Lucy hadn’t spoken her question with any particular forcefulness or volume, yet her voice echoed through the sky like a heavy bell that had been struck. It was invigorating, the way this allowed her words to carry on trailing into the distance rather than quickly fading the way she would have expected. But at the same time, there was foreboding in how the lingering words continued to seek an answer that might not be so pleasant.

  The King stood silent for a moment, letting the after-impression of Lucy’s words reach the horizon. Just before Lucy began to tremble from anxiety, he said: “Your Final Dream is the last Dream you will experience in your lifetime.”

  “In my lifetime…?” Lucy muttered to herself, and this time her voice did fade quickly. It sounded like what she had feared, at the edge of her mind, but surely…

  “In the waking world,” the King began as the entire world grew slightly dimmer, as if the sun were waning, “you are slumbering your last sleep, before passing from the realm of the living.”

  The wanderings of the clouds, the shimmering rays from the sun, the lapping of the wind—all of it ceased as the world came to a stand-still.

  She was dying.

  She was practically already dead.

  It didn’t strike with much surprise, as this matched exactly the portentous theory hidden in the shadow at the corner of Lucy’s mind. But hearing it spoken by the King’s voice, his deep, grave tone flooding over every inch of the open air, driving away any gaps of ambiguity or doubt—the sheer authority behind it struck like shattering a mirror.

  “No,” Lucy said, the burning in her throat and eyes making her own voice come out as a pitiful yelp. She’d said that as an instinctual reaction of denial, but she realized it wasn’t completely unfounded. This was all still a dream, and this “news” was being relayed by a literal figment of imagination. For all she knew, she could pinch herself and wake up to the four white walls of her bedroom, their blankness silently urging her to get ready for class or make her lunch for work or set up her desk for studying.

  Come to think of it, what had she been doing before falling asleep and waking up in this dream?

  There was a big, glaring hole in the fabric of her recent memory. What she’d been doing, what her situation was, even what she’d been thinking before falling asleep—all of these were suspiciously absent. And in the gaps left by their absence, the King’s claim sought to fill them in, to imply that if Lucy were to pinch herself awake right now…

  Lucy dropped her hand from her face, suddenly terrified at the prospect of waking herself up only to enter another deeper, infinite slumber.

  “To block out one’s recent memory is not unheard of,” said the King. “It is a common phenomenon for those entering their Final Dream, allowing themselves to experience peace and contentment before passing on.”

  “How…” Lucy gulped, struggling to find her voice despite having used it so firmly only moments ago. “How do you know all this?”

  The King was an extension of herself, and though she’d had a passing interest in Psychology, she had no recollection of reading anything about these “Final Dreams.”

  “It is true that I originate from your subconscious,” said the King, proving their deep interconnection by having seemingly read her mind. “However, unlike your conscious mind, your subconscious is far from an isolated space. All people who are able to dream—all Dreamers—are interconnected through humanity’s collective unconscious. Final Dreams are experienced by every individual who has ever been connected to the collective unconscious, and so that knowledge is made manifest in myself.”

  Lucy nodded, but she could not help frowning gravely. The explanation made sense, but it was difficult to accept that her conscious mind had deliberately blocked out memories because this was, indeed, the last dream she would ever dream. If she accepted that, it meant accepting that she…she…

  In her desperation, she clung to the one thing she could think of that went against the King’s explanation, that meant there was more to all of this and she hadn’t already set one foot through death’s door.

  “But I’m here now,” said Lucy, “listening to you say this is my last dream. If…if my mind just wanted me to be happy, why would it make me have this conversation with you and make me worry about all this?”

  Her question resounded across the sky, much like the original question she had posed. Despite that, the King did not move from where he floated over the world, proud and upright. Lucy wished he had a face, for the inscrutability of his non-existent expression made the words she’d spoken seem ineffectual. She wanted to leave, go back down to the fields, and forget all that she had learned so she could actually be content and peaceful—but now that she knew, there was no going back. She was trapped now, bound to a fate she didn’t want, and that was enough to make the hot tears well in her eyes again.

  The King continued to be unfazed, even as she began to wipe at her eyes. However, some moments later, he said: “Although your question was largely rhetorical, there is, in fact, an answer to it. And this answer ties into the true reason for our meeting.”

  Lucy gasped. The King spoke all of this with his usual calm and even tone, but his last remark carried a weight to it that exceeded the boundaries of the world below and the infinite stretches of the sky. If she were to hear him out, there was no doubt that there would truly be no turning back from all she had learned just now.

  She didn’t have to. From everything the King had been saying until now, he seemed intent on instilling in her the notion that she herself was still very much in control. She could shake her head, tell him, yell at him to speak no further, to let her leave this maddeningly expansive chamber and keep to herself for the rest of this dream’s duration.

  But despite how easy this could have been, she did none of it. An anxious but playful urge had taken hold of her, pricking her skin with little sparks of excitement as if an ice wind were washing over her in small, concentrated bursts. It was impossible to keep still, to ignore the desire to press on and find out more. Yes, this was the all the all-too familiar and often conflicting hand of her own curiosity, pushing her to seize these answers for her mind to devour. But it also told her to not back down, to accept that it was right for her to want to know.

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  After all, if everything she’d learned so far were true, this would be her last chance to know.

  And so it was with the cat’s paw of curiosity tickling her lips that Lucy said: “What is that reason?”

  The King shifted slightly, the constant shifting of colours on his robes momentarily frozen until his posture settled. One of his robed arms was outstretched, proudly, toward Lucy, as if presenting her to an unseen audience. The sun even grew a tad brighter, becoming a celestial spotlight.

  “You are here,” said the King, “because you have the potential to become a Dream Knight.”

  “Dream Knight?”

