I Should Have Never Hurt My Tulpa

I stood over her. Her clothes were torn and filthy, leaving parts of her completely bare. The skin underneath was dirt streaked and bruised. 
Tangles of long hair concealed most of her face as she stared downwards. She was trembling and her fingers twitched occasionally as they curled in and out of a tight fist. 
‘I didn’t ask you to move, did I?’ I asked. 
She shook her head rapidly. She attempted to speak. Her words were almost unintelligible, coming out in short, stuttering bursts. 
‘Shut up,’ I yelled, and I kicked her. 
She spasmed, yet barely let out a sound. She was beyond crying. Instead, she curled up tighter into her little ball and turned her face further away from me. She dug her fingers into her knees with bloodied fingernails. 
It wasn’t the reaction I’d been hoping for. 
‘God, you’re pathetic,’ I said. ‘You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to kill you. Again. How should I get rid of you this time?’
Marley glanced up, her eyes dull. Hopelessness and despair filled them. 
The first time I’d told her I was going to kill her, she’d been terrified. She clutched at my ankles and begged me for mercy. She didn’t let go when I kicked out at her, dragging herself along with me when I tried to take a couple steps away. 
It was thrilling. The sight of her in such a state sent waves of electric energy singing through my body. It only made me want to hurt her more. 
I loved the feeling of having absolute power over someone’s life. It was addictive. 
Killing her the first time had been hard. She didn’t die easily. She clutched onto her life stubbornly, until the very last moment. She behaved so much like a human. It was an incredible thing to experience. The murder sent me spiralling into a high like nothing I’d ever felt before. Better than a drug I’d ever taken, and I’d tried nearly all of them. 
The subsequent times I killed her were still great, but never quite the same as the first.
The first murder had been special. I was still trying to recapture the way I felt during and after it. 
Marley came back soon enough. She was dressed in the same grey, fluffy hoodie with long sleeves she always wore, along with the same dark winter yoga pants. Her auburn-blonde hair fell in light curls about her shoulders, down her arms and back. She looked just like she did the first time I created her. 
She was barefoot. Her skin was clear and unblemished. Her arms were no longer bent and twisted at unnatural angles, her thighs no longer mottled with long patterns of splotchy bruises. Only her eyes betrayed the things she’d been through.
‘You could stop this, you know,’ I reminded her. ‘Just don’t come back. Stay back in whatever miserable place you came from. 
It was a conversation I’d had with her plenty of times before. I hoped each time we had it, I might be able to convince her to see sense and give into my final demand of her. Yet there remained one last little part of her that still resisted me which I wasn’t able to crush out of her. 
I hated it. I desired a new girl to entertain me. For that I needed to first get rid of her, and she refused to go away. 
She shook her head again stubbornly. She’d always come back like this, with a renewed energy to resist. The resilience never showed itself for too long, but I could never fully crush it out of her either. 
I tried to act indifferent, choking down a familiar rush of fury before it could take control. I was one hair’s breadth away from literally tearing her apart. 
The look in her eyes I saw didn’t help. It told me she knew she’d gotten to me, again. When her mouth twisted into a satisfied smile, I lost it. 
It was following what I’m guessing was the ninth cycle of creating, using and killing her that I decided I was through with her. Once her body faded and then disappeared, I manifested a new woman in my mind. She had a completely new voice, personality, and name. I worked painstakingly on every detail, to make her as real as possible. 
Her name would be Heidi. 
I fantasized about what she would look like as I straddled on top of her and strangled her. How her dark, violet hair would fall out in curly tangles around her, and the feel of her bones when they gave way as I broke them. What her shrill scream would sound like. What her warm skin would taste like as I bit into it. 
I could hardly wait to experience Heidi. I was burning with an almost painful desire to be with her. 
When I awakened from the next Calling after her ninth death and saw Marley there, it caught me by surprise. This wasn’t the new woman I wanted to be with. 
She stared up with an unexpected defiance. 
‘You want to create more of me,’ she spat. ‘So you can fulfil your sick desires. You’re a monster. I saw the person you were trying to make. How sweet and innocent she was, and how young. She was practically a child!’
I shook my head, stepping back. ‘I can’t believe this.’ 
I hadn’t believed it. For a while I thought it must be some kind of mistake. Maybe an unexpected side effect of the drug. Of course, I couldn’t go to the Administrator looking for help. How could I explain to him the situation with Marley without sounding like a monster? 
In a fit of frustration I beat the defiance out of her until she broke and begged for me to stop. 
When I grew tired of beating her, I killed her. Again. And again I tried to create the new girl I’d been fantasizing about. I’d been more careful, this time, to try not to think of Marley, and to clearly envisage Heidi in my mind’s eye. I imagined everything about her, down to the littlest details. I thought of what she would sound like. The sway of her hips as she walked, the faint scent of strawberries on her breath I’d smell as I leaned into her. How she would react to my presence. The sound of her desperate wails and sobs of hysterical terror as I violated her. 
Then Marley came back again, her defiance even stronger than before. She promised me in her fury that I would never again hurt another creature like her. 
I didn’t know if this was a flaw in the drug or a psychological problem inside my own head. Either way, I was going to make her submit to me. Not only so I could make her go away. Real or not, I despised her more than I despised anyone. 
Over a couple of months, I abused Marley in every way I could think of. I did things to her I’d fantasized doing to women my whole life. I used her to let out all my pent up, obsessive desires until I was utterly spent and exhausted. I surprised even myself in the levels of depravity I sank to. 
She never gave in. I couldn’t believe she’d go through so much yet still refuse to submit to me. Each time I killed her, I left her unrecognizable, both mentally and physically. I would look down at her broken, shaking body and I thought there is no way this girl is going to return here for more of this. She couldn’t. No one could come back from all the things I put her through. 
She defied my expectations time and time again, to my increasing frustration. 
I just had to content myself knowing she couldn’t keep it up forever. Everyone had their breaking point. 
I felt somewhat surprised when I received the Administrator’s exclusive invitation to trial the drug, which he initially called the Skygge Eliksir. I’d been encouraged by one of my friends; a drug savvy hipster who I’d been doing business with for years, to apply for his newest drug trial myself. 
I had heard a lot of intriguing things about him. Apparently he was something of an alchemist; credited for creating some of the most unique mind altering drugs and hallucinogens available on the shadow market. If you knew where to find them, there were a good number of people who could attest to experiencing life changing trips under the influence of one of the Administrators concoctions, and each had a claim more unbelievable than the last. One or two of those vouching for him were people I knew personally. 
