His surroundings started to fade. His instinct failed. The table vanished. The walls became a barrier between reality and Kaelen's imagination, slowly fading, losing each property they had. The tiles lost their weight and smoothness. The world had turned brighter and easier to read.
Kaelen noticed the absence of sound of their planning first. Lifting up his face, he saw nothing, not black, just nothing. For a moment his breath stopped, and his tensed joints shook.
He rubbed where he thought his eyes were, forcing his eyes to open. "Ack—" He scratched his eyeball.
A light, not too far away. From it, walls emerged; a small cluster of shining particles followed like they had been waiting for the walls.
When the scratched eye opened. Everything stretched.
Sky; ocean, which was too far but still visible; shore; villages; towns; and mountains. Everything that Kaelen had ever heard of emerged.
Walls in nowhere didn't exist anymore; he stood in the middle of a road in a well-developed city, the kind of place he wanted to live in.
A voice came down the road. Of a middle-aged man. Unhurried. "There's nothing to worry about, Kaelen."
The man didn't have a form yet; it was Kaelen's imagination that gave him a body.
Kaelen had never seen that man, yet he knew who it was. "Rowan?" he asked.
"Your first question should have been, 'What is this place?' or 'How do I get out?' Still, you asked for my name."
"So you really are Rowan."
"Don't expect answers from me until you ask for them."
Kaelen sighed and looked at the road. "What is this place? I do remember something like this when Aurelion brought me here, but it was too blurry."
"This is the void — the place where consciousness is stored. Our consciousness is given a place usually as big as a room, but yours is a bit bigger than that, almost as big as a country."
There was a hidden smile beneath Kaelen's face; it could be read but was impossible to see from the surface.
Kaelen opened his mouth.
Rowan knew that; he warned Kaelen. "Don't be too proud of yourself; there have been apostles stronger than God who still died, unable to do anything. Aurelion is almost as strong as you, and yet he still hasn't done anything significant."
That smile turned into a grin; he couldn't help it.
"How did I come here, and how do I get out?"
"I won't tell you until you leave that arrogance of yours."
"You are the arrogant one here; you don't even give straight answers."
"You seem to believe improvement is something that comes from results or beliefs, but all you do is change the way you think of yourself," he said. "You understand everything and you believe in the right things, but never accept them."
Kaelen giggled and said in a loud voice, like the chosen one he thought of himself as, "Never in my life have I seen someone more capable of change than me; I keep changing. In a few months I change so much that I think of my old self as a lowly being."
There was no break between any of Rowan's replies. Every word came in an instant. "To change yourself, you need to understand yourself, not the self you want to become. Understanding your flaws or why you are like that is the first step to improve."
There was a long silence; night came and brought strange voices with it.
Rowan started fading pixel by pixel. "It's my time to leave then," he said before vanishing.
Rowan had left. Kaelen had gotten no answers, and the night was lethal.
The city was too big, and his void was still lonely. His own country was unable to give him a feeling of home.
His footsteps made almost no sound, as if there was no weight in the floor.
A sound came from the sky. "So much talent, and all of it going to waste. Then another. "You don't deserve any of this; I am there working so hard, and you get all of this without leaving your room.". Then the third. "How long will you keep hating everything? Just saying 'happens' is not a solution, Kaelennn."
They were the way he remembered people and what they said. It took him so long to forget about them, and now they are back.
Every time he heard the voices, a sharp pain all over his body could be sensed. Each word was like a sword falling from the sky, and it rained, striking every place. Each hit had a corrupted feel to it that turned your brain upside down.
It started raining; each drop hit like something harder than water had any right to be.
He ran into the closest house, covered each gap, blocking out every sound, and covered his ears with pillows. The sounds didn't stop; that was when his void stopped being his. These things had been given too much importance by Kaelen to the point that they controlled every change in him.
But how could they taunt him without his ears? Kaelen moved everything he had put up to stop the noise and went to the kitchen. Unable to walk, his body had forgotten everything he did from instinct. He took big leaps, as big as he could.
His hands started shaking as he picked up the knife and brought it closer to his ear. He slipped it. The sound of it dropping was too loud for a floor with no weight.
He picked it up again.
He tried to cut his ear in one try.
Blood hit the floor, but the voices still came.
Slowly he butchered his own ear, not stopping; there was nothing left.
The voices were still there.
He did the same for his other ear.
Blood stained his hand. No pain. No pain at all.
The knife slipped; he really had lost his hearing.
"Do you think you can run from us? We are the ones who control you."
"No, you don't. This is my void; get out."
A familiar voice came this time. Rowan. "But do you actually mean it?"
Kaelen screamed as he covered the hole where his ear had been. "You get out too."
"Kaelen, if you don't gain back control over yourself, then both of us are doomed to end before this end."
Screams came raining down from the sky—not voices this time, something older and louder. Blood ran from the hole where his ear had been, faster than it should have.
Kaelen lost his ability to think; he was nothing more than a statue. As he lay on the ground.
The voices didn't stop. "Tired so early?"