Every society needs rules, without them everything eventually falls into chaos.

There are governmental rules - Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat on your spouse. Then there are social ones such as don’t lie, don’t mistreat your loved ones, don’t be rude to strangers.

It was the third kind that Helena couldn't handle. Laws that only she was expected to uphold:

Stare at exactly two centimeters above a person's eyes to avoid looking directly into them, always smile so as to never appear intimidating, talk in a low voice so that people could not hear your opinion, and try your best to not stick out - something near impossible at 6 feet 3 inches.

To make things worse, there were always new rules to learn. New opportunities to screw up - and all those screw-ups liked to congregate in her mind, staying rent free and making noise until the late hours of the night when she would toss and turn in bed, tense and sleep deprived.

All in all, when Helena took a tumble over the hill near Saint Serenity's orphanage one early morning and realized that she was probably going to die, she didn't really care.

Well, she cared that death seemed to be taking its sweet time getting there, and that meanwhile she was stuck laying motionless on an assortment of jagged rocks and horse manure.

But she felt ready - relieved almost.

But as predictable as ever, fate decided to screw her over just one last time, because when she finally began to doze off, a tall, dark shape appeared in front of her.

‘Great.’ She thought to herself, praying that the stranger wasn’t one of the boys from the orphanage. The man drew closer, and at once she changed her mind. The unknown was scarier, she decided.

Who was this man? What did he want?

She tested the strength of her limbs, finding she couldn’t as much as lift a finger. Almost everything hurt, and what didn’t was completely numb. She was not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Stay away,” She groaned, her last resort. Not that she had much hope for it, begging never helped her in the past.

The stranger paused, and for a second it seemed that by some miracle he’d actually heed her plea, but then he reached over his shoulder to grab something - a bag, which he set down in front of her. Her heart began working in earnest when she saw what he pulled out of it.

“Please, go away,” She begged.

“I’m going to have to clean and dress those wounds. Most of it will require needlework, and your left leg needs to be set. I’m sorry, I don’t have Yinroot on me, so this is going to hurt,”

Helena tried to move again, but her body refused to comply. When the stranger laid a hand over her leg, his other wielding a needle aloft, she felt her vision blur with tears. The helplessness she felt threatened to knock all the air out of her lungs.

“Here, drink this. It won’t be as effective as Yinroot, but it’ll numb the pain a little.”

A bottle was pressed against her lips, and she tasted the bitterness of alcohol on the rim. She could refuse it - the one and only rebellious act at her disposal, but if she was about to be poked and pricked with a needle for the foreseeable future, she would rather not do so sober.

“Good. More of it. Now close your eyes, see if you can find something else to focus on. Your happy place, if you will.”

“I don’t have a happy place.”

The stranger laughed. “You youngins are so dramatic.” He said. He had a deep, baritone voice that would be comforting under any other circumstances.

“You can have my happy place then. Imagine you’re in a clearing in the woods,” He began, gently arranging her leg into the position he wanted. “Surrounded by green as far as the eye can see, and there’s a small hut in the center,”

Helena screwed her eyes tighter as he prodded and pressed into the length of her leg, checking the extent of her injuries. When he dabbed alcohol onto one of her wounds without warning she yelped in pain.

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“Shh,” He gave her unharmed shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “The hut, can you picture it?”

“Screw you!” She snapped, her entire body hazy with pain. It was probably the first time she had broken the ‘Don’t be a bitch to strangers who are trying to help you’ rule, but she couldn’t help it, the alcohol wasn’t working as quickly as she hoped.

“Concentrate, child. This will be over sooner if you get your mind off the pain,”

At a lack of anything else to do, Helena took a deep breath and tried to focus on his voice. Sensing her efforts, the stranger continued where he left off.

“The hut is covered with vines. Been abandoned a while, you see? But that’s fine. It means nobody else is there but you, and all is peaceful and quiet.”

Doing her best to ignore the pain, Helena tried to picture herself standing next to the abandoned hut with marginal success.

“There’s a stream running nearby. You hear the sound of the water as it brushes against the pebbles. Birds are flying overhead, and one of them lands on your shoulder,”

“I hate birds.” She complained.