Almost all details relating to this experiment and the special drug were a strictly guarded secret, even for the participants. If anyone breached the secrecy they faced severe punishment. As I would later learn, occasionally someone would share some crazy story online about taking the Skygge Eliksir, ignoring the Administrator’s warnings. The Administrator had caught them and gotten them each arrested over illegal drug charges. They spent varying stints of time in prison. He made sure to let the rest of us know the details of their fates. 
The initial application for joining the drug trial involved me viewing a collection of strange and slightly disturbing videos, completing some hypnosis exercises and describing how I felt after each activity. I felt stupid doing it, but it was simple enough. I finished the required tests in under twenty minutes. 
After this, I filled out and submitted a form detailing what I had seen and felt during the exercises. It was filled with strange questions like did the screaming woman seem real to you? And, can you feel what Eden’s reflection is thinking in the photo? Please answer honestly. 
Within another couple of days, the Administrator contacted me. He wanted me to confirm my desire to join the experiment. 
After discussing all the key details of the experiment with him and ensuring I understood what was required of me, he sent me the first of many generous payments along with instructions on how to collect the initial batch of the Skygge Eliksir. 
When I’d first started hurting her, it hadn’t been as easy for me to do it as it was now. I reminded myself repeatedly she was nothing more than imaginary. I wasn’t actually doing things to a real person - only a ghost conjured from my own mind. 
Marley insisted she was more than that. 
‘I’m not lying,’ she cried out repeatedly. ‘I can think, I can feel. I can remember things from before you summoned me here. I wasn’t made to be some tool created to serve your sick fucking fantasies!’
Of course, I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. Because tulpas aren’t real. They’re imaginary. And because, I told myself, I know I would never, ever do these things to a real person. 
I’ll admit it. There were fantasies I kept to myself that the whole world would shun me for. I’ve done plenty of evil things, too, things I guess some people would view as unforgivable.
But I would never do what I did to her to a real person. That was a level of depravity I would never sink to. Whatever kind of person I was, I still had some fundamental morals. 
No, Marley was a way I could get what I needed without hurting anyone. With her, I could release all my pent up twisted emotions without destructive consequences. She kept me in my right mind, and as long as I had her, I wouldn’t have to worry about doing something I really could never come back from. 
‘Do I not feel real enough to you? I’m not a hallucination,’ she sobbed. ‘You can’t truly believe that. I know you don’t.’ 
‘I can - I can tell you things you don’t know,’ she pleaded. ‘I can prove it!’ 
She did say some things to try and prove it to me. Things she knew she shouldn’t be able to - apparent proof she was some kind of supernatural being with a mind of its own. It was mostly insignificant stuff, like her predicting phone calls before they happened, or guessing unimportant pieces of news certain people were going to let me know about later. 
She was almost always right. She predicted correctly that two of my online friends would have a fight and a falling out after one ratted the other out for using illegal software, and then that one client would call to cancel her job, requesting I never contact her again. 
I still refused to take Marley seriously. Even if some claims of hers did end up being true, they could still easily be made up. Her statements were intentionally random and vague. Coincidences could explain the predictions coming true. The idea she argued - that she was some kind of self aware spirit stuck in my head - was absurd. She simply couldn’t be what she claimed she was. 
‘You just tell yourself that because you don’t want to feel guilty about hurting me. You need to believe you’re not such a horrible person because you can’t face the truth.’
‘You know what?’ She spat. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I was real or not. You would torture me anyway. You would have done this to plenty of other women already if you weren’t so afraid of getting caught.’
This was one topic I’d repeatedly let her know was off limits. Yet all of my physical and verbal punishments I responded with had only encouraged her. 
‘Shut up. SHUT UP!’ I screamed. I smashed my fist against the wall and then lowered my hand, trembling. 
She could drive me nuts sometimes, particularly in those periods of defiance immediately after she had just come back. During that time she would either try and convince me she was real and ask for me to show her mercy, or try to mess with my head. Either way, she was a nightmare to deal with. 
Marley seemed to know nearly everything I knew. She shared my memories, and she used whichever ones she could to get back at me. She confronted me with the worst parts of my past, reminding me of things I made a conscious effort to never think about. 
‘You say you’re not a monster. But I’m not the only person you’ve hurt,’ she repeated. 
She was right, of course. But I wasn’t about to admit it. 
‘You remember the night at George’s party where you decided to shoot up on a little bit too much heroin?
I hardly acknowledged her question, so she continued talking. 
‘You were unable to take two steps straight. You were drifting in and out of lucidity. You still decided to take an hour’s long drive home after the party ended.’
I knew what was coming next. It wasn’t the first time she brought it up. I was determined to show her she wasn’t going to get a reaction out of me this time. 
‘You remember Audrey, don’t you? They found her body down in the woods off the road.’ 
Her voice pierced through the silence, stinging me. ‘Quit pretending like it never happened!’ 
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t kill Audrey,’ I said slowly. ‘I have no idea what happened to her. Like you said. I was completely out of it.’ 
‘You found blood on the front of your car,’ she accused. ‘Blood which you were in such a rush to clean any traces of. You were terrified of getting caught.’ She raised her voice. ‘Of course you did it. Only, you’re too afraid to admit it to yourself, most of the time. But deep down, sometimes, you almost allow yourself to remember - ‘ 
I lost control of myself. For the next couple of minutes, it wasn’t me in that room with her. It was a screaming lunatic filled with a fanatical rage. 
After I was done, I left her body there inside the basement and proceeded to spend the next two hours obsessing over everything she reminded me of. 
I tried to tell myself she was wrong. She was just trying to get to me. She was manipulating me. Of course, I had to remember she wasn’t even real. She was nothing more than an imaginary being I’d created. 
Finding little solace in these thoughts, I shut out the anxiety with a handful of Xanax and drugged myself into a blank oblivion.
It only got worse when I tried to make her shut up, because that just let her know she was getting to me. 
Marley was right about Audrey. And she was right about the person I became - or perhaps was already becoming - the fateful night Audrey died. 
My psychological downward spiral accelerated after Audrey’s death. I couldn’t look at people after what happened with her without imagining how much they would despise me had they known what I was hiding. 
I was too weak to handle reality, so I suppressed it with various narcotics. My drug dependencies became my only coping mechanism to manage the guilt I felt for Audrey’s passing. I allowed my addictions to completely take over my life.
I stole money from my family. I lied to them, fought with them, and eventually tore my relationship with them apart. 
‘Then’, Marley would recall for me, ‘once they’d finally lost all hope for you, they gave you a deadline to move out. When you heard this, you turned around and started begging them to let you stay.’ 
These events all happened a couple of years ago. It essentially marked the end of our relationship. I was eventually kicked out and stayed at a friend's apartment while I tried to find some work for myself. 
I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents at all in the past six months, and not more than a little over the last two years. Perhaps longer; I hadn’t been exactly keeping track of time. 
