Bright Adventures

Contents of this PDF file:

• 117,943 English words
• 16 stories written over 19 years
• 8 painted illustrations 
• Horror
• Fantasy
• Left-leaning "humanist" politics
• Extremely good writing
• Adventure
• Pain
• Loneliness
• Sex
• The end of the universe
• Too much personal information
• A more exhaustive introduction than this, with content warnings
• Hope
• Lesbians

Stories in their original Swedish available on request. As of 1.1, illustrations also available on request because PDF is terrible at this.

This work is presented as is, though I'd consider it unfinished. Getting distracted by other things to write. I'll come back to it sooner  or later, though of course it will probably be sooner if I hear from any readers telling me they care. [Wink]

A writing sample:

 Helena wants the pain to stop. Later, she will think of better reasons, less selfish reasons. Stopping the bullies from hurting anyone else. Sure. But in the moment she wants revenge, and nothing more, and she hates herself for it. For being such a small, ugly person.

But then, she has been hiding in the library all day just to keep them off her back. Hungry, sleepless, her lower back still hurting from when they pushed her to the ground, she's lost herself in a book about two girls traveling the known world and its inner edges, hidden in a high-backed chair in a badly lit corner. When the lights go out it takes her a minute to look up from the book.

It's not the first time Helena has been left alone in the closed library, and it's not like anyone expects her to come home. She sighs, letting go of some tension between her shoulders, and takes a small flashlight from a pocket in her jacket and curls up in the chair and keeps reading until she finishes the book, sometime late at night.

And then she goes exploring. Just walking around, stepping light and careful, not making a sound, pretending to be a ghost gliding between the bookcases and through the halls, enjoying the dark, the quiet, the smell of old paper held by many hands.

In the deepest, darkest basement level she opens a door she always thought was locked, and that's around when things begin to smudge and blur together. She skims through creaking tomes and brittle parchments and crude clay tablets and the shadows grow and dance around her as the little flashlight seems to shine brighter. Helena can't make sense of most of what she reads: historical accounts involving people and places she hasn't heard of, ancient shopping lists that are probably exciting to archaeologists, treatises on politics and physics and philosophies and swordplay using deep jargon she thinks she might decipher after a good night's rest, and poetry that makes no sense at all but sounds nice.

But among the scattered pages her scattered mind latches onto something. It isn't like words following one after another to build sentences. It's like a chorus of voices, a multitude of sounds resonating with the pain in her heart, harmonizing, pulsing, weaving a fabric of associations, insinuations, intuitions. Helena closes her eyes, afraid, not because she thinks she must be going insane – though she certainly does – but because of the cruelty and vehemence and wildness and the power in the message she is receiving.

And with her eyes closed she can still hear the books speaking to her, without words. It seems like all the knowledge in the world pours through her and the only thing that sticks is the bad because she is a bad person.

And with her eyes closed she can see a thing in the shadows, in the corners of the room, indistinct, smudged. A face without eyes or mouth, watching, waiting. It's not really there, she thinks. Some kind of intersection – but the knowledge is lost, the wrong shape to fit in her mind.

The shadows are everywhere, layering on top of each other, stretching and bending the angles of the room. Helena can't tell if her eyes are closed anymore.

And she's tired of being scared, so she takes the key to power from the books. It's easy once you know how. Painful, monstrous, unforgivable, but simple. The key turns in her head, unlocking it. The key turns in her heart, breaking it. She reaches into her breast with her fingers and pulls her heart out. It's not really happening. It's not even real blood. Something bright red and tangling wet runs through her fingers, falling on the circle of pages on the floor, a sacrifice. The pain isn't even that bad. It seems to belong to someone far away.

And her want and her sacrifice is enough. It's like a light turns on behind her eyes. All the shadows disappear and she opens her golden eyes and the books are burning. Helena breathes in and in and it feels like she's growing taller as she stands up. The smoke doesn't sting her eyes and the heat doesn't burn her. There's just the power, the heavy light she wears on her brow like a crown, making things possible. She hangs on to the need to punish those assholes, the first and only thing she cares about just now, to get Lucy and Kimberly and Neal and the rest, to get revenge, no, justice, just so there's something more in her than power. Something to be for. Something simple and straightforward and just for her. Make them pay. The entire library is on fire now, and she moves to the exit with quick strides, too late thinking she could rein the power in, have it not splash thermodynamics everywhere around her.