  Lucy could not help spitting the term back out the moment it reached her ears. The two words had left an overwhelmingly strange taste on her tongue, saccharine sweet and oversaturated in the plentiful, fanciful myriad of flavours that could only come from childhood fantasies.

  A Dream Knight.

  Did that mean a knight who steps into reality from the land of dreams, moving and speaking with an affected, dreamlike tone? Or perhaps a knight who fights with the power of dreams, and hopes, ideals, illuminating their sword with brilliant light? Either of these were the kinds of doodles and sketches Lucy would have drawn in notebooks when she was a decade and a half younger, and so it was hard to believe that this great and wise King could be speaking about that.

  And yet, despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of it all, Lucy couldn’t ignore a part of herself that felt oddly…giddy about the idea, and the King’s claim that she could become one. This in itself was embarrassing, but still it was enough to have made her question come out not with rebuke but with genuine anticipation.

  “Yes,” the King said. “Among individuals who experience their Final Dream, there are those who devote themselves to travelling to other Dreams, meeting other Dreamers, and rescuing them from harm. Of course, such individuals are a precious few. Most would be content staying within their Final Dream, cherishing their fleeting time.”

  “Rescuing other Dreamers from harm…” said Lucy. So that was what the “Knight” part actually meant, turning out to be different from either of the possibilities she had guessed. While that sounded valiant enough, as a knight rightfully should be, the concept by itself didn’t sit right with her. “Is there…any benefit to that? Do they remember after waking up?”

  “The memory does not stay with them,” said the King. “But the effect remains. As Dreams are manifestations of one’s inner mental state, so too are the perils of Dreams often manifestations of problems in the waking world. Rescuing them will not make those problems disappear, but many a time they will uplift Dreamers out of their mental valleys and ignite a new perspective for change.”

  “I see…” It was certainly beginning to make sense to Lucy, but the whole notion was still impossible to swallow. Namely… “And I’m one of these ‘Dream Knights?’”

  “You have the potential to be, if you so choose.” The King stated this matter-of-factly, but there was a change of energy in the wind that felt like a nudge, a beckoning onward. “It is an exceedingly rare thing, that potential. I cannot force you down any particular path, for I am merely a conduit and reflection of knowledge. But you may well wish to consider the motivation that has always been at your side, laying dormant until now.”

  “I think…there’s got to be a misunderstanding.” Lucy couldn’t help her voice coming out tremulous and faint, much like when she spoke to her shift manager about mistakes in her schedule. She wanted to sound firm and clear up the misunderstanding, but in some cruel irony of the universe, the more she wanted to be heard, the feebler her voice became. “I’m not a knight. I don’t rescue people.”

  The wind calmed, and the King regarded her silently. She wasn’t sure if he was appalled or merely waiting for her to elaborate, but she continued on, letting loose the thoughts that had bubbled up to the surface of her mind and threatened to spill over. “If…if this really is my last dream, then I’ll die without having done anything. For anyone. How…how can you call that a knight?”

  “That would certainly appear to be the case, wouldn’t it?” The King’s voice was as all-encompassing as ever, but it sounded gentler, somehow, as the wind picked up ever so gently into a quiet breeze that tickled Lucy’s fingertips. The King said: “It would seem impossible given who you are, or rather, who you believe yourself to be. But there is far more to your being, even if you have never spoken as such out loud, even to yourself. In fact, your final experience in the waking world is very good proof of that.”

  “My final experience?” Lucy wanted so desperately to remember, for she could not believe that anything she had ever done was exemplary of a knight, but the more she grasped for that marble of memory, the more it slipped down the drain of forgetfulness. “I…I can’t remember.”

  “Do not admonish yourself for that, for it is expected. You see…” The King spread his robed arms wide, indicating the world around them. “When a detailed Dream such as this is spun, many of your memories and experiences are flung off from your conscious mind and become the fabric of everything in this world. Those memories are not inside you, at the moment, but they are still present. Rather than searching your mind internally, you need only will your memories to take form, and they shall manifest before you.”

  “Like…the clouds?” She remembered taking that first step out onto the floor-less chamber, and the half-second of terror and relief of finding that a tiny cloud had appeared just where her foot had wanted to go.

  “Precisely,” said the King. “In fact, the clouds themselves are the easiest to reshape, as they are wandering thoughts. If you so wish, you may have them create a stage and actors to re-enact the night before your slumber.”

  His manner appeared expectant again, and though Lucy was still bewildered, she nodded. The King graciously stepped aside, one robe outstretched to his side as he headed toward the opposite side, indicating that the chamber was all hers for this re-enactment.

  Will the clouds to show her last memories… It sounded simple enough in words, but Lucy still couldn’t wrap her head around the ability to summon and now mold clouds just by thinking. It seemed…wrong, to have the world bend to her commands like this, as the real world—the “waking world” as the King said—had so thoroughly imprinted into her mind that such a thing was unrealistic.

  But then, this world was unrealistic. And if the King were to be believed, it was all made up from herself, and herself alone. Knowing that, there couldn’t be anything wrong with being selfish for once, with indulging in her curiosity, with wanting to cling to the small, minuscule possibility that maybe she did, truly, have what it took to be considered a “knight.”

  Gazing out across the sky, Lucy watched the clouds slowly flitting by, all wildly different in shape and form, but all far larger than herself, even surpassing the King’s grand stature. That in itself was daunting already; how could she mold things that dwarfed her entire body, let alone her own two hands?

  You are not small.

  The King’s words resonated within her mind. They had made her cry, but now they quelled the shaking in her hands. Her hands were small, as was the rest of her, but that wasn’t the thing to focus on right now. Much like how those tiny clouds had appeared beneath her feet because she needed them there, these larger clouds had to be remolded because she needed to know more about her own life circumstances. How she could possibly accomplish that didn’t matter—she just had to believe she could make it so.