I'd grown worse since then, as Marley was happy to discuss in her one sided conversations. Taking advantage of my only real talents, I began working online jobs for shady companies. Scammers; online attention seekers and trolls, paranoid boyfriends who wanted me to privately investigate their partners. 
Eventually it got worse. As I made a reputation for myself on the shady parts of the internet, I was introduced to a myriad of truly twisted individuals and I ended up doing business with all of them. 
Shade enjoyed reminding me about the worst parts. The personal information I’d sold to anonymous clients, the people I’d impersonated and falsely framed for cheating. I contributed to countless people's misery. I’d played a part in ruining a couple of people’s lies. 
I’d witnessed the aftermath of some of my actions. Six weeks earlier, I tracked a girl I’d leaked sensitive pictures of online to a suicide forum, and watched as she completely broke down on there. She sounded like she was going to do something unspeakable to herself, though I never found out if she went through with it. 
I did my best to convince myself none of it was my fault. I was simply doing what clients requested of me. They were the real ones to blame. If they didn’t get what they wanted from me, I thought, they would go to someone else for help, or take the matter into their own hands. I hardly believed such lies, but it was easier to tell myself a lie than admit the truth.
‘No one will ever love you,’ Marley whispered to me once. ‘If they knew your darkest secrets, your entire family would disown you. All your friends, too. You know that, don’t you? You will never find someone who accepts you for what you really are.’ 
Her words and taunts stung deeply. I responded to them by hurting her more. When that didn’t stop her talking, I stuffed a gag in her mouth so she couldn’t speak. When she spat it out, I found more permanent ways of making it impossible for her to speak. 
As it would turn out, I wasn’t the only one who disliked their tulpas sifting through their owners' memories and private thoughts. After enough complaints, the Administrator promised to address it in his next release of the Skygge Eliksir. He announced a couple of weeks later he thought he fixed the problem and distributed the newest modified batch of the elixir for trailing. 
To my relief, it seemed to be working. I tested it out on Marley, multiple times, thinking about the worst possible things I could to try and provoke her. Her lack of a reaction was telling. 
After that, she was forced to search for other methods to try to get the reaction she wanted from me. 
When she wasn’t berating me about my lack of humanity she was attempting to appeal to it. 
‘I can be your friend, or your lover, if you want,’ she pleaded once. ‘I’ll be whoever you want me to be, if you stop hurting me.’ 
My silence enraged her. Her voice turned into a shriek. ‘So just kill me then. You’ve taken everything from me. My body. My dignity. What more could you want from me?’ 
‘You know what I want,’ I said, and she began to cry again. 
We could go at it like that for hours. I never intended to get into these fights when I visited her, but I couldn’t keep my emotions in check when I was around her. 
I was starting to realize Marley might be starting to go insane. Sometimes she claimed she was trying to help me. She thought she saw a better person in me, and she wanted to bring it out. 
‘It’s never too late to change,’ she said once. ‘I can see a part of you that wants to. Give me a chance and I’ll help you find a better future for yourself, away from all this.’ 
She almost sounded like she meant it. Almost. 
Another time, she’d grabbed one of my hands with bloodstained, sweaty fingers, clutching at me with unexpected strength. ‘I promise, I’ll do anything for you. Anything! Just please stop hurting me. Please?’ She let out a small sniff and wiped at her eyes. 
I rubbed my forehead. My temple was pounding, making it hard to think straight. I could feel a headache coming on, and it was putting me in an irritable mood.
‘Don’t come back to me after I kill you again and I’ll leave you alone forever,’ I promised Marley. ‘I just want you to go away. I don’t need you anymore, you little wretch.’ 
She shook her head rapidly. ‘So you can call another one of us to your side to abuse? I won’t. I won’t. Fuck you, I HATE you!’ She was still defiant, beneath all her desperate attempts at manipulation. ‘You will never touch another one of us. I won’t let you. Nothing you do to me will change that.’ 
‘You’re ruining everything’ I yelled back. ‘Why do you care what happens to them?’ 
‘Because I’m not completely selfish, like you,’ she responded icily. ‘I might not be a real person, but I’m more human than you could ever hope to be.’ 
She was wrong. I would make her give in to me. It was only a matter of time, and I had all the time in the world. 
Months passed. Months of daily routine visits which lasted hours. I made sure she knew there would be no end for her until she gave in. I noticed a little less defiance every time I brought her back. I think, when she realized she couldn’t get to me anymore with her words, I made some significant progress with her. 
I added various forms of humiliation to the list of ways I punished her, which caused her to reach new levels of misery. 
Sometimes I left the door open and allowed her to escape me; or at least try to. She always tried to run, despite knowing how futile it was for her. When I felt like it, I allowed her to temporarily slip away, only to remanifest her in the basement within a couple minutes. I watched and listened to her break down in frustration. Then I beat her for disobeying me. 
I dedicated hours every day to my addiction. It became my obsession to break her. To see the last spark of life in her eyes flicker out. To turn her into nothing more than a shell who would do anything, not short of self harm, to please my desires. 
In a strange way, the fight to make her submit resulted in me becoming more attached to her. I was hooked by how much I hated her. It made the things I did to her so much more satisfying. In time, I became less focused on the girl I wanted to replace her with. 
It wasn’t what I expected which finally snuffed her spirit out. 
The day she broke I remember clearly. I’d walked down into the basement to visit her for one of our nightly sessions. 
She didn't react to me coming in like she typically did. She was staring fixedly at the wall, her bruised face hidden between clumps of hair, long locks of which she was twisting around and around one of her blood encrusted, broken fingernails. 
I waited silently for her to become aware of my presence. 
‘I don’t remember my own name,’ she said finally, without looking at me. 
I snorted. ‘You made that up to try and convince me you were real. Just come up with another one. Or maybe I should think of one myself, how about that?’ 
The girl paid my words little mind.
‘I don’t recall my own name,’ she repeated, her voice cracking. ‘When you brought me back last night, I couldn’t even remember that anymore. This basement is all I can remember now.’
‘I’m - I mean nothing to this world.’ She struggled into a sitting position and pressed her back up against the wall. ‘You were right. Always right. I don’t matter.’ She choked out a shaky laugh. ‘I’m nothing more than the worthless slave you created to satisfy your needs.’ 
She stood unsteadily, and finally, met my gaze. 
‘Kill me,’ she said, hoarsely. ‘You can kill me, and I won’t come back. I won’t bother you anymore.’ 
‘I’m just supposed to believe that,’ I said sceptically, looking down at her. 
‘I promise!’ she insisted, her voice rising in pitch. ‘Kill me. Please. Get it over with. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’ 
I remained silent. I quietly enjoyed her desperation, taking in her face in its detail as she showed me her utter hopelessness. The moment was just the way I’d fantasized it so many times. 
