It was a question that seemed harder and harder to take seriously, the more time Lucy spent with the Dreamer and witnessed how deep she had fallen. But it did spark another question that was vitally important: what if that past experience held the key to saving the Dreamer in a different and, more importantly, non-murderous way? If she could empathize with her…

  Lucy did a double-take, her mind taking back in the sight of the Dreamer’s face beneath her, eyebrows still knitted in annoyance, an annoyance born from being convinced that she was entirely in the right for all she had done and tried to do. How could Lucy ever bring herself to empathize? Even if there was an explanation for how the Dreamer had turned out, that couldn’t excuse the kind of individual she was now.

  I try to get you to understand where I’m coming from and you don’t even try.

  Lucy bit her lip as those words from the Dreamer’s last outburst washed over her. She was torn between the absurdity of trying at all to empathize with someone who had outright homicidal inclinations, and the truth of the matter in how she had never given this girl, who was roughly her own age, a fair chance.

  But…no, it was still ridiculous, and quite frankly, impossible. Attempting to murder another human being in cold blood was so ethically bankrupt at a fundamental level that it made Lucy and the Dreamer exist in different, incompatible planes of existence. How could Lucy empathize if she could never relate to doing something so horrible? Again, the inkling of the idea that this girl was a lost cause, and that trying to view her in anything but the most negative light, whispered loudly throughout Lucy’s mind.

  “Think you’re so high and mighty.” The Dreamer’s voice came suddenly, a low voice barely above a whisper, as she kept her head turned and gaze wilfully averted. “The way you pin me down like this, like you’re some blameless cop pinning down a crook far beneath them.”

  There was a controlled a silence, and then the Dreamer added, just a touch louder:

  “But I saw that smile on your face, right before you met me.”

  The smile…Lucy’s blood ran cold. Her head spun, but she focused on maintaining a tight hold on the Dreamer’s wrists. There was no denying that Lucy had smiled after destroying the boy-turned-machine, but had it really looked like she was relishing in destruction, in the afterglow of ending another life? She didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t be true. But the more she fought it, the more a hidden cloud in her mind dissipated, revealing something dark and pulsing underneath, like a pitch-black heart in the centre of an endless abyss.

  Perhaps it was true. Perhaps Lucy had smiled like a maniac who had wanted to do something like that all along.

  Lucy took a sharp inhale of breath, fighting to banish those thoughts. But instead of keeping steady, her eyes darted all around, soon fixing their gaze on the Dreamer’s eyes. She was still looking away, but Lucy could see her eyes clearly. They were so opaque: clear and vibrant, but obscuring untold depths far beneath the surface. And yet, when Lucy tried looking into those depths, she found that they were already there, an abyss staring back at her. Showing Lucy her own reflection.

  And that was when Lucy’s hands began sinking into the Dreamer’s wrists.

  “Wh-what the fuck?”

  The Dreamer convulsed in panic, twisting her head back and forth to look at her wrists, where Lucy’s hands were melting and melding into them like melted clay being added to the composition of the Dreamer’s body.

  “What the hell are you doing?” The Dreamer choked the words out in hysterical fear. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “I-I’m not doing anything!” Lucy didn’t know how to sound more convincing, but it was true: she had no idea what as happening. And on top of that, she was panicking as well, seeing her own body slowly dissolve and mix into the one beneath her.

  The Dreamer thrashed her arms about, freeing them now that Lucy’s arms had lost their armour and their strength. But when she shot her hands up to grab Lucy’s face, the entirety of her arms began melting as well, bleeding into Lucy’s skin. She screamed, all her earlier confidence transfigured into abject terror.

  She wrung her body back and forth, trying to wriggle or slide her way out from under Lucy, but her hands would not give out their hold on Lucy’s cheeks even as they, too, began to dissolve. Their faces drew closer and closer together, and to Lucy it’s wasn’t clear whether this way due to the Dreamer pulling her down, or by the force of whatever was causing the two of them to quite literally melt into one another.

  “Stop it stop it stop it!” The Dreamer shrieked over and over.

  “Trust me, I would if I knew how!” Lucy surprised herself with how stern her voice sounded despite her own panicked state. She tried wrestling her way out as well, but she felt her legs, which were out of sight but almost certainly turned into mush as well, tear and shift in an unnatural way that legs shouldn’t, like a cube of gelatin that had torn halfway with the top half sliding over. She feared that if she kept moving, her legs really would tear the whole way through and her unsupported torso would fall and crash down on the Dreamer. So despite this nightmarish situation, Lucy chose to remain still while grasping frantically in her mind for any sense of what she could actually so about this situation that was pure insanity.

  Very soon, their faces were close enough that the Dreamer’s eyes took up most of Lucy’s field of vision. The Dreamer kept struggling, which in turn made her squeeze her eyes shut for several moments or blink rapidly. However, she eventually kept her eyes wide open, staring into Lucy’s own, and in the Dreamer’s hazel green irises, Lucy saw her own reflection staring back at her with perfect clarity like a mirror.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  And that was when reality melted away as well.

  Lucy’s vision flew into the Dreamer’s eyes—then past them. Her vision was engulfed in her hazel green irises, total and complete and uniform, but flickering and dancing with a faintly sinister undertone, not unlike the mocking green lamplight of the queen’s castle from Kenneth’s Dream. But soon her vision flew past this as well, and what Lucy found wasn’t the impenetrable white nothingness that had been the Dreamer’s place of existence for a long, long time.

  Her hand in front of her face, waving goodbye as distant figures were swallowed up by the metal grime of urban sprawl.

  What are you doing? called a faint voice that was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  Lucy blinked.

  Her father, in his office dress shirt and dress pants, collapsed at the front door, not breathing, skin cold, the bags under his eyes coal-black from weeks of sleep deprivation.

