"Remove your shirt."
"Uh..." Kaelen removed his shirt. His physique had changed. It looked as if he had just gotten out of the gym.
Caeran crouched in front of him and took a look at the chains. "Something shifted in you. Can't quite place what it is." Caeran pulled a chain towards him.
"Nothing." Caeran mumbled.
"Is it bad?"
"No, these are." Caeran tilted his head. "Strange..."
Caeran got up. "Meet me tomorrow."
Kaelen put his shirt back on.
Caeran placed himself onto a chair. In front of his laptop. He looked at a model of the chains that he had created.
Caeran shouted from his chair after Kaelen left. "You should discuss with Aurelion too. He might know a thing or two."
Kaelen didn't respond, just nodded and stepped out of the room.
Kaelen felt his way to Aurelion's room from the stairs.
Aurelion was inside the room. He sat alone on his bed. His eyes were down. His body ready to fall.
"Can I come in?" Kaelen asked after he was at the center of the room.
Aurelion tapped the bed twice.
Kaelen sat beside him.
"What would you do if the same choice found you again? Not once. Every few decades, same room, same face refusing to change, and you kept making it anyway."
Kaelen shut his eyes for a few seconds. "I would start all over again. I am going to live anyways. Better to live my life than someone else's."
Aurelion turned at him with his head down. "But what if those choices saved the world many times?"
Kaelen looked him in the eye. They went deeper than before. For the first time, his eyes didn't wander deep into Kaelen. Kaelen looked down at the bedsheet. "I would still call it. You can never know where those choices would have led you. Nor will you know about the next choice. Your act of selfishness, which you think is service to the people. It isn't. You don't do it because you want to save them. You do it because you want to defeat gods."
"Selfishness? Giving away everything for selfishness? No," Aurelion placed his hand towards Kaelen and moved his head towards him. "Don't pretend you're a philosopher. You have no idea how many times I have heard that." Each word came with its own gap.
Kaelen looked him in the eye, like he normally would. "I never wanted to be. Nor did I try to be one. If you don't want to accept it then don't."
Aurelion smiled.
"Oh, yeah. I remember now. I wanted to ask you something," said Kaelen, his face coming closer.
"What?"
"Rowan had a way to reach the true world. Or someone else did. Or maybe will have. I don't know how and whom. But they did reach it for sure."
"So did you."
"Hmm?" Kaelen pretended to not hear it correctly.
"When I was bringing you from the statue room. I traveled you through it. It's called void, by the way."
"You did... How?" Kaelen lunged forward on his knees.
"With you. I can't go there alone; the gods will kill me. But they couldn't touch you."
"Couldn't we kill them there?" Kaelen came closer again.
"No, they have spent so long understanding that place. We can't kill them there."
"So we have to learn it? That's easy. You went there once, why not again."
"We succeeded once. It doesn't mean that it's safe."
A long silence filled the room. Aurelion got busy in his journal.
Kaelen turned towards Aurelion and said in a soft voice, "Hey, Aurelion."
He stalled his pen mid-sentence. "Hmm?" His voice had lost its usual weight.
"What makes me so different?" Kaelen observed his own hands at a level deeper than he ever had. They weren't so manly after all. They were soft. His fingers were average. Maybe he wasn't so different. "I lived all my life like this. And I never found myself different."
Aurelion wrote the ideas before they escaped. And shifted his gaze toward Kaelen. "Maybe here." He shrugged. "But not in the place that matters to us," he said, pointing at both of them. "You are still learning to use them in this world. And I don't think that you never thought that you were different."
Kaelen stared at a corner of the room. "But how can I rival someone who has lived in that world when I haven't?"
"I don't know. But I trusted you enough to still put everything on you. Remember that."
"Even the people who owe me everything never trusted me this much. What makes you so confident in me?"
"Earlier you said that you never felt different from the crowd." He paused. "I doubt that."
"I really wasn't good at anything. I used to wake up late. Procrastinate. Feel guilty. Procrastinate even more because I feel guilty."
Aurelion switched his attention back to his diary.
Kaelen giggled. "Ah, fuck." He paused with a long smile. "Who am I even lying to?" He paused again. "I was just better. At everything I did, I always learned faster, improved faster. I was smarter in every way. I was always different from the crowd. And I know I was always right." He ended it with an even longer smile.
Aurelion flicked his pen towards Kaelen and got back to his journaling.
"I guess it's time for me to leave."
A soft hmm came from Aurelion.
Now that Kaelen took a clear look at it. The house was bigger than the previous one. There wasn't a basement. But it had multiple floors. It didn't look bigger than a floor or two from the outside. He had already seen the stairs to the third floor. There could be even more.
Kaelen opened the door to his room.
Kaelen's body turned heavier. His body acted on its own. Kaelen slammed himself against the wall.