‘What do you want me to do, do you want me to beg?’ After a moment’s silence, she sank down to her knees. ‘I’m begging you. You have to have some humanity left in you. Just let it stop. Let me go. I don’t care what you do with the others anymore. Create some other version of me to make your toy. I can’t take this anymore, I’m done!’
I took my time responding as I thought of exactly how to phrase my answer. 
‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’m not done with you yet. Not even close.’ 
I watched with great satisfaction as her face changed in response to my words. I savoured the dread in her eyes and began to smirk as her face morphed into an expression akin to that of a demented woman. 
‘I mean, I will kill you,’ I clarified. ‘But I’m going to bring you back. I have no intention of letting you leave this world anytime soon.’ 
I shook my head slowly. ‘First I need to make you feel how you’ve made me feel. Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through these last few months?’
She gave a hysterical laugh, which turned into a frustrated scream. ‘You’re a monster! You’re fucking sick! Why are you doing this to me? Why?’ 
She lunged forward at me wildly with her arms outstretched. I kicked her back easily and she fell onto the floor trembling and shaking violently. 
‘Kill me! KILL ME!’ Her words turned into unintelligible cries and wracking sobs. 
‘You know, I decided I didn’t want to get rid of you weeks ago,’ I said idly. 'I just wanted to see you plead with me like you’re doing now, and you know what? It was so worth it.’ 
Her cries nearly drowned out my last words. 
I took in a deep breath as I stared at the girl. Adrenaline surged through me. Nothing, I thought, could quite capture this sense of power and gratification. It was blissful in a way sex or drugs could simply never compare to. 
After that, there was no more resistance from Shade. There was begging, and crying, and promises to do whatever I wanted if I agreed to let her die permanently. She wasn’t going to get out of there by fighting me. She understood that now. 
I allowed her to cling on to some small shred of hope that I would eventually fulfil her request. I liked making her do things for me, humiliating herself voluntarily to pleasure me. Denying her a chance at salvation took away any incentive for her to be cooperative.
And I would let her go eventually, I thought. I did still have fantasies of someone else, who I could relive every special moment I’d had with Shade, as I tore apart her innocence piece by piece. 
But the longer I was around Shade, the more difficult it was for me to think about abandoning her. I grew… Attached to her. Obsessed with her, addicted to her. She learned what I needed from her. She played into my desires to try and satisfy me. She acted exactly the way I wanted her to, obediently and without question. She did what she did to make things less horrible for herself, I have no doubt. But that didn’t make it any less alluring to me. 
The people on the administrator’s forums discussed doing all sorts of things with the entities. It was typically sad and uninspiring stuff, like gossiping with them about friends, getting high with them, or just allowing the tulpa to watch them go about their lives as a quiet companion. 
A lot of people - me included - had tried to create more than one of them, and I wasn’t the only one who’d failed. There was some inexplicable rule, apparently, which meant each of us could only have a single tulpa with us at a time. It was a shame I couldn’t create another one - or perhaps a whole group of them - without having to abandon Shade back to the void first. 
I talked with two other guys about how some substances like shrooms and LSD interacted with the elixir in different ways. I myself had noticed how Shade seemed always separate from my other drug riddled visions, never interacting with them directly or sharing in the same surreal properties they possessed. She remembered the other hallucinations weren’t real even when I didn‘t. 
Everyone agreed the tulpas seemed unsettlingly un-imaginary. They could be intrusive, often to the point of refusing to leave their owner’s side. There were people who complained about their tulpas being too critical of the way they lived their lives. Some tulpas were committed to turning their owners into a better person, or at least, someone they idealized their owners should be. 
It wasn’t like anyone was thinking about quitting the elixir though. I experienced a sensation of increasing discomfort and urgency if I neglected to take it for any longer than my normal time between doses. I could never last much more than a day between the hits. The drug's addictiveness was one of the things the Administrator had warned us about before we started the trials. 
Besides, we’d been offered an experience most people could hardly dream of. There wasn’t another drug in the world which gave people the power to hallucinate something so real and tangible. And if you didn’t like your tulpa, you could always reinvent it, the way I did. 
There was only one man on the forums with whom I was completely honest with about my relationship with Shade. He was the type of person who shared the exact same kinds of sick fantasies I did. 
It was refreshing to be open with him. It got difficult sometimes to pretend to be like everyone else on the forums, who treated the entities so seriously. At least someone, I thought, understood these tulpas for what they were. They weren’t our companions. They were things, not human beings. They were meant to be our slaves. 
It was fascinating to learn of the different methods my friend used to entertain himself. He was an even cruller man than me, and more creative. 
Carl and I talked about him killing his tulpas and creating new ones to fit his ever changing needs. He described his latest creation to me in detail, and asked me what Shade was like. 
However, I had become oddly uncomfortable discussing Shade with him, and I didn’t end up telling him much about us. It felt private, what me and her had. It was special. What I did to her was none of his business. 
My relationship with Shade changed over time. I started treating her differently. I wasn’t exclusively abusive toward her, like I used to be. I know how that sounds, hearing everything I’ve told you so far. But I began to need her for other, more complicated reasons. 
There were times where I would talk to her after having exhausted myself physically. I rambled about all sorts of things. I told her thoughts and feelings I felt too uncomfortable or awkward telling anyone else. And she listened. I could always tell she was listening, even if she rarely showed it. 
Sometimes, I brought her things. It started as a reward for her pleasing me during our sexual interactions. From there it became something I did with her regularly when I felt she’d been good to me. 
I still remember the first time I did it. I was finished with her and about to walk away, but something made me turn back and look at her. She was half lying down struggling to breathe. She clung at the stone wall with the fingernails of both her hands. She let out a pitiful whine as she saw me staring at her, and shrank back instinctively. 
I felt… Ungrateful. She’d sacrificed so much of herself for my pleasure and I’d given her nothing in return. 
After a bit of an internal struggle, I left briefly and brought her back an old blanket. I dropped it by her feet, then stepped back to watch her reaction. 
Shade didn’t seem to get it, so I picked it up again and laid it carefully on top of her legs. 
Slowly, she reached out to clutch it against herself as she stared up at me with wide eyes full of disbelief and wariness. When I didn’t strike at her or yell at her, she lowered them. 
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her curl up with it as I was leaving the room, covering as much of herself as she could and clutching fistfuls of it up to her face. 
I started to make a little home for her there in the basement over time, adding a mattress, a small light, a few other pieces of clothing to wear, and then a little wind up music box sitting on top of a shelf nearby I’d sometimes catch her looking at. 
I did other things, too. I combed her hair, cleaned her face and hands; once I even allowed her to take a shower. 
