Dreams, she did truly feel that the synergy between Understanding and Ideation had been an important factor in both her success and her survival.

  But those moments where Understanding and Ideation had coalesced never involved situations in the heat of battle. If Lucy were to have any hope of eliminating whatever new monsters and horrors she could potentially face in subsequent Dreams, let alone best Diana in battle, she couldn’t continue to neglect Rebellion like this and handicap her raw strength.

  Holding this line of reasoning, she reached over to the Axis of Rebellion once more and took the alignment orb in hand. As she raised it above the next slot, which would be the five-point position, she hesitated and glanced at the Axis of Ideation. Her Ideation alignment was at 5, while Rebellion was still at 4. Surely, she could spare one point and allow the two Axes to even out? If they were equal, she expected that she would become as strong as she was currently agile and quick of thinking—not terribly adept in either, but decent nonetheless.

  She thought back to that first encounter in Kenneth’s Dream, where had needed Ricardo’s help to fend off just one of the royal guards. And after that, there was the blow to Diana’s arm when they had fought in the church. She had maimed Diana to quite a surprising degree, but not enough to prevent her from fighting back. If this new alignment granted her just enough strength to actually subdue an armoured foe on her own, then it would be worth it.

  Taking a deep breath in and out as she concluded all this to herself, Lucy placed the alignment orb into the fifth slot of the Rebellion Axis, letting the ease of the motion and the satisfying chime-like sound of the orb clicking into place wash over her pleasantly. At the base of the alignment grid, the large number “1” faded, followed by streams of clouds pouring in from the edges of the world to condense into a large number “0”. Now, her alignments were as follows:

  Ideation: 5

  Understanding: 15

  Rebellion: 5

  The King slowly and gently gestured his hand toward the Origin Point where the three Axes met. Lucy nodded, for now having gone through the process three times, she knew what he was inviting her to do: confirm her alignments.

  The clouds in the sky and the sun overhead all continued their wandering and shimmering in a peaceful, lackadaisical manner as Lucy stepped up in front of the Origin Point. As she wrapped her hand around her Ideal’s handle, she noted how gentle and effortless her grasp was. It was as though her earlier doubts and anxieties and suspicions had peeled away, and she was left to marvel at the grandeur of it all again, of having control over major qualities of her very being as well as the serene, unhurried peace to deliberate over her decisions.

  Consciously, she knew that it wasn’t wise to brush aside all of her skepticisms, for they were valid, and she tried to rile herself up again, just a smidge, a little bit of hesitation before unsheathing her Ideal to prove that she wasn’t blissfully complicit in the very system that was wilfully hiding things from her. But try as she might, she couldn’t, as her body went through the motions of its own accord of drawing out her sword and pointing it toward the Origin Point. Here, now, in that expectant moment where the blade of her Ideal hung freely between herself and the Origin, she was at last able to freeze her inertia and ask herself:

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  Why?

  Why was she suddenly so calm? Not just calm, as there were pinpricks and tingles dancing over her body as she readied herself to set her new alignments in stone. There was no denying it: she was giddy. And, with horror, she recognized this giddiness from other instances that had cropped up time and time again: of wanting to destroy things, to tear apart obstacles, to have a Feat like the one Diana had granted her in the church where she could decimate entire swathes of enemies with a single swing of her sword.

  But all Lucy had done right now was allot a single point to Rebellion, so it wasn’t like she was about to become high on extreme power once her alignments were confirmed. But when Lucy processed the giddiness she was suddenly feeling, she found it was less a feeling of expectation and more one of relief.

  Relief that she was no longer making Rebellion her weakest alignment?

  Despite the wind picking up into a low howl, sweat beaded down her forehead. The alignment grid remained as ice sculpture still as it always did, but there emanated from it an invisible, barely perceptible, but irrefutable force drawing Lucy toward itself, toward the Origin Point. The Origin Point didn’t look any different than it always did, as the sharply defined convergence of the three Axes, but Lucy couldn’t tear her eyes away from it.