But she draws the heat inside her, maybe some instinct to protect the books, or maybe some instinct to avoid being noticed, and she feels her body explode with strength. Helena runs now, effortlessly, breaking through a smoldering plaster wall when she tries to turn a corner but fails to find traction and carrying on without slowing down, laughing even in the middle of this awful destruction, laughing as she hears the sirens approaching outside and realizes how much trouble she's in, laughing just because she's running like the wind and free and strong and clever and no motherfucker can hold her down anymore.

She does manage to keep the laugh down when she gets outside, and a half dozen firefighters approach her with concerned faces. She doesn't run or giggle and she thinks she hides the light under her hair, and she walks confidently, trying not to alarm them. She knows they mean well, and she likes them, and she hopes they can save some books, and if she gets out of their way she might not have to go to jail.

But when one of them puts a hand on her shoulder her anger slips out, she feels just a moment's offense at being touched, and she cuts his arm off at the elbow with a thought.

Haughty, she thinks. Don't care. Be haughty. They are beneath you. They will learn, or they will perish. It's not your problem either way.

So Helena walks away while the man falls down behind her, shrieking, gushing, drawing all attention from her. She keeps walking, urgent but restrained, when her composure slips for just a split second and a small fire breaks out on the bare asphalt where she put her foot down. And she keeps walking, burning up inside, until she comes to Kimberly's house. Standing at the front door she tries to think. Kimmy's parents are friends with Helena's parents, because of course they are, and they know her, so she probably won't get away without killing them too. Not if she's going to have time to make Kimberly suffer. And being her parents is probably no capital crime.

Helena takes to the air, leaving another piece of her heart behind. She rises to the second floor, where she opens Kimberly's bedroom window and hovers inside, slow and steady and soundless. The cunt sleeps on her back, nude, sheet tangled between her legs, making cute little snores, and her head turned to the side with a hand curled up next to her mouth like she's dreaming of sucking her thumb, a breathtaking picture of easy, raw, effortless, guileless sex, only hinted at by the little light coming in from the street, so beautiful it hurts, even now. If only someone hadn't talked her into thinking being gay was an evil thing.

Yeah, it's the inside that counts, thinks Helena. She looks down on that pretty pale face and imagines shoving her thumbs into those cruel judging eyes and feels nothing, wants nothing but for this to be done. On the nightstand is Kimberly's fancy phone. It needs a password, but Helena only has to close her eyes and wish to see the pattern of fingerprints. From there it takes only a minute to find the others' addresses and some small part of her is relieved that she has no excuse for torture. So she holds her hand out and lets the power flow into it, carefully, trying to find an even rate, trying to figure out how to control it, until her hand glows white hot.

Kimberly wakes up at the last moment, from the heat or the light, looking ready to panic. She breathes in sharply, beginning to scream, when Helena drops her hand and karate chops the cunt's head off in one jerking motion. There's no resistance, no noise. There's only a little bit of blood, and the mattress smolders a little bit, and one takes care of the other. A sharp smell of hot copper fills the room, which is impregnated with Kimberly's favorite perfume – some kind of white flower – and mixes into something foul, washing over the few happy memories of her Helena has. And Kimberly still looks at her, her eyes wide and full of tears, her perfect red lips trembling. Helena's hand, cool again, strokes the cheek of the only girl she's ever loved.

'You should have just left me alone', says Helena, bent over and whispering in Kimberly's ear. 'You piece of shit.' And she feels the head stop twitching and go still and for a second it's like the last ten years never happened and she's happy again, a pleasant little fire in her stomach. She wipes the tears from Kimberly's cheeks and kisses those perfect lips, just once, like she used to dream about, and maybe she imagines it but in the murky light those pale dead cheeks seem to blush pink.

The power flares and roars in Helena's head as she hits the street, crackling stronger than before, and she begins to realize the most terrible truth, in some part of her brain under the blazing light where she can still think. What luck that no one has put the key together before now, and that she burned the books. One could even think it was deliberate, some merciful mechanism in the structure of reality that made the knowledge so deeply hidden, where no one was meant to ever find it. Well, until Helena stumbled along. She walks quickly, carelessly, leaving a wake of small fires, bathing in the bloody smell still hanging over her and trying helplessly not to finish the thought.

The power comes from sacrifice, yes. It feeds on suffering and bloodshed and loss. But she doesn't have to give of herself.