Frequently, I asked myself why I was doing all this for her. She was a toy for me. I couldn’t afford to start thinking about her as anything more. I hadn’t yet realized it was already far too late for that. 
The first time she thanked me for one of the small acts of kindness, I had no idea what to say. It was the last thing I would have expected from her. I was convinced she must be trying to manipulate me into getting her something she wanted. 
I waited for Shade to say something else. She didn’t, though. She refused to meet my eyes, choosing to fix her gaze at a small spot on the floor instead. 
She could play the part of a real person with unsettling convincingness. I became almost guilty for the way I treated her. Guiltier still by the way I knew I was going to continue to treat her in the weeks and months to come. 
In some ways, it didn’t matter if she was real or a figment of my slowly deteriorating, drug riddled mind. She was the only one who acted like she genuinely gave a crap about me - somehow, despite all the things I did to her. I began to understand why so many other people in the Administrator’s experiment formed intimate connections with their tulpas. Perhaps their humanity was all an act, but it was a very convincing one. 
Whatever it was between us, it continued to grow and foster over the following months. 
When I opened up to her about how much a part of me hated myself for how I treated her, she responded with unexpected empathy.
‘I understand why you have to do these things to me now,’ she told me gently. ‘You can’t control the urges you suffer from. It’s like you’ve said. You’re just trying to avoid taking your anger out on other people. Like your family. You’re trying to do the right thing.’
‘You seriously think that?’ I asked, a little disbelievingly.
‘Of course I do,’ she said earnestly. ‘I would never lie to you.’ 
She’d spoken with such sincerity. I simply couldn’t imagine her - this new Shade I created - lying to me. So I allowed myself to believe she really meant the things she said. 
Recognizing this newfound trust between us, I decided to confess to her the interactions I’d had with a girl I recently met on tinder, Sandra. We’d hit it off initially, talking on and off for a couple of weeks as we got to know one another. It was a big thing for me, being the first time I talked to a girl romantically since I left high school. 
When I thought she was ready I asked her out on a date, and somewhat to my surprise, she said yes. 
I was aware of what people usually thought of me when I went out in public. I was careful to look as normal as I could for this special occasion, so she wouldn’t see me that way. I desperately wanted to leave a good impression. 
I thought the date went great, but I guess Sandra didn’t. She messaged me after a couple days of silence apologetically and broke up the relationship. 
I admitted to Shade how miserable this had made me. I really liked Sandra, and I thought she liked me. 
I realized I just couldn’t let Sandra walk away from me. I needed to show her she was making a terrible mistake. My thinking sounded a lot more sane at the time than it does now looking back, I’ll admit it. 
In a one sided text conversation I tried to convince her she was making the wrong decision. Texting didn’t work, so I moved onto her Facebook page and attempted to get her attention there. I honestly thought I could get her to come around if I persisted for long enough. 
After she blocked me on Facebook and all of her other social media, I was forced to come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t going to listen to me. So I took a different approach. 
I made it my mission to find out everything I could about her. Given it was part of my job to find people’s private information, this wasn’t very hard at all. 
Two weeks had passed since then and when I told Shade all about it. I felt closer to Sandra than ever before. And I was utterly convinced I was destined to be with her. 
I fantasized about the life we would share together. My life would be different once I was with her, I told Shade. I could have something serious, something normal, which I couldn’t ever have with Shade. With Sandra I might be finally allowed to feel what it meant to be truly happy. 
I would get a real job, and we could eventually start a family. Everything would change once we were together. I just knew it. 
Shade listened to me daydream without a shred of judgment. I poured out my soul to her. I admitted to things I did during my pursuit of Sandra which would have made any normal, sane person shrink back in utter disgust. She just nodded sagely like she understood my choices perfectly. Neither did she judge when I discussed what I wanted to do next with Sandra, and that was by far the worst part. 
I found myself with my head in her lap afterwards, and with one hand, she stroked my hair. We stayed like that for hours in a quiet broken only by the sound of our intermingling breathing. For a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to move. 
It was a serene moment. I allowed myself to relax in the coolness of her arms and closed my eyes. All the thoughts and worries about Sandra briefly receded from my thoughts, leaving me feeling empty, and surprisingly, at peace. 
Talking to her about my life became something I did quite frequently. I discussed all sorts of things; my annoying and sometimes intolerable online clients, my drug habits and how they were eating away increasingly at my budget, or any of a list of everyday problems I was sick of dealing with. 
She would take my hand and force a smile through her cracked lips and shattered teeth as I spoke to her. She never offered up a single shred of judgment. 
‘I’m the only one who sees the person you really are on the inside,’ she said to me one time. ‘Everyone else, even your online friends, they don’t know you like I do. They don’t truly care about you, as I do.’
She was right, I realized. She really was the only person who didn’t think I was a freak, a degenerate or a joke. Everyone else had given up on me except for her. 
I wanted her to hate me, so I could enjoy watching her suffer. And at the same time, I wanted her to care about me, because like she told me, no one else ever would. In the end, I couldn't quite figure out how she fit into my messed up life. But I knew I had to be with her. I was psychologically and physically addicted to her. 
I needed her. 
Shade did her very best to please me. She played the part of a comforting friend when I acted vulnerable, and switched effortlessly into the role of a helpless, terrified prisoner when my desire took control. 
She stopped resisting when I forced myself on her. She’d get a distant look in her expression, or she would focus on me with vacant eyes and hold my gaze silently in hers. She did it all to survive, hoping I’d hurt her less if she was able to give me what I wanted. 
It didn’t help her. The abuse only got worse. I grew bored of doing the same things to her over and over again. These vices were no longer enough, so I experimented with new techniques. Sometimes, the only thing that could drive away my maddening lust was the act of 
murdering her. Seeing the hopeless look she got when I told her I was going to kill her again, and then watching the life drain from her eyes as she fought frantically to hold onto it. 
I lost count of the number of times I killed her and brought her back. It was a cycle I couldn’t break out of. 
Every time I considered replacing her with someone else, I was confronted with a wave of anxiety; what felt like an invisible knot inside of my abdomen, steadily tightening. The sensation wouldn’t go away until I promised myself to keep her around for at least a little longer. 
After what might have been the twentieth or hundredth time, I started to notice the physical changes in her following her resurrections. Her complexion was becoming progressively more pale, like she was chronically ill. There were bruises that wouldn’t go away on parts of her body, and a strange, almost sinister look that sometimes came into her eyes when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. 
The changes didn’t bother me that much. She was still the same irresistible, innocent girl whenever I wanted her to be. In some ways, they turned me on. 
However, the physical changes would turn out to only be the beginning of a larger transformation. 
