Helga (unedited)

Chapter 3: A fiery passion

September skies were always my favourite, a thick splendiferous mural of crimson and orange. The sharp odour of sulphur too was a great odour to witness. I was walking past very mountains of Lhana, those tall structures that poked at the very face of the black star-pimpled sky lay above us, around us, and very much, between us. The horizon of the thick mural cloud and the black sky resulted in a scene of an ashy cloud, much like when coals burn orange but have already become white like snow. Below that cloud, did I see her, that hot lady.

‘Quite a scene isn’t it?’ she asked of me, as if she’d known that I was around.

‘Yeah...sure.’ I brought myself to mumble. She had that power, the cruel power to make a spelling bee lose its sting.

‘What makes it a scene for you?’ she inquired as if she wasn’t satisfied with the blissful aura that lay above us.

‘Uhm...just look at the clouds,’ I pointed out ‘just look at them’.

At this her dark hair was swaying left and right, backwards and forwards, around her visage.

‘You have to look deeper than the clouds,’ she returned in an inspiring voice ‘just look at everything. It’s not just beautiful clouds, but beautiful clouds in September, on this planet,’ she continued.

The province where we lived was called Ale. Ale was the smallest of the nineteen provinces.  It was considered to be a capital province, rather than a province where other, more important activities could take place. The province itself was desolate considering our population on Mercury. The first Mercurial inhabitants inhabited Ale and from there left, only leaving the nickname ‘Mother Province’. The woman had lived on Ale her entire life. She claimed that she’d known me from the time I was born till then. Although she claimed it to be, I’m pretty sure that she would’ve have been twenty-four had she been living on Earth.

‘... Terras...’ she said. With the exception of that one word, I was oblivious to what she had continued to say. I knew that Terras was Earth’s ancestral name, and thus just progressed with assuming that she was speaking about the beauty of Earth before its demise.

‘Earth...Terras. Have you been there before?’ I inquired.

She told me that she’d had sisters and that they lived on Earth before. Once more, I fell into deepest oblivion, only having the recollection that one of her sisters was called Aquarius.

The woman was dark, a night forest of melancholia. She had no friends; my exception being that I was an enthusiast. She not only had no friends, but also did she give no notion that she required them. Our parents warned us against the woman, calling her a demon, the witch of Babylonia, and Satan’s favourite demon. I remember asking her the woman if any of these labels had any truth and her turning around, with that blood-draining stare of hers and responding, ‘I am no angel.’