*

Helena watches the sun rise, shivering in the heat, sitting on a bench in an empty park and eating a small hamburger that cost her the last of her money. She will have to go to school, she thinks. Avoid suspicion. Act normal. Try not to kill anyone else. Is she going to be able to hold back when Lucy comes after her? Probably. Just knowing she could melt their faces if she wanted to will let her shrug off most attacks. They might even relent when they hear about Kimmy. She'll just have to act convincingly shocked. Pretend to pretend to be sad. By the time she sits at the school house door and waits for the teacher to come unlock it – as she always does – she has a plan for every eventuality including confessing to the counselor she might have to visit that she worries she's not really sad because Kimberly was so mean to her.

She holds out until close to lunchtime.

The news come in during recess, when the wealthier kids read the Internet on their phones. The details of the murder, though ghastly, are too bizarre to be kept from the public and the library fire where the fire marshal lost an arm for unclear reasons fades quickly into the background. The bell rings and the class files in to greet the music teacher, Karin, but Karin announces class canceled. You may go home if you wish, she tells them. (Four students do.) Or she and the other teachers and the school counselor will be available if anyone wants to talk, or you may take a study room and talk amongst yourselves (another seven leave, in two groups), or just take it easy and take care of yourselves. And each other. The police may want to get in touch, they'll want to talk to everyone who knew Kimberly and we all knew her, didn't we, just so you're prepared, and you should know though you're almost adults no one can make you talk to them without an adult present, if you're not comfortable.

While most remaining students cluster together in muted conversation Helena shrugs and takes a book out of her desk, opens it to a dog-eared page and begins reading and waiting for lunch. She's not tired at all, somehow, worryingly, but she is ravenous. Her eyes glaze over as she tries to follow the plot – she's reading this books for laughs, both for its many elaborate heterosexual sex scenes and the fact the book was sitting all innocent in a bookshelf in the classroom – and she keeps reading the same page over and over, barely noticing, as she flexes the power within her as gently as she can, finding the finer controls, getting used to it. It's like when she had her growth spurt three years back, getting taller than anyone in the class over summer, and having to learn not to knock things down at every turn. Only it's all in her head, and she can stay perfectly still while the power flickers through the room, coming close enough to cut a hair off the head of Lenny sitting in front of her drawing something with his pastels, just because she can't stop thinking about food.

And she knows without looking that Lucy and Neal behind her have stayed just so they can do something to her. She rubs her eyes, gets up and walks out, with a finger stuck in the book to keep her place, as though she's just going to find a more comfortable place to sit and read or possibly a quiet place to cry without anyone noticing, and Lucy and Neal comes after her without any attempt at discretion, leaving six students in the classroom. She leads them to an unoccupied study room, or rather, goes there with no doubt they will follow. They don't disappoint, throwing open the door with a bang not long after she has sat down in the couch and opened the book.

'We know it was you', says Neal, voice shaking with anger. 'We're telling the cops.'

'Really?' says Helena. She had not planned for this. It's too stupid. 'I cut a girl's head off, and you go out of your way to be alone in a room with me and tell me you're going to put me in jail.' She tries not to laugh, laughs anyway, and the light spills out from under her hair and she stands up and the two bullies seem to shrink under her gaze. 'Is there a version of this story where I don't kill you two assholes first?'

'I – you – you're evil', says Neal, backing up against the wall, holding their arm in front of Lucy, protecting her or shoving her back or maybe both. 'You're a monster.' Helena feels a stab of admiration at their courage. Lucy, meanwhile, seems ready to faint.

'Yeah', says Helena, locking eyes with Neal as she takes her jacket off and begins to unwrap the bandage on her left arm. 'I'm a monster you made. Look.' She points at the scars, jagged, uneven, layered. 'This is from when you flushed my head in the toilet. The first time. This is from when our dear, departed Kimberly put a handful of pubic hair in my soup. This is from when Lucy told me people as poor as me should be killed. This is from when you rubbed chewing tobacco in my hair.'

Helena is not angry at all. It scares her, how calm she stays. She keeps Lucy and Neal pinned to the wall with a steady pressure, just hard enough and hot enough to keep them from moving or thinking too easily. Not that they try to. They are utterly defeated, broken, eyes blank with panic. On a level she observes the power has stopped growing because they're beyond fear. She lets up a little, bit by bit, and wraps her scars back up.

