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The half-sized door on the wall was just like any of the doors I'd seen. It was completely normal except for the fact that it was small. I walked to the door, while my hand was reaching for the doorknob. The gap I made between the wall and the headboard was a bit small but enough for me to fit in.

In all fairness, the wall was clean. No cobwebs. No dirt. It was clean, but of course, it wasn't the perfect type of clean. I was thinking that the old man used to go here so often, and that was the reason why it needed no cleaning.

Wait. Is this his room? I thought, looking at the gray walls of the bedroom.

While shaking my head, I twisted the doorknob. The door wasn't heavy, but it made a sound, a creaking sound. I exhaled then bent over to enter the smallest doorway I had seen yet (of all the memories I still had).

I made my first steps after standing up from sitting on my haunches, and I didn't mind closing the door. I was thinking that I might be trapped. It was difficult to trust things-even if it was just a door.

It was too late when I noticed that I was in a hall of a normal height, which was-well-far from the height of that door. The hall was lit with, like, magical lights from above. I kept on walking until I reached the end of the empty hall.

I was walking with speed, but I didn't know why I was walking so quickly. There was no good reason for me to do so. It was just then that I realized that I was at the end of the hall. . . when I had both of my hands against the wall. I glanced around the hall, and I finally understood.

This is not a hall. This is a room, an elongated room.

Awesomely big, it was.

Removing my hands off of the wall, I looked down on my feet. Wow, I thought as I saw my bare feet. With my eyes exploring the room, I took the changing view in. The plain walls of the hall started to have materializing things. Then suddenly, the walls were almost covered with large and tall bookcases placed against them.

I took little steps around as the room had different things arranged in it. The bookcases were quickly filled with books of two colors-scarlet-colored books on the right and navy-colored ones on the left. All of them differed in thickness. I wondered why. Faster than how I thought it would be, the room looked like a library. This is so confusing, I thought. I don't even know what these are for.

The bookcases of the blue books, which were so disorderly, were three. The second bookcase had a book that looked so interesting. It was thin, and it wasn't the thinnest among the blue books, but I didn't even know how it caught my attention. It just felt like there was something special in it.

I walked to the second bookcase of the blue books, so I could take the book. My fingers had the book cover's surface at their tips when the room darkened. I promptly pulled the book from the shelf I could barely see. Then, neon lights went slowly flashing around, and when I turned around to see where the lights came from, I discovered that they came from the only bare wall I'd seen here. Right-two walls had bookshelves against them, while the opposite of the bare wall, which I noticed just by then, was filled with clocks of different sizes and colors. And there was the half-sized door I left open.

"Athene," a voice called out, then I looked back at the bare wall. No one was there.

"Wh-who is there?" I asked and hugged the book in my hand as I felt the coldness crawling inside the room.

"Good evening, Athene," another voice said, and it was completely different from the female voice I had heard moments ago.

The neon lights kept flashing around, but it started getting faster that I couldn't stand it anymore. I shut my eyes close as I hugged the book even tighter.

"Oh, hi there, Athene," the female voice said when I couldn't sense the flashing neon lights through my eyelids anymore.

I quickly opened my eyes, and the neon lights were no more flashing around. They were materialized into three-dimensional images of a man and a woman. They. . . Skyler and Winston? I looked down at my feet. Bonnie. . . that word-bonnie. I was remembering something about it.

I stood still with my eyes fixed in between my feet. Bonnie. . . he calls her 'bonnie.'

"You call her 'Bonnie,' right?" I asked Winston as I raised my head to see them clearly. What looked strange was the look of the colors that portrayed them. They were neon.

"Pardon?" Winston asked back. That made me feel aware that I asked a question. Good skies, I did not know I asked something.

"You call Skyler 'Bonnie,' right?" I asked again as I let my memories rush in. "Why do you call her that way instead of her name?"

Memories started flooding my head at an irritatingly slow pace. They were always about a manor, a humongous one. And there were lots of people I once greeted like I knew them so well.

Winston chuckled and put his hand on Skyler's shoulder, then he said, "Yeah, why?"

"I'm curious," I said, still keeping myself thinking right. My thoughts were overwhelming. I didn't know I had this much memories. "I just wanna ask." And they were still flooding my head.

"Well, she is gorgeous, so I call her that." Winston said as he looked at Skyler. His eyes were smiling at her. . . and it was like I heard his voice saying, "I'm the luckiest one," although there was no voice to listen to at that moment. Skyler was shaking her head and making a poker face.

"What do you call that again?" I asked as I recalled another powerful memory-when I was talking with Winston and Skyler about a feeling. . . a feeling I had never felt.

--

"So why do you keep saying she's so perfect when you're saying Skyler has lots of scars?" I asked, smiling. I couldn't explain the feeling. It was happy because it was beautiful-the view of them, sharing the mutual feelings. And it was, kind of, sad because I didn't know how that feels.