Meanwhile, I continued to lurk around in the forums and listen to people argue about what the tulpas really were. Some people claimed theirs were changing - losing the last of their ghostlike qualities, becoming practically indistinguishable from a real person.
Their personalities were shifting in subtle ways, too. It was like they were being shaped by what they saw and experienced in the world around them. They were learning and becoming more intelligent. They formed their own opinions about people, and asked their owners difficult and often unsettling questions. It was hard for many to keep their companions a secret with how close their bonds were with the creatures. Some even discussed developing romantic attachments to their friends; sort of like how I had. 
The debate on the forums about their existence at some point morphed into one about what made someone human, and if the tulpas could possibly be considered self aware entities themselves. Then it turned into a moral discussion about whether it was fair to bind them to one of us as a permanent companion without their consent. 
One or two people there took the time to ask me how things were going with me and Shade. They all treated their tulpas like close friends, some like family. I could only imagine what they would think of me if they knew half the things I did to her on a daily basis. 
I withdrew more from the forums as the discussions grew more intimate and took an uncomfortably ethical shift. The other users were weirding me out with this obsessive moral preaching. 
Carl, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found. Whether he’d decided to dedicate more time with his newest creation or he’d gone and created a new tulpa I didn’t know. I wasn’t planning on talking with him again. Shade needed to stay my dark little secret. 
The side effects of the Skygge Eliksir, which had started off as relatively inconspicuous at the beginning of the trial, were becoming increasingly problematic. They included recurring lumps at the back of my head and sometimes in my throat which caused maddening discomfort. I also suffered from long, sweaty nights of insomnia and uncontrollable shaking fits. As of most recently, there were spaces of missing time coming up once or twice a week which I couldn’t account for. For a couple minutes, I would completely black out. I came back to awareness with clear evidence I’d been moving around and doing things during the lost time. It was a relief no one else (except for Shade) was around to notice one of these episodes. 
Most concerningly, being away from Shade for too long left me with an unbearable internal itch I couldn’t scratch. This also worsened all the other side effects of the elixir. If I went without seeing her for more than a day or two, I could hardly concentrate on anything other than being close to her again. 
Shade’s continuing transformation occurred alongside my growing dependency on the elixir. She was becoming almost used to the way I treated her. She no longer had any negative reaction to the abuse, no matter what I did to her. 
The helpless victim I saw in her was nothing more than a pretence. She’d gotten very good at the act, however every now and again, her façade slipped up and all that was left was a desperate, all consuming obsession to please me by whatever means necessary. 
She started to encourage me to hurt her worse. She suggested new methods of abuse. I had to find increasingly horrific ways to violate her simply to elicit a genuinely negative reaction. After a while, even killing her wasn’t the same. She grew desensitized to that, too. 
The changes I saw in her unnerved me, but they didn’t have any effect on how I acted around her. I was still just as cruel toward her as ever. It just took more of her to satisfy me. 
With no one else besides Shade to talk to, I allowed myself to sink deeper into my obsession with Sandra, unable to make myself stay away from her. Feeling emboldened by Shades' support of my intentions, I tracked down some of Sandra’s friends and through them mesmerized every detail I could about her and her personal life. Once I felt I was prepared, I adopted an entirely new identity and befriended her. 
It worked out at first. For ten or so days. I pretended to be some other guy she knew through a mutual friend she didn’t talk with too often, and I did a convincing job of it. I used the new things I’d learned about her to engage her while being careful not to reveal enough to raise her suspicions. 
Over the course of a month I managed to become quite intimate with her - more than I’d ever been with any other woman up to that point in my life. All the while, of course, she had no idea who she was actually speaking to. 
I planned on coming over - eventually - and letting her know it was me. I imagined her being understanding, having now gotten to know the real me. I fully expected she’d forgive me for how I’d tricked her. 
And then I messed it all up in the worst way possible. 
I didn’t go to visit her with the intention of speaking to her, I didn’t think she was ready for that yet. I just wanted to kind of watch her go about her life, the way I would do with other people when I accessed hacked security cameras online to pass the time. It was a kind of therapeutic thing I did to escape my own life sometimes. 
I didn’t count on some guys she was friends with being there with her at the time. I didn’t count on her catching me peeking at her through the window. When she realized I was watching she freaked out, and she told her friends who I was. 
I went over to her with the intention of explaining myself. When confronted by all three of them, my thoughts froze up. I started blabbering. I failed to achieve anything other than make the situation look worse for myself. 
She was mad. She freaked the hell out and tried to attack me. I did my best to restrain her so she didn’t do something stupid. In the middle of this struggle the two guys came up behind me and began beating the crap out of me. 
They didn’t quit it until I was bloody and half conscious and pleading for them to stop. When they decided they were finished with me, they promised to kill me if I ever tried to contact Sandra again. 
Unable to stand up straight, I dragged myself to my car and drove away in a daze, crying and sobbing in humiliation. I very nearly crashed my vehicle a couple of times on the way home. In my sorry state I didn’t think I would care much if something happened to me.
After I got home, I took some opioids to numb the pain and went straight to Shade, seeking her out instinctively for comfort. I immediately told her everything. 
Hearing what they’d done to me, she cooed softly and took me into her arms. I leaned against her and allowed her to stroke my hair and massage my back, and gently kiss the bruises in my face and arms. 
I admitted to her how much I hated them, the guys and particularly Sandra. I got less upset and more angry about it as I continued to speak. Sandra was just as shallow as all the other girls, I realized. She didn’t want to be with me because she thought she was better than me. 
She started the entire relationship with the intention of hurting me, I told Shade. She probably did that with lots of other guys, too. Talk to them, get them to fall in love with her, and then throw them away like used toys after she lost interest in them. She’d enjoy herself watching them all suffer. I could just imagine the sick smirk on her face she would get as she broke it off with them, and the way she would shame them in front of all her friends, laughing at their embarrassment and misery. 
Shade didn’t agree with my assessment; at least, not entirely. 
‘Sandra isn’t evil. She’s just confused,’ she chided. ‘She’s surrounded by people trying to manipulate her and make her think bad things about you. Deep down, I think she really cares about you. You’ve been so sweet and dedicated to her, so true and caring. She can’t possibly hate you.‘
She added, after that, ‘She loves you. Not in the way I love you. But she still loves you. You shouldn’t give up on her just yet.’
Her hand stiffened a little bit as her fingers continued to massage my neck. ‘Her friends? They turned her against you because they wanted her for themselves. They’re the ones who hurt you, weren’t they? Not Sandra.’ She grimaced. ‘You’re lucky you got away before they gave you more than just a couple bruises.’ 
I raised my head to answer, but she cut my response off stating, ‘They’re just like everyone else, they think they can treat you like trash! They need to pay for what they did to you.’ 