'I'm over all that, I guess is what I'm trying to say', she says. 'You fuckers made my life Hell, I turned into a demon. I'm willing to call that even. I don't want to hurt anyone else. Let's not escalate this to the point where I turn you into two wet stains on the wall, what do you say?'

'Fuck, fuck is wrong with you?' says Lucy, in a high-pitched whine.

'I'm a monster. We just went over this. I'm struggling to stay in control this infinite cosmic power that feeds on hurt. Are you seriously going to try to make me angry?'

'We can talk like civilized people', says Neal, with a pointed look at Lucy.

'More to the point, I'd rather you didn't', says Helena. 'Talk. To anyone else.'

'Like we were going to snitch', says Lucy. 'We were just going to hold it over your head. Hey, our friend was brutally murdered in her sleep at the same time as she browsed the personal details of her friends on her phone, maybe someone should check the fingerprints on the loser who's got a history with those particular three people.'

'See, you should have bought me a smartphone like I asked when you made fun of me for not having one, then I'd know how they worked and we'd have avoided all this.'

'You know you are why people light hobos on fire, right?'

A sound like a thunderclap rattles the building as all of Helena's hate falls on Lucy, like a stormwind through a funnel. Most of her evaporates and a handful of dark greasy lumps splatter the wall before Helena knows what happens. Neal throws themselves to the floor, landing on their face, screaming, and the door flies off its hinges, into a crowd standing outside the room. More than just the trio's hanger-ons, their despicable fanclub who joins in their games. No, it seems like large parts of the school must have heard something going on, kids and teachers and even the janitor.

And they're hurt and afraid and Helena all but loses herself as the power grows explosively and she knows there's no version of this story where her life isn't over and she doesn't know what to do. She needs help. She needs to do something with all this energy. So much energy pouring into the air, it's like it wants to condense into mass. Bodies, she thinks, it's too much to take into my body. Need more. And the light bends to her desire and a handful of dark shapes fold out of the air, shadow things with spindly pointed arms and legs and not much else, jittering and staggering and stumbling into motion, without sound. They step on Neal, and Neal resumes screaming as the needle-legs stab their legs, arms, back. The screams turn to gurgling as the things step on their neck, and helpless low breathless stuttering moans as one step sinks into the back of Neal's head.

Helena watches as helpless and horrified as everyone else. Some mad part of her worries she'll get in more trouble for killing the most queer student in school but she supposes really it's more that Neal never treated her as subhuman, never went out of their way to be mean, even held the others back a couple of times.

The needle-things don't react like the power does, moving with her will. They just move away from Helena, through the crowd, as it falls over itself in a desperate scrabble to get away. In fear or in pain, they scream just as loud, and innocent or guilty, they bleed just as red. Helena keeps watching Neal as their struggle slows to a stop, and her heart breaks all by itself, and the power wraps over it like a cold shroud, and a course of action that was unthinkable a moment ago becomes the obvious solution to several immediate problems.

The great suffering of the crowd makes the power spiral out of control. Their pain makes her feel bad. In fact, the thought that anyone will remember her as this monster is unbearable. And the fewer people left to raise alarms the easier it will be for her to get away. So the power rolls out of her in waves, thick sharp light cutting them all to pieces – the constructs as well as the people – killing quickly, with little bloodshed. Quiet spreads. The school only has about three hundred students and fifty staff, Helena recalls. Limited casualties. And it's a little bit out of the city, people have certainly called the cops but they may not get here before she can get out.

But no. Outside the windows, past the people running away, she can already see a line of blue and white cars, with cops behind them pointing rifles at the building. Maybe she could blow up the cars with a fireball before she has to find out if she's bulletproof.

Instead she blows out a window in the back and runs into the woods. The woods are thick and old and she stumbles between roots and pits covered in deep moss and tangles with ferns and blueberry bushes and low hanging stinging spruce needles. To Helena's surprise there are people here too, stumbling after her, calling for help, shooting and coming closer to hitting each other than her, but still closing in as she concentrates on not starting any forest fires.

One bullet hits a girl hiding in a thorn bush, who screams once and falls silent, and Helena reaches out to the shooter and pulls his intestines out of his mouth from fifty meters away. It feels fair to her, but the cops retaliate with burst fire and something she thinks must be a shotgun that cuts a fairly thick tree trunk in two next to her head. Her leg decides to quit mid-stride and she falls, fast and hard enough to cut her cheek on a bush despite trying to cover her face with her armored arms. Jaw clenched and aching, she feels around for peoples' heads, takes twenty-six of them – everyone facing in her direction within the forest – and pulls them off.