"I don't know," Winston said as he was grinning. "I don't know if it's just me, but I believe that when you love someone, you can see the best in them, and their imperfections are just an illusion. The flaws and gaps they have in their personality? Those are things that you have to fill in, and. . . you can say she's perfect."

"She's perfect," he continued as he smiled at Skyler, "because the both of you as a pair-you can feel it-are perfect because you are one."

"So that thing was love?" I asked, smiling at Skyler, who was hiding her face by looking down. They were already aged, and it's just so beautiful.

If they really found the thing called love, they must be lucky.

"Yeah," Skyler looked at me then smiled.

"How do you define it?" I asked again.

Skyler wasn't the kind of woman who would like to talk about things. She won't answer a lot about "philosophical" things, as humans call it.

Winston's said, "Love is. . . something simply beautiful. It was something others describe 'complicated,' but I don't know. It's either there was something or there was someone that was making it complicated, but love itself isn't."

--

"Love. That's it." After Winston said that, Skyler lifted her head up.

"That's really cool," I said, although I didn't really know what to feel about it. "I'm curious of how experiencing love feels."

"You will get to that soo-"

"Athene, your stay in that world will be wonderful if you focus on the thing you have to do," Skyler said, cutting Winston's statement, while Winston was just smiling at the serious Skyler.

"That world is wonderful," Skyler continued. "You may not agree with it by now, but believe me, you'll have your own reason of finding it wonderful. . . or even magical."

While chuckling, Winston said, "Bonnie, you're getting too serious."

So that means I'm beautiful in Aisle's eyes, I thought but immediately shook it out of my head.

"I'm just telling everything I've to tell," Skyler argued. "I'll forget them later. You know how important these instructions are."

"Alright, alright, Bonnie."

Skyler cleared her throat and looked down then smiled at me, and I was back to reality's neon figures of Skyler and Winston.

"First of all, Athene, you have to know your Fate Keeper identity number," Skyler said. "You already know what Fate Keepers do, so I'll just proceed."

"Oh, come on," Winston said; he sounded like he was butting in, although he has something to do with everything Skyler was talking about. He, himself, was one of the best Fate Keepers. "You should explain everything."

"She grew up in the Keepers' Manor."

"No, everyone of us did. Explain it, Bonnie."

"Alright, alright," Skyler made a sweet smile, and it was completely confusing. "Fate Keepers keep fate on the right track. Fate Keepers manage fate books. The books on the left, the blue ones, are fate books. They contain the records of what must happen in every human's life."

I glanced at the bookcases of the blue books and at the book I was holding.

"Fate books," Skyler said, making me look back at her neon image. "That's the proper term."

I nodded in response since I thought it was impolite to just listen.

"The fate books are incredibly numerous, and Fate Keepers in the past had to look into every single fate book just to know what to do. Now, you'll just have to listen to what we tracked."

My job wasn't as easy as I thought it would be back in the Keepers' Manor. Winston was right-I grew up in there, the home of all Fate Keepers, but there were secrets, especially about how the world of these creatures-including humans-works. Winston was right. Even if I grew up in the Keepers' Manor, I still didn't know a lot of things.

"Inspired by the technology of humans, over there are useful things Fate Keepers use," Skyler said as she pointed to the wall of the clocks (and many more), and it was only then that I realized there were more things in the area of the clocks. "You can determine time of different countries by looking at those. . . clocks."

As I glanced at the wall, I tried my best to remember how clocks are read. And I remembered it well. I just couldn't see the clocks because they were too far from me, but I was sure the clocks had labels. Maybe I can see the countries' names there.

"Now, the red books on the right are fate books of Fate Keepers," she said. "There are Keepers' Recorders. You have one, and you'll meet whoever that is when the time comes."

I was doing my best to take everything in. The things she explained were important and interesting, but I was starting to lose track of it.

"Athene," Winston said, and I snapped my eyes open.

Good skies, what have I gotten myself into? I should have tried to stay awake harder. Now, I don't know what to do.

"Athene, I think you should sleep now," Skyler said, noticing my sleepy eyes. "Some Fate Keepers tend to forget their past once they step on that world. And remembering it all at once is a difficult task. It isn't normal."

"We suggest you sleep now," Winston said, and I felt happy yet too overwhelmed to show it. "Go now. After you wake up, proceed back here."

"Thank you, thank you," I said, and before the neon lights could disappear, I ran towards the other end of the elongated room. I bent over to enter the small door, and as though magically, the neon lights were replaced by the white lights.

Finally, I was out of the room, and my feet were on the bedroom floor of the old brick house.

As my eyes landed on the bed, I didn't care who it was for as memories still continued rushing in my head. The book was still in my hand while my eyelids tried hard to open themselves, but when my back landed on the softness of the gray bed, I fell into the sleep I felt was actually unnecessary.

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