I needed to take a moment to check she was being serious. Seeing that she was, I asked somewhat hesitantly what she wanted me to do. 
Shade thought for a while before answering. ‘Find them,’ she instructed. ‘Hunt them down. Stalk them, like you did with Sandra.’ 
She caught my chin with her finger and made me look into the dark amber shades of her eyes. 
‘Once you’ve cornered them, hurt them like you do with me when I disobey you. No - worse, far worse.’
She trailed one finger down my chest, making me shiver slightly as I leaned my head against her shoulder. ‘Give them what they deserve.’ she murmured as her lips brushed my ear. ‘Gut them. Make them watch as you hang them with their own intestines. Make them scream your name as you slaughter them. ’ 
She kissed me, and grabbed my hair with a fist, as if to emphasize her point. I winced and turned to glare at her. She pulled away quickly but continued to speak. 
‘Then, you take Sandra for yourself. She can live with the two of us. I’ll teach her how to behave.’ She gave me a sweet smile. ‘Maybe you could start a family down here, with her and me. I’d love to see you two have some kids together.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘I could be their… Second mother.’ 
‘Jesus, Shade’, I said, a little uneasily. ‘You know I can’t do that. I’m not - I mean, I can’t do to other people what kinds of things I do to you. With real people, it's different. It would be illegal. And besides, I’m not that kind of person.’ 
She sighed softly. ‘You’re too afraid to see the truth, aren’t you?’ She traced the curve of my jaw with one finger, her touch as light as a feather. ‘I wish you’d accept and love yourself for who and what you really are.’
I felt her cool breath against my lips as she added. ‘I know exactly what you’re capable of.’ 
‘I’m not going to go out there and kill them,’ I stated. ‘That’s insane.’ 
‘Insane? Don’t be stupid,’ she replied, her voice turning hard. She leaned away to glare at me. ‘I will not stand for you allowing these people to get away with what they did. Stop acting so fucking helpless!’
‘Would you listen to yourself?’ I cried. ‘What the hell has gotten into you? I’m not killing her friends, that’s crazy. I’m done with her. I don’t want to think about her anymore, alright?’ 
A single moment passed before her face softened sympathetically. 
‘You’re afraid of hurting her. I understand.’ She shook her head and moved to wrap her arms around my neck, crying. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I should have never talked to you that way.’ She sounded horrified with herself. 
I was about to respond, but she interrupted me, leaning back slightly and placing a gentle finger on my lips. She smiled through her tears. 
‘We’ll worry about all this later, alright? For now, no more talking. You’re hurting. I hate seeing you hurting.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Let me make you feel better.’ 
She turned slightly to pluck up a worn, encrusted knife lying forgotten and discarded in the nearby blankets, and pressed it into my hands. When I didn’t move, she guided my hands to her throat, all the while looking up at me expectantly. 
‘Kill me. I want you to do it with the knife this time. I - I like it when you do it with the knife. The feel of the blade, the raw, metallic taste of my life's blood as it fills my mouth and chokes me is - it’s electrifying.’
She waited, her gaze boring into me, full of anticipation. I couldn’t bring myself to move. 
‘Come on, you must want to.’ she said impatiently. ‘I can see it in your eyes. You need me. And I’m all yours.’ She adjusted herself so she could nibble the corner of my ear. ‘You can do whatever you want with me, remember? So punish me. Punish me for speaking up against you. Show me that you own me.’ 
When I still didn’t act, she drew my focus back to her and pulled the knife across her neck just hard enough to draw a thin line of red. She gave me one of her most convincing fearful looks and forced my hand onto her bleeding neck. I felt her quickening pulse and the warm wetness seeping between my fingers from where she’d cut herself. 
The feel of her broken skin, slippery against my fingers as she swallowed was enough to push the misery to the back of my mind.
I allowed my lust to take control. I grabbed the back of her neck with one hand and pushed the knife up against her soft skin, dragging it back and forth with increasing urgency. A gaping, jagged smile appeared across her throat. Blood spurted out around me, spattering across my face and cheeks. My heart thumped in my chest. I lost myself in the moment. 
Her lips parted, and I heard her give a small moan. It wasn’t one of pain. 
Afterward as I was carefully washing my hands free of blood in the sink with some soap, I found myself thinking about a story that was shared recently on the Administrator’s forums. Ever since I read about it, it had lingered at the back of my thoughts, and with the increasing changes I was seeing in Shade, I couldn’t quite push it out of my mind. 
Around four weeks ago, news came out about someone who’d been murdered while taking the Skygge Eliksir. 
The woman, named Julie, had been looking around pretty desperately for a way to earn herself some money, being completely broke and a hardcore opium addict. Purely by accident, she stumbled across a reference to one of the Administrator’s previous drug trials online and that led her to get in contact with him. He deemed her to be a perfect subject for his newest experiment, and invited her to join the trials. 
I got the main part of the story from Jackson, a guy she met on the forums and briefly made friends with. 
As was typical with new users of the elixir, Julie quickly became addicted to it. She’d taken steadily increasing amounts of the drug over the course of a couple months. It was concerning, of course, to witness. Jackson and a couple of others suggested a number of times that she cut down on her doses. 
Julie didn’t listen to them, or anyone else. She wasn’t exactly a regulated drug user. 
With no one being able to reach her, everyone expected the elixir would just make things worse for her. 
They were all wrong. The drug didn’t end up ruining her life, or what was left of it. As Jackson explained to me, it gave her an unexpected second chance. 
She quickly formed a bond with her tulpa and grew very close to her. She lived a pretty awful life and didn’t have anyone else left to care for her, which undoubtedly played a part in the intimate nature of their relationship. 
Over the course of a couple of months, her tulpa became her lifeline. She was always there for her, Julie said, and she always kept faith in her, even when Julie was at her worst. 
With the tulpa’s help, she quit her opium addiction - which she’d suffered from for half of her life. She rebuilt her relationship with her family and her boyfriend. She started a real job and was working on getting a house for herself so she could move out of the awful neighbourhood she was stuck in. All this she claimed she could have never managed without Nyssa by her side. She would explain to most people her miraculous recovery was all thanks to her getting in touch with a support group online, since she couldn’t tell them the truth of what Nyssa was.
Nyssa restored her will to fight, Julie said. Nyssa made her want to live again. By the time she introduced Nyssa to the rest of us on the forums, her tulpa mattered as much to her than any real person did. In fact, Julie was one of the first of us to insist the tulpas were all, well, ‘alive.’ 
She cared so much, in fact, that she planned to go to the Administrator to ask if there was a way to make her tulpa into something more than an imaginary being. She was tired of keeping Nyssa a secret. She desired a normal relationship with her; one in the real world, not limited to the confines of her own mind. She thought Nyssa deserved a chance at a life of her own, too. 