The noise, the chaos doesn't stop, and Helena crawls through the underbrush, haphazardly, left leg still on break, trying to squish flat against the ground, away from the bullets. After a while she realizes it's just her screaming. She stops to breathe, flops over on her back, looks down supported on her elbows, and sees a broad trail of blood behind her and more pumping out of a hole in her thigh, and suddenly her head spins in a much more unpleasant and distracting way than what the power does to her and she slides down in the moss.

Some intuition, some insight in the workings of the world she's gained in the last day warns Helena that healing is a lot harder than harming, and she draws in an ocean of power, everything she's spilled out here and in the school, enough that a fire in a storage room she hadn't noticed goes out from the drop in temperature, draws it into her, replacing the wide awareness of the battlefield with a brutally fine, exquisite perception of her wound. And determination. And the power sings and begins to knit the flesh together and suck the blood back in, and it's still not enough, and she takes another piece of herself, feeling something tear in her chest, ignores it, shoves her fingers into her leg and rips the wound out, and she wants to scream but it hurts so much she can't breathe.

Trembling, feeling hollowed out, thinner, a dry skin stretched over bones a size too large, she limps deeper into the woods. The storm fades, or moves to somewhere deeper inside her, under the armor. Helena holds the light at the forefront of her mind, where it spills from her brow and lights the way and keeps her strong and stops her thinking too much about the hundred or so people she has killed.

*

The day goes on and helicopters turn up to hunt Helena. She shoots them out of the sky with fireballs when they get close and the fires begin to spread after all. Losing all direction, hot and ever more desperately hungry, she finds a line of trucks and tanks moving over a field at the edge of the forest, and starts running in the other direction. The sounds of stomping boots and another helicopter come closer and she turns the key and slips through space a little bit, leaving another piece of herself behind, and finding herself back in town, at dusk, on an unfamiliar back street with the forest on one side and a faceless storage building on the other.

For one second, in the quiet, guilt almost falls on Helena, a wave crashing against the wall of determination throbbing in her temples. She keeps moving, wiping something from her cheeks. Probably sweat. And she finds a gas station and walks in to find food before remembering she has no money and they'll probably have seen her face on TV.

There's three people in the small store, including a clerk, and they all stare at her nakedly, concernedly, mutely, but, she realizes, not like they were looking at a wanted murderer. She takes a look herself at her reflection in the glass storefront and finds she's somehow covered almost head to toe in blood and dirt, her long hair tied in greasy, pine-riddled knots, her shirt in shreds, and the light flaring from her forehead casts her face in long, harshly angled shadows. For a long moment she can't look away from the ruin that used to be her favorite non-book thing in the world, her steel studded leather jacket.

'Sorry', she says to the room, piling a stack of plastic-wrapped sandwiches on her arm. 'I'm very hungry, and I'm going to take this food. Don't bother calling the cops, they're already trying to kill me.'

And she leaves without trouble. But then someone down the street calls out her name and her shoulders sag. Just a moment's privacy to shove food in her face, what does it take? Where can she go? She looks to the sky and her eyes fall on a tall building in front of her. Ten, no, twelve floors tall and with a flat roof. She tries to do that space-slip thing again, but trying to think through how she did it tangles her in doubt and for an instant it's like the entire planet Earth is scraping over her skin, she's stretched out over everything and flimsier than a soap bubble and the air resistance pushes against her with a force like a train as she moves up at an angle and she keeps going just because she's too high up to dare stop.

Flailing, tumbling, straining, Helena falls on her knees on the rough concrete roof, somehow coated in a thin layer of gravel, and the pain strangely feels worse than anything else. Stinging lances of pain stabbing into her kneecaps, immediate, eye-watering, real. It reminds her heart to beat, her throat to draw in air. She falls over, turning sideways to avoid crushing the sandwiches, scraping her elbow and still catching two of them under her. A quavering, shuddering cry escapes her as she hugs herself and rocks from side to side on her back and lets the tears wash over her face.

Sirens approach down there but she still has time, she thinks. Time to just give up for a while. Stop being cool and strong and hard in the way that no one can be without thinking, knowing people deserve to be blown to pieces for standing in her way.

