Hey there, stud,” the slutty angel said. “You want to stay here and have a three hour orgasm with me while I tell you how proud I am of all the hard work you are doing?”

Hero knew it was a trap.

Every year, larger demons would take souls on a tour of the outer planes. They would show how good others had it and be invited by deliciously desirable creatures to stay in the worlds of bliss and joy (or at least come rest their weary heads on whatever shaped breast they might desire for 5 minutes). After the souls condemned for history of a million poor little choices (or, in the rarer cases, one spectacularly bad big choice) began to feel hope, to feel like they belonged or deserved a respite from their eternity of suffering the angels would reveal themselves to be demons in disguise making absurd promises of peace and happiness so that the gullible souls would start secreting that delicious sticky nectar known as hope. Once a soul was slick with it, the revealed demons would hit the souls with a stick until their skull was soft and crinkly.

Once the souls recorporated, the demons would use divination magic to look through the histories of the damned souls at the different paths they could have taken to end up in a place that was not simply miserable pain, bereft of hope. The abyss was a grey which hurt to look upon, particularly with eyes that had drunk so deep of the rich hues possible to those who had made better choices. Those like Cheese, thought Hero. Well, not quite like old Narcho. Hero thought with a pang of guilt.

“I can suck your eyes out through your asshole and then we can take a nap beneath a blanket of knowing we have nothing to do tomorrow but watch the grass grow if you want.”

Hero tried not to give them any attention.

“We can walk through the valley of echoes where the words of those you touched in life whisper their forgiveness and you can whisper yours and you can let go in small drops or in one great bucket, all the shame that is knotting up that lovely heart of yours while I wrap my arms around you from behind and sob my sympathy into your shoulder.”

Hero felt his muscles grow tense.

“And then you can braid my hair while I groom your nails and everytime we laugh together the sun shines a bit warmer and suddenly a year has passed and you’re inside me and my lips are on yours and-”

Hero felt himself shaking. The angel... the thing that seemed like an angel but was just waiting for him to... to what?.. To want something so that it could be taken away? Whatever it was stopped. It took a step back.

“Hey, it’s ok. I heard what they did to you and I’m really sorry. I guess I didn’t really believe it. Or I didn’t want to believe it.”

The angel sighed and tried to adopt a neutral posture. “They shouldn’t do that, trick you, I mean.”

Hero tried to fill his head with other words. He thought of the words the woman had said to him at his first hanging. Something about poisoning her father and could he take her sin with him to hell and he had nodded and cried in gratitude before stabbing the small blade her confession was etched on into his ribs.

“You deserve better.” The angel said. “Hell, the universe deserves better. It really sucks that they keep lying to you. Whatever happens after this, whether you soak my sweet titties in tears or slobber all over my dick or rest your weary head on my lap while you just breath or whether you walk away right now and not taste my pussy juice and the way it restores youth and lends strength... whether I am an asshole demon disguised as something you can’t help but love or fear to lose just luring you into hoping just so I can crush that hope... Whatever happens, I’m sorry. I really wish the universe was giving you more.”

They stood in silence while their pounding hearts wore themselves out.

“I’m sorry,” the angel said, looking around at nothing, “I think I’m just nervous.”

Hero felt something terrible begin to slip inside of him.

“You have both?” He asked.

“I can be whatever you want me to be so long as I want to be what you want me to be. This is a heaven and you can be anything you want to be. Even happy. Or at least not miserable.”

The angel bit their lip. “Anything is possible if you want it. Nothing is forced if you don’t. Every door you open opens up one and a bit more doors. Keep opening doors until you find one you like. Maybe that door is inside you and when it swings open it lets you love what you have or maybe the door you seek is outside you or maybe it’s both. Maybe things are good and you are ok with looking at how they can be better, look at building new bridges and trying new things. Maybe things are just fine if they stay the same but it doesn’t hurt to look. Maybe things are fine and you are afraid of them getting worse.”

“And where does one find these doors?”

“Wherever they look.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“And can you see how to open me?”

Hero paused. He swallowed.

“What if I want a banana creamsicle that’s melting in the hot sun and I have to keep licking it off my fingers?”

“Like what if I was all runny and warm and sweet on your tongue?”

“Yeah... do you... is that a want you can desire?” Hero felt dizzy.

“Ok, but just tell me to stop if you get uncomfortable and want to stop.” The angel took a step forward. The light began to play strangely upon them, their dress wrapping up and over them.

“What if you get frustrated?” Asked Hero, thinking of that familiar companion of an emotion which seemed to sound the start of everything that was terrible in his existence. His hand clenched in worry and he was surprised to find the angel in it.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Then we can slow down or we can stop or we can back up.” The angel winked and tore a small tear in their wrapper. 

“I’m a big popsicle, I can handle it.” The angel said while unwrapping itself in his hands. A melted drop began blooming on its head and soon started running slowly down it’s body.

Hero’s hot, slightly bumpy tongue reached out to touch the syrup which they have to sweeten even more than other sacrine treats because cold dulls the tongue’s telent for tasting sweet so anyone who sells frozen popsicles today and wants to sell even more tomorrow needs to add extra sugars and salts. This means when the frozen thing melts it’s even richer and thick and sweet all over the mouth that got smashed in the face by the demon Hero was holding in his hand because, according to the thing in Hero’s hand: “you gross little pervert, you don’t deserve sweet things. Nothing is good in the world and you’re a big dumb dumb for thinking there was. Shame on you for being so stupid. How could you possibly think any part of the universe was rooting for you or noticing you or if it ever did was interested in offering anything except pain and suffering, you dirty little pervert person that even other perverts don’t want to be around.