  Her arms moved of their own accord, lowering the angle of the sword so that her Ideal pointed more readily at the target that would make her planned alignment changes into a reality. Looking down, Lucy nearly let go of the handle.

  “What…?”

  It had happened for the briefest of moments, so it could very well have been a trick of the light or a delusion from all the anxiety. But what she haf seen was clear: the flickering blue aura around her Ideal’s blade had turned into a roaring red.

  Now, it was back to the faint blue that was difficult to see against the sky, but despite the split-second change the difference had been so stark as to be unmistakable. Lucy wanted to play this off as a momentary blip of her vision, or some peculiar detail about her Ideal which she barely knew anything about anyway besides it acting as a sword. But she couldn’t shake this off so easily, not when that red aura had so closely resembled one Lucy had seen engulfing a spear that had mercilessly skewered so many people in Kenneth’s Dream.

  “Are you quite all right?” said the King. “You need not hasten yourself if you are doubtful about your alignment selection. There is no shame in taking the time to reconsider before proceeding.”

  Catching herself breathing raggedly enough that it must have tipped the King off, Lucy closed her eyes and took a deep breath in, raising her Ideal up in front of her face to make it a part of herself and her intentions rather than a tool pointing her elsewhere of its own accord. “I’m fine. I don’t have any doubts.”

  And she was not lying. Or rather, she convinced herself that not lying about that claim was the only sane path forward. Doing what the King had said and reconfiguring her alignments was an easy way out of this present dilemma: she could allot that one point to Understanding instead and prevent all this strangeness with Rebellion all together.

  But that, in its own way, would be admitting defeat. If Lucy couldn’t handle utilizing more of Rebellion without letting it consume her—without letting herself become more like Diana—then that meant she was weaker than Rebellion on a very fundamental level. She needed to be able to keep it under her command, to show that a Dream Knight didn’t have to use it in such a forceful and awful way. The way her Ideal had flickered to red only briefly before returning to the calm, cool blue she had associated with Understanding was proof that Rebellion could be reigned in and overcome.

  And overcoming Rebellion was precisely what Lucy sharpened in her mind as her true goal while stepping up to the Origin Point and thrusting her Ideal forward.

  Letting go of the handle, Lucy took a step back. The sword and the alignment grid lit up with a total, all-engulfing white light, chimes rung through the air, and then the light dispersed through the sky in every direction, piercing through the boundaries of Lucy’s Dream to reach all that lay beyond. Although Lucy had only seen this for the third time so far, the beams of light seemed more forceful this time, as if trying to poke holes through the tapestry of the sky.

  With her new alignments confirmed, Lucy raised her Ideal back out of the Origin Point and brought it back to her side. The alignment grid then faded out of existence, but not before Lucy’s eyes glanced at the Axes of Ideation and Rebellion. The number “5” appeared above both of them, looking completely interchangeable.

  This is what I am now, Lucy thought to herself. By now, her influence on the collective unconscious would have told all of humanity, subconsciously, that she was taking that step toward making Rebellion a greater part of herself, no matter how small. She hadn’t thought of it too much until now, but whatever actions she took as a Dream Knight within Dreams would reflect heavily on her current alignments and how they affected herself. This instilled in her a sense of pressure, but also determination, as she was passionately motivated to show how she would handle things her way in the Dream she was about to resolve.

  “Excellent,” said the King with a bow of his head. “Next, you may acquire a new Feat to add to your arsenal.”

  “Of course.”

  Lucy brought her Ideal in front of her, resting both her hands on the handle as she stood with the wise, patient poise of the reflection of Understanding she had seen in the mirror some time ago. It was disorienting to think about how the actual passage of time since then was impossible to determine in this chaotic realm of Dreams—but that didn’t matter when she was standing her in the present, facing ever onward to the future, to the possibilities she could still grasp and shape.

  And so, even with all her misgivings in just the past few minutes, Lucy waited patiently for the Feats to appear before her, resolved to control all that was within her power and completely, absolutely determined never to fall from this stance, from this platform of clouds, into the depths that kept calling to her with the same provocative ire as Diana’s mocking smile. This, she swore on her soul.