It occurs to Helena the best thing she can do is let them kill her. It will keep her from killing anyone else, and she can't imagine any other way to accomplish that. She stands up, sniffles, and steps to the edge of the roof and looks down on the hard ground. It probably won't hurt. It'll kill her for sure, if she can keep herself from doing anything stupid. If she can die. What reason, what justification to keep doing this can she possibly have? She remembers thinking, when zombie apocalypse stories were in the fashion, she would rather die than live in a world where people have to kill each other because they can't trust each other.

The soldiers down there run around like ants. They aim searchlights along the ground, not showing any interest in her location. And she's so hungry she wants to throw up.

So she sits down and devours two sandwiches and then when she starts on a third, beginning to feel the taste of roast beef and mustard, she decides trash food is a reason to live. Good enough to kill anyone for? Probably not even in self-defense. But if she has one reason she might think of others, she doesn't trust her low blood sugar defeatism. She doesn't trust that she's supposed to be stomped on her entire life, hated and feared and alone just because she doesn't fit in, and then die the same way just to make everyone else happy. She deserves at least to have time to think about her options. Maybe time to feel properly bad about her mistakes. Maybe even time to try and make up for them.

*

Helena wracks her brain trying to conceptualize a folded space, some kind of pocket dimension, a way to easily bring the remaining pile of sandwiches with her. She can teleport, she shouldn't have to worry about these details, she thinks. It's easier if you just don't think about it, obviously, she just has to want and know that wanting means she can. But she doesn't even know, she can't picture what it is she wants to do. Once you start thinking, how do you stop?

A light startles her out of her thoughts, a narrow cone of light shining on her from above. Then another one, in her eyes. Then a rattle of small explosions around her. In her shoulder, sending her down in a graceless twirl. Dizzy, not sure if her good right arm is still attached to her, fighting not to throw up from the pain, she lashes out completely blind, surrounding herself in a bright electric blue ball of fire that grows and grows until she feels the message is clear.

'Leave me alone', says Helena, in the silence after the fire, as the two helicopters fall out of the sky. Something whistles through the air towards her and she throws her hand out and it bounces away with a metallic noise. A rotor blade, maybe. Everything is on fire within several blocks, and she can hear faint screams from below and turns her attention to her ruined shoulder instead, with a sullen, self-righteous sort of anger. It doesn't go away even when she's repaired the wound, and the feeling of being a whiny child makes her even angrier.

What does she want? Out of here. She steps down to the ground, cutting diagonally through the building. There's a scream of tortured steel amongst the falling rocks, and maybe something more, but Helena moves on, not looking back, with the sinking sun in front of her, while the sky turns red.

There are men in rows with rifles, and she kills them with sheets of fire. There are tanks, and she sinks them into the ground. There are airplanes, quiet and ominous and strangely shaped, and she disintegrates them with her eyes.

There are walls, and she does not care about the walls.

It happens so quickly. Just like that, most of the city where Helena spent her life is gone, the army is gone, and she is gone, somewhere far away, in the deep forest, alone but for a single bird singing somewhere in the night. A cuckoo, which doesn't strike her as symbolic but safe. A safe feeling coming from desolation, from solitude. Helena remembers learning about cuckoos for the first time in a book that said they sing in the wildest, deepest part of the forest, far away from humans. It feels like coming home. Maybe it is symbolic after all.

And as she thinks these still and lonely thoughts she wrangles her jacket off (tearing it even more), wades into a little stream, drops to her knees, bends over and drinks until she coughs and gasps for breath. Dropping to her stomach, rolling over, scrabbling for a spot on the mossy bank that keeps her head just over the water before washing herself and her dissolving clothes with stiff cold hands, until all she has left is her raw and aching skin and a few tough threads of jacket and the bandages on her forearms, and the light on her brow abates bit by bit, as if burning out.

*

For a moment she floats in the darkness and nothing seems to be, nothing is there, Helena isn't there, there's just the timeless void. She could die now. Maybe she already died. It wouldn't be bad if it was like this, she thinks. Nothing. Oblivion. Nirvana.

But then she thinks about how she's thinking these things and ruins it. Everything hurts. Her throat hurts, she must have been screaming much more than she was aware. And her breath catches with a horrible rasping sound when she remembers what she did. She doesn't know if it's self-loathing or sympathy or what, but she's overwhelmed by pain so impossible she wants to tear herself to pieces. Squirming feebly to get off her back, she vomits violently, silently, invisibly in the dark, heaving until the acid burns her sinuses and cramps burn in her stomach muscles. The smell makes her gag all over again, and she rinses the rubbery corrosive slime from her nose with an exhausted desperation. At some point she falls over in the moss and can't seem to summon the strength to move again and she lies on her arm and thinks there's no point in moving anyway because she just wants to get away from herself and she's stuck.