When they didn’t die, she learned their names.

One was named Reed and he was small and talked a lot when he was nervous. The other was named Cthulhu and he was better to have at your side than anywhere else.

Szarra took a sip of her tea. She had been brewing for the last hour, the leaves were of a variety of bush that barely survived on some of the highest slopes of the deadliest jungle between two seas. On the day most pleasant to the plant the leaves had been ripped off their branches and slowly mottled right under the plant. The immediate mottling would cause more tannins and toxins to defend the plant from those parasites who roamed the land not synthesizing their own sugars from sunshine like any moral organism would and instead feeding off the work of others and being kind of an ass about it. Smashing the leaves, smearing out their guts all full of chloroform still spinning helplessly trying to rip some oxygen from some carbon dioxide and make that sweet sweet sugar that the mushroom daddy loves. The plant would react to the released chemical screams and begin making more and more defenses. The second leaf was usually 1.25 as strong. 1.25 times as full of the plants best efforts to make something that causes proteins to precipitate in blood. The third leaf, having witnessed the scent of two other leaves having their cell walls ripped down and smeared around inside a soup of other smashed cells, was usually 1.81 the original intensity! Then the flesh was baked in the bare sun, removed of moisture and slightly sticky with soft oil, the leaves were shoved into a pouch slick with the oils of the leaves what came before until they were dropped in a pot and steeped hot over a fire for at least an hour until a fine film of all the concentrated evil the plant could make danced irridescent on the surface. The tea would rake the tongue in an akrid warning as it was drunk. Szarra’s tongue, however, had long since habituated to the intensity and felt barely a stir of her facial muscles as she swallowed her first sip and the bitter strong sensation ran beneath her skin. She sighed, contented as the heat ran up her spine.

The small one was making many words with a voice that could have been shaped by his name. The bigger one was making what Szarra thought were unnecessarily slurpy noises with his tentacle lips while he sucked at some sweet and sour sweetbread bits and intentionally goaded the small one.

Szarra reached into her damp pack and produced a small flask filled with a poison identical to the one that had been the primary lever of overturning the divinochratic cult who had been caught spying on her grandfather. The cult’s organization had crumbled when the key members holding things together suddenly shuffled from the mortal coil, having encountered no more than a moth feather’s fluff of the poison which filled the small flask that Szarra took from her bag.

“They were just children and you killed them.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome.”

“I am not grateful.”

“Well, you should be because they were going to turn into owlbears if I didn’t stop them. Did you see the glowing necklaces or were you too busy running away?”

“They didn’t turn into owlbears!”

“Duh, I stopped them. You’re welcome.”

Szarra took the cork out of the flask with her teeth and poured a small bit into her tea. When she drank it, she was grateful that the small one was throwing his hands in the air while trying to explain that only things of certain ages should be killed. His gesticulations and vivid displays of emotion distracted anyone from noticing her eyes crossing involuntarily as the basic compounds of the poison tea dragged like a rug full of hammers across her tongue and  stabbed every nerve in her mouth with angry deadliness when she breathed in.

Szarra hadn’t been sure why Cthulhu had killed the small creatures the day before but she was pretty sure it wasn’t for the reason he kept insisting on.

“But what if they were turning into owlbears?”

“But they weren’t! They were trying to send the children to safety!”

“What’s safer than being an owlbear tearing apart the friends of people who run away during fights just because the only people shorter than them had their owlbear amulet interrupte?.”

“They weren’t turning into owlbears.”

“What were they turning into?”

“Nothing, they were trying to get to safety.”

“Yeah we know that now.”

“I knew that then!”

“That’s why you didn’t kill the future owlbears.”

“They! Weren’t! Owlbears! They stayed kids and would have died if there hadn’t been a healer on the other side of the teleportation.”

“The owlbears lived?”

“Yeah, there was a healer on the other side and they saved all the children and they’re fine. That’s why I came back. I wasn’t sure, earlier.”

Szarra felt her cheek try to lick her eyebrow as she took another sip. She managed to keep everything else completely composed while Cthulhu created new ways of suggesting the children would have become owlbears. She had seen the kids when they fell, minds fried by Cthulhu’s blast. They were definitely dead. “What a sweet alien,” thought Szarra, “telling Reed those nice lies.” 

She downed the rest of her tea and thought, “I wonder if that’s what ends up killing Reed.” Then she sat perfectly still while Reed reacted dramatically to Cthulhu suggesting that the necklaces may not have originally been teleporting them but had a condition where if the wearer was dead or otherwise unconscious, the amulet would then create a teleportation condition so people wouldn’t see what it really was. When she could hold it in no longer, she felt to bitter poison twist her face as the sound of an indignant goat escaped her lips

Reed Greenbottle was going to die.

This would not be news to Reed. It would be a familiar message mentioned not unkindly or unoften and even at great expense to the messenger by those Reed depended on and loved and shared space and time with. His parents had said it in several different tones of voices. Tutors had said it in loud voices full of fear and peers said it in voices exploring new limits of expression.

And he had seen it in so many dreams.

It made sleep less relaxing when it was full of terrible things that were destined to happen. Sort of.

There were good things in the dreams too but how many handfuls of candy does a person reach for if half of them were transmuted into rocks as one tried to chew them?

When his dreams started coming true, he was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before he saw his parent’s death or something worse. And then one day, they were gone. He was all alone with no one to take care of him.

Reed was 37 when that happened but halflings matured slowly, or so Reed quickly volunteered whenever he told the tale.