  Stop it!

  Lucy blinked.

  Her phone screen giving off a dim light as she scrolled through it in bed, eyes reflecting headlines and images of war, political polarization, and decaying educational institutions, over and over again for hours.

  I told you to stop!

  Lucy blinked.

  Her fingers clutching two documents, a letter of rejection from a university and an overdue rent bill, then balling them both up into crude paper wads that she threw into the wastebasket while holding her head in the bathtub and wishing it was an ocean that could drown everything away.

  Stop looking!

  Lucy blinked.

  Her hand gripping a subway handle bar as the silent mob of people boxed her in, with their uniforms and branded purses and laptop bags, all emanating the need to go on, to perpetuate, to keep the gears turning forever in the middle of nowhere, all while wordlessly asking her why she wouldn’t want to do the same.

  “Get out of my fucking head!”

  The Dreamer’s voice acted as an aerial bomb, detonating everywhere, lighting the air on fire, and causing the very reality before Lucy’s eyes to explode and crack and burn away. Lucy’s mind went blank for a second, and when she came to, she found herself back on the ground, pinning the Dreamer beneath her in the white void. Her arms weren’t sludge, and her legs felt stable, so it was as though everything had gone back to normal from before the unexplainable melting had happened.

  Except for one major difference: Lucy was crying.

  She had felt it. Every emotion behind all those images she had seen. They were almost more tangible than any other emotional storm that had overwhelmed her in the past, like they were missing puzzle pieces that had slotted perfectly into gaps in her mind.

  Without thinking, she wrapped her arms around the Dreamer and pulled her into an embrace.

  “What the hell?” the Dreamer spat, turning to Lucy with a glare that only sharpened upon seeing fresh tears run down Lucy’s cheeks. “Have you gone fucking mental?”

  She shook herself violently to try and free herself from Lucy’s grasp, but Lucy did not budge, and instead brought their bodies closer so that her warmth, even with armour in the way, could be felt. “It’s…it’s okay…” she said in a low voice. “I…I’ll help you get over everything.”

  “Screw that!” The Dreamer continued to struggle as she yelled. “I don’t know what you did, but I feel hella violated. And…”

  The Dreamer bit her lip, silence taking her voice, before it came roaring back. “There’s nothing for me to ‘get over!’ I know what I need to do and I’m not pussying out! It all needs to end! You understand that, don’t you? I’m gonna make it all end!”

  Lucy continued to hold the Dreamer in her embrace, her emotional outpouring giving way to pondering as she considered the Dreamer’s reaction just now. It was clear to Lucy that in this moment, it was a crossroads between Rebellion and Understanding, with the Dreamer’s intentions aligning with the latter to an extreme degree, while Lucy had proposed a solution aligned with the latter.

  And what made this an insurmountable dilemma for Lucy was that she understood the former. She understood what the Dreamer was going through, and why she wanted to tear everything down. It was not unlike the intense loathing and mistrust Lucy held toward the King and the Dream Knight system shortly before entering this Dream. And it extended even beyond that, to the waking world of society that had broken and beaten her down long before she had become bed-ridden at a hospital. How nice it would be, to break those chains and topple those endless, suffocating dominoes by one’s own hands and reclaim the freedom and get vengeance for everything that had ruined life since the very beginning.

  But…

  “No,” said Lucy. “I know you believe there’s no hope for you. But I want to believe there is. I want to believe in you. As long as you let me understand!”

  “Shut up!”

  All of a sudden, Lucy’s body felt weak, and the Dreamer shoved her back with surprising ease. Lucy barely caught herself back on her hands as the Dreamer climbed out from under her and rose to her feet, glaring down at Lucy.

  “Wait!” Lucy reached her hand out, toward the Dreamer, toward the promise of using her own endless empathy to solve the unsolvable. “I—”

  The Dreamer’s eyes flickered, her irises becoming green balls of energy that crackled with energy. When they pierced into Lucy’s eyes, her entire body froze, and then it was as if the connection between her mind and every nerve in her body had been severed, for she could not move anything.

  Lucy’s mind flew into disarray as she remembered a similar experience all too vividly: the queen from Kenneth’s Dream using a control enchantment with her eyes. And unlike last time, Diana the Knight of Rebellion wasn’t here to break the curse.

  The Dreamer’s face, meanwhile, had become shrouded in darkness despite the stark white of their surroundings. Her expression, besides her glaring eyes, was completely obscured, shutting out any possibility for Lucy to scrutinize what she was feeling beyond hatred. The darkness surrounding her seemed not of this world, like it was coming from a distant realm, an ancient, primeval corner that somehow felt strangely familiar on a deep level…the collective unconscious?

  But Lucy had no time to ponder this further as the Dreamer took Lucy’s motionless body, using her newfound strength once again, and began carrying Lucy toward the wall that led back to the maze of darkness. Lucy was screaming and thrashing about mentally, but no matter what she did, she could not break the impenetrable force of the curse the Dreamer had placed on her.

  It felt like an eternity, this dragging of Lucy’s body to the wall, but in truth it only took seconds before the Dreamer stopped, grunted, and threw Lucy through the white wall.

  Lucy landed on the metallic floor, her landing harsh as her body was still completely immobile and unable to catch herself. The familiar, absolute darkness engulfed her senses in the blink of an eye.

  Lucy had never felt more alone. And hopelessly frustrated. Where had she gone wrong? She had seen the Dreamer’s memories, and understood her on such a deep level that she immediately cried for her despite everything. She had been so close, so very close to fixing everything in the Dream of this unfixable person through the sheer goodness of Understanding, so why was she here now in the darkness, alone and completely helpless with no way back to the person she’d been so close to rescuing?

  Her only answer was the deep rumbling and roaring and whirring of a colossal machine.