And the light comes on again, just a flickering candlelight, and she reaches in for the remaining part of her heart and rips it out of her chest, slick and darkly glistening in her hands where it doesn't hurt her. But it's like it keeps growing back and by the time she lies down with her jacket wrapped around her she's already feeling again.

'Help me', says Helena, a whiny croak, a prayer to her power, a pure and undirected wish.

And as the light fades from her forehead, a gentle liver-colored light rises from the ground in front of her. The stuff that came out of Helena takes shape and walks to her, a figure seemingly made of dark glass with smoldering red threads running through her inside, giving her shape a dull glow. This one has a face, unlike the creatures Helena made before, and maybe that's what makes her less frightening.

It's an inhuman face, like a mask, idealized, flawlessly proportioned, made entirely of the same glassy substance, adorned with two short sharp horns instead of hair and glistening in the dark with its own inner light. But its owner looks on Helena with naked concern.

'Having a bad day?' says the glowing girl, kneeling at Helena's side.

'I'm trash', says Helena, reaching out with a shaking arm, not knowing why. 'And I did a bad thing.'

'It'll be okay', says the strange girl, pulling in Helena and cradling her in her lap. Her skin is softer than it looks, and warm. 'I think you just need a little love.'

'Whuaag', says Helena, meaning to ask who she is, but finding herself shaking and sobbing, struggling to get free, finding no strength in her body.

'Oh my, it's been a long time since you've been held', says the other girl. 'I can tell these things. I'm a succubus.'

'Are you going to sex me to death?' says Helena, her voice small and brittle.

'Nah, I'm more into dudes. And you're nourishing me right now, it's not so bad is it?'

'It doesn't, uh', says Helena, suddenly aware of the succubus' body pressed against her, the flawless curves, the hard muscles, the soft swell of her crotch against the back of Helena's head. It makes her body come alive, and she thinks of asking if this preference for dudes is particularly deep and abiding, and she's surprised at what comes out of her mouth instead, 'You're right, I can't even remember the last time anyone touched me. That I wanted. I must have been like four.'

'I won't let go.'

'Thank you.'

For a long time Helena floats in another darkness, warm and comforted, until her tears run out.

'I, um, this is nice', she says, hands lazily stroking the warm arms wrapped around her chest. 'I'm just so tired. I'd like to lie down all the way. And I'd like to hold you too. If you want.'

'Sure', says the succubus, and lifts Helena off her and onto the ground. The moment she lets go Helena panics, feeling like she's falling, and she takes hold of the succubus as soon as she lies down, on her side, facing Helena with a curious smile. Helena moans helplessly, burying her face in the succubus's chest, and the succubus just sighs, patiently, and strokes her hair and neck.

'Why are you so nice to me?' says Helena, with her small, still voice. 'Don't you know what I've done?'

'I'm not here to judge. Let's worry about that later.' The succubus's voice is warm and soft, but too precise, too quick, not quite human.

'Why are, where did you come from? I didn't make you, right?'

'It's more like you summoned me. I'm from, let's say outside. It's like what you'd call higher dimensions. You've seen some of this, you know it's hard to conceptualize, using words to talk about it in like, linear time is sort of like making the sun burn with a typewriter. But I'm here, Helena, because you needed me. I'm older than time and I've watched you since before you were born, and I unfolded from the moment you wished for me and I took form here in space because you paid with your soul. And when you don't need me anymore I'll go out there in the meat world and fuck and love and see what I can see down here for as long as it'll let me live and then go back outside.'

'My soul huh?'

'Don't worry about it, you'll grow more soul. You have a massive potential for caring.'

'I can listen to you talk all night', says Helena, looking deep into those shiny red eyes though she can hardly keep hers open. She leans in, without thought, feeling the heat of the succubus's breath on her lips, and then a handful of warm fingertips.

'Dudes, remember?' says the succubus, with a pointed smile.

'Sorry', says Helena, bending her neck to hide her face, eyes closed, cheeks burning, but smiling. 'I thought my guardian angel, yeah, I remember. What a waste.'

The succubus pulls Helena closer, and kisses her forehead, and maybe she does something to make her go to sleep. She's vaguely aware of being asleep, of dissolving in relief.