It was all a haze for a moment. Then the blurriness started to fade, and the pain came. It felt like someone was pinching Aurelius on the area between his navel and hip, as well as on the area between his index and middle finger of his left hand.

Despite the pain, Aurelius pushed his upper body back towards the wall behind his bed. His neck was awfully tight, but he had no energy to give it a good crack. He simply moved his eyes around.

He looked at his own miserable condition first. His waist and hand were wrapped in bandages, and he had bruises in places he didn't remember being hit on. His wrist was also of an unpleasant, greenish color. He remembered thinking it was sprained the first time he hit the Commander. He wasn't sure what it was, but it didn't look good or feel good.

Then he looked to his sides. He lay on the other half of a large bed in an unfamiliar room of comfortable size. All of it seemed to have been built out of wooden planks of different textures and shades. What caught his attention was that on the other side of the bed lay an abused blanket; somebody had been sleeping right beside him.

He looked at the nightstand beside the other side of the bed. His notebook was there. His precious gray notebook that could do no wrong. Why was it out of his bag? Finally, his gaze traveled to his companion.

Cade was sitting on the windowsill in thin clothing, her legs curled up against her chest. Just then, the sound of raindrops revealed itself to Aurelius. He hadn't heard them before, but they'd been there the whole time. Aurelius hadn't been hearing the world, but it had been there, talking to him. Now he was listening.

Cade hadn't seemed to notice Aurelius waking up yet. No, of course she had. She just chose to hold her hand against the window and watch as the drops of rain raced down the window.

Aurelius stayed quiet. Was he supposed to greet her, thank her, curse her, or what was it? Aurelius didn't feel like saying it, whatever he was going to say. He just watched Cade.

Her figure was still. She looked so peaceful. It was as if she was untethered from the world. Nothing could touch her, but she couldn't touch anything. It was sad in a way, but so beautiful.

Aurelius noticed that her hair had grown. As he looked at her at that moment, he couldn't believe she would ever hurt a person. Perhaps that was what people thought when they looked at him as well. He looked at his right hand. Those people would be wrong now. He was no longer what people saw outside. He couldn't claim to be. His existence had become something of an unintentional lie.

He looked back at Cade. Her eyes had turned. They were pointed directly at him and his sorry frame. She really looked different. Aurelius wondered how long it had been. It couldn't have been more than a few days. Suddenly, he faintly remembered waking up on their way back from the Boerlow mansion. He had cried for her to let go and even hit her as she carried him before he quickly tired out and lost consciousness again.

However, there was no judgment in Cade's eyes. Her eyes seemed to be lighter. They were always so dark while they were out, but as the window reflected light into them, a silver flow appeared. He had the urge to hug her, but he remembered that the world wasn't his servant. Cade wasn't his caretaker. She had her own issues and didn't exist to bother herself with Aurelius' troubles. He had no right to push it onto others, so he didn't. He just clenched his hands into fists around his blanket.

"How do you feel?" Cade asked, leaning back against the wall beside the windowsill.

"I..." Aurelius began before stopping to breathe. Then his shoulders dropped. He trembled slightly, holding back vomit. "Why are we here, Cade?"

Cade's thin eyebrows tilted slightly as she pulled them down. "Why are we... in this inn?"

"No." Aurelius shook his head slightly before uttering with a fluctuating voice, "Why are we here in this world, doing what we are doing?" Aurelius looked at the planks on the roof. "Why should we... I keep going?"

"We are supposed to," Cade said with a light knock on the window. Aurelius looked at her. She looked away. "We are strong and gifted, and all the things that tie us to duty. We have to do it. We are supposed to do it. You know, one is lucky if they get to be without the choice of 'what am I going to do with my life?'. I and you have it right under our noses. Do everything in your power to make the world better, it says. Other people can't do as much as us, and they really like using that fact as reasoning as to why all the work should be left to us. They are right. Can't say they aren't. But I made up my mind long ago. I don't need duty. I made a promise to myself to protect the beauty in this world. That's why I keep going. It's the same for you, isn't it?"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"A hero." Aurelius chuckled. The chuckle turned to a cough. Once that was over, he laid down again. "Gabriel asked me what I wanted to be... how I wanted to live. I told him I would be a hero. I would help everybody. Make the good prosper, and make the bad into good."

"You were always going to fail if it's something like that."

Aurelius looked down at his hand and pressed on the wound behind the bandages. "I guess so. You protect the good without caring for the bad. Maybe I should too, but I want everybody to be what they can be at their best. The world could be so good."

"The world could be, but it isn't, and it won't be," Cade said with a sigh. "Until you accept that reality, you won't be able to achieve anything. The steps your ideal world requires are steps that no human society can take, especially not this one. And besides, people will always seek conflict. Negativity is present everywhere. Give a man paradise, and the first thing he'll do is complain. Better to focus on preserving the good than on changing the bad. It's really all that we can do with the power we have."

"Hmm." Aurelius stretched his body to grab his notebook from the side. "You read my notebook?" he asked after getting his hands on the thing and returning to his original position.

"I'm sorry," Cade said and lowered her head slightly. "I let my curiosity get the best of me."

Aurelius tapped his fingers on the notebook's gray leather cover. "You could've put it back, and I wouldn't have known."

"I know."

"I don't blame you," Aurelius said, opening the notebook. "Though I am a bit embarrassed," he said with a slight smile that didn't match his sorrowful eyes that pointed to the first page of the notebook. On the page, it read "the world is yours" in all capital letters. The letters were made up of a bunch of messy lines drawn with a heavy hand, and the text went diagonally from the upper left corner to the lower right corner.

"I don't think it's embarrassing," Cade said softly as she turned and hung her legs off the windowsill.

Aurelius snorted quietly and flipped through some pages before finding the quote he was looking for. Then he read it out loud, "Some animals in this world only seek to destroy. And not for the sake of their survival, but just for their entertainment. Those types of animals are okay to kill since it makes the world a better place." After he finished, he looked at Cade, who still sat on the windowsill with a complex expression. It seemed she was tensely waiting for Aurelius to tell her his thoughts. He proceeded to do so. "We were hunting when he said that. I wrote it in my notebook later that day, according to memory. I don't think I forgot anything, but I wish I did. Gabriel was in the Zalfarian Elite Troop. He must've killed hundreds, if not thousands. What I wrote must've been his rationale when it came to killing." Aurelius spilled his thoughts, and a glint appeared at the bottom of his eyes. He turned his gaze away from the eyes of Cade, looking up at the roof instead. "I thought it was okay for me to kill, too. I thought it wouldn't be that bad. But it is. It's horrible. I put my bare hand through a man's chest. I practically ripped out his heart. Or his soul. And life just went away. At that moment, it didn't matter if he was good or bad. I could do that to him regardless. I could kill anyone. Good or bad. How can it be right for me to have such power? The guy also wasn't all bad. He had a family. He had love in his life. Possibly more than I do. He was a murderer for sure, though, so maybe I did make the world a better place. But what does that matter?"

Cade stood up and stepped closer. "It does matter. You may be a murderer now, and because of that, you may feel like you can't be what you want to be anymore. But you can. You can be a hero. As Balgair said, a hero isn't someone who is perfectly in tune with upright ideals, but someone who is capable of letting go of those ideals in order to change the world for the better. And that's what you have done."

Aurelius looked at Cade with his eyelids lowered. "Everything is a mistake," he said, before he put his hand on the page where the quote was and ripped it off. "I'm done." He crumpled up the page and threw it at Cade before turning his back and wrapping himself in his warm blanket.