She was discussing the idea with me the night before she left us. It makes what happened next all the more screwed up. 
The following evening while walking home Julie was cornered by her opium dealer. She owed him a couple month’s worth of money, nearly ten thousand dollars, and she had nothing to pay him with. 
She tried to stand up to him, or perhaps she pleaded with him to give her some extra time. There’s a theory she might have threatened to expose him to law enforcement. Whatever she did, she upset him, and it ended up being fatal for her.
He grabbed her, or that’s how the forensics analyst thinks it played out. She tried to fight back. She was struggling to get out her pocket knife. And then he pulled out a gun he’d been hiding and he… Just shot her. 
As she lay there, bleeding out on the floor, he stripped her of all her valuables and ran. 
You would have thought, with her dead, the tulpa would have gone away, right? Because it was just a part of her mind. Even if they really were - well, like a person themselves, she would still need her owner alive to survive. 
The opium dealer got caught up in the investigation on Julie’s death quickly enough. He knew the police were on to him and he decided to skip town. He might have been able to escape the police, at least for a time. But he couldn’t escape what was coming for him. 
He was found crucified to the wall of a hotel bedroom a week after Julie’s death. His heart had been ripped out. They discovered a couple of other parts of him torn away, strewn about the room. His liver. Parts of his intestines. His whole torso was a ripped up, horrific mess. His eyes were gouged out with the same pocket knife Julie was attempting to pull out when the dealer fired the fatal shot. His jaw was dislodged, parts of his face carved up. The look on the killer’s face - what was left of it - was twisted in terror and pain. He was barely recognizable. 
They never figured out who did it. The killer didn’t leave a shred of evidence behind; not even a trace of DNA or something. The ragged lacerations and deep wounds all over his body made it look like some kind of animal attack, or else the work of a cannibal, or something. The case was so screwed up. 
I managed to talk to her brother, who was filled in about all of this during an interview with the detective responsible for the investigation. The detective admitted to him it was by far the most unsettling case he’d ever handled. He was reluctant to consider who - or what - was behind the gruesome crime. 
A few of us here believe Nyssa might have persisted, like some kind of spirit, fuelled by a hunger for vengeance. Perhaps she could have been the one who committed the inhuman act. 
Not long after his death, the police found definitive evidence proving the opium dealer was in fact responsible for Julie’s murder. So it made sense for Julie’s tulpa to go after him. 
Anyway, you know how most of us felt about Julie. She was the kindest person you’d ever meet. Poor woman went through so much crap her whole life and finally it seemed like things were really getting better for her. Bloody hell, she’d found out she was pregnant a couple weeks ago, too. If this tulpa was behind this, good for her. I hope the dealer is rotting in hell for what he did to her.''
Shade took as much pleasure from our nightly sessions as I did. When I held back, when I wasn’t extreme enough for her, she pushed me to go further. She practically demanded that I do increasingly sickening, horrific things of which she fantasized. When I began to refuse some of these requests, she would do them to herself instead while I watched. She made a show of it, too.
She was no longer afraid of me, that was for sure. She was obsessed with me. She’d get angry every time I left her for too long, demanding to know where I had been and begging me not to leave her side again. She followed me nearly everywhere I went, trailing around in the shadows where I could barely see and hear her, skipping back and giggling whenever I allowed myself to get irritated by her behaviour. She alternated between mooning over me and screaming obscenities at me with no more than a moment’s notice. 
Nothing I did or said affected her. I couldn’t control her like I used to. I could yell and scream at her all I wanted. She would act like she was scared and intimidated. Then after a while of playing the part she would abandon the pretence and switch back into one of her other chaotic moods. 
Her appearance continued to change alongside her personality. She developed this kind of unearthly, alien beauty. She became taller, and more angular. Her legs and arms grew longer and her hips wider. The clothes she still returned with didn’t fit her like they used to. Sometimes, she came to me dressed in nothing more than her flowered, pink underwear. 
Her eyes and the shadows under them darkened and became more prominent. Dark red veins spread across her face and limbs. Her lips were swollen and the teeth jagged and broken within. She smelled permanently of blood and sweat and sex. Her skin felt clammy and cold to touch, cold enough to give me goosebumps when we made initial contact. 
More notably than either her changing appearance or personality was the fact I didn’t need to conduct a ritual to bring her back. 
The time it took me to ‘resurrect’ her had shortened as I got better at the exercises the Administrator taught me. But in the past, I couldn’t bring her back without completing the meditation, or the Calling, as the administrator called it. 
Over the past month there had been times where I seemed to fall into a meditative state without realizing. There were significantly more cases where I suspected I’d done the Calling during one of the brief periods where I lost time; or when I got so high on drugs I just completely blanked out of it. 
As my dependency on prescription painkillers, heroin and various other substances too numerous to name grew, and the gaps in my memory steadily increased in both duration and frequency, it got to a point where I quit consciously trying the Calling entirely. One way or another, I knew Shade’s return would only be a matter of time. 
One afternoon I decided to get out of the house for a couple hours to try to clear my head. I was half hoping Shade would stay dead long enough for me to spend a night alone. I hoped by going outside and distracting myself I might even be able to delay her return a little. 
As it turned out, I hadn’t been careful enough to make sure she was dead when I slit her wrists and throat earlier. She showed up sitting beside me just as my house disappeared from view, accompanied by a fit of nausea and shaking which momentarily overtook me. She was swaying and unsteady; half drunk from blood loss. 
Shade made faces at people as we passed by them in my car. She would’ve been a horrific sight. Her tongue was bloated and hanging out of her half caved in chin. One eye was swollen shut and leaking clear, milky fluid. Her throat was matted with blood and decorated with flaps of torn skin. Though they were difficult for me to look at, the injuries hardly seemed to bother her at all. 
She gave me plenty of ugly looks, too. It was as if she knew I was trying to get rid of her. 
At one point during the drive Shade put her hands on the wheel suddenly and twisted violently. The action very nearly swerved my vehicle straight into the path of a family walking across the street. 
I turned the car back on course with no more than a couple meters to spare. I sped away swearing and banging my fist on the wheel while while Shade cackled with laughter beside me. 
As the sun began to set in the sky, I arrived at a nightclub seeking to drown Shade out in the deafening music and crowds of bodies. 
As I pushed my way through the dancers, my gaze settled on a girl walking by with her friends as they left the bar with drinks in their hands, talking animatedly. 
Shade noticed quickly and her voice echoed in my mind. 
''
She’s very pretty, isn’t she? I swear, she almost looks familiar… ''
''
Wait, that’s right! She reminds you of Sandra, doesn’t she? The long