It was a ridiculous thing to say, she knew that.

“What animal would you prefer then?”

Taking the question as a challenge, Helena searched her muddled mind. “How about a big, slobbering blood-warg?”

The hand stitching her up paused. “A blood-warg?”

“Yes.” She replied, satisfied with the disbelief that had slipped into the stranger’s tone.

“It’s your choice, I guess,” he said, and then pressed the needle into her skin again, and any sense of victory she felt disappeared in an instant.

“So - a big, slobbering blood-warg makes its way over to you, his breath stinking of rotten flesh. He looks at you with piercing, terrifying eyes, and when he opens his cavernous mouth you spot the dismembered arm of an unfortunate victim. Who knows, his next victim might be you,”

“Hey!” She protested, but the stranger only chuckled. “Careful what you wish for, child.”

She wanted to tell him to stop calling her a child, that she was already fifthteen, but the part of her brain that wasn’t fuzzy with pain warned her that doing so would probably only convince him of the opposite. Besides, people usually mistook her for being older because of her height, and being older as an orphan wasn’t a good thing, so she decided she’d let it slide.

He worked for a while, continuing to describe the small hut and its surroundings, (thankfully leaving out the blood-warg), and Helena bit her bottom lip to stop herself from crying out. He was being gentle, she could tell, but there was no pleasant way to sew up flesh, and it seemed an eternity before he stopped.

“I’ve set your leg and stitched the most worrisome lacerations. I’m going to move on to your right arm now,” The man announced.

Relief flooded her. Her arm was completely numb, so maybe she wouldn’t feel the needle this time. She listened to the sound of her sleeve being cut open and let her mind drift. At least until a sharp inhalation of breath snapped her out of it, and she opened her eyes, blinking into the early morning sun.

When her vision cleared she looked at the stranger’s face properly for the first time. He was middle-aged and severe looking, with frown-lines like deeply-cracked stone and eyes that would make even the most confident of men unsure of themselves. Spectacles hung from the bridge of his nose, lending him the air of a stern librarian. If it weren’t for the pitying way he was looking at her she would have been intimidated. Instead she found herself annoyed.

“What?” She asked, following his gaze to her arm, but he quickly maneuvered himself in such a way that she couldn’t look at it directly. But then he gritted his teeth, shook his head and pulled back, returning to his original position.

“I’ve always maintained that one should be made aware of the truth, even if it’s painful. But I don’t relish being the bearer of bad news either,”

Heart pounding, she turned to look at her right arm.

The unobstructed view wasn’t pretty, to say the least. It was mangled and twisted unnaturally, bone poking out at the elbow. She swallowed thickly, feeling nauseous.

“I’ll try to set it, see if it can heal properly, but I can’t make you any promises,”

She wasn’t listening anymore. The life of an orphan was harsh. The life of a cripple even more so, but the life or an orphan and a cripple -

She choked back a sob, then looked at the stranger resolutely.

“Kill me.”

“Youths these days...” The man said, lips twitching into a half smile.

Helena scowled at him, anger heating her cheeks. “This is my decision. My life.”

“No actually, it’s not your decision.”

His voice was firm, almost cold - despite the smile still on his face. She tried to appear unbothered by it, but she couldn’t tell if it was working because his expression remained the same. Time to try a different tactic then.

“Leave me then. My head is woozy, I know I lost a lot of blood. I’ll die eventually,” she reasoned.

Instead of arguing with her, the man caught her eyes with his. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” He said, grabbing a few bandages out of his bag. “I’m going to set your arm, then tend to the rest of your injuries. When I’m satisfied that your condition is stable enough, I’m going to take you someplace where you can recover.”

“Stable enough?” She snorted derisively. “I can’t move. At all. I’m a lost cause, what on earth makes you think you can fix that?”

“What’s your name, child?” The question caught her off guard. No one had asked for her name in ages.

“What?” She asked.

“Your name.” He repeated.

“Helena. What’s it to you?”

“Well, Helena,” He reached for the alcohol again. “lost causes usually don’t have the energy to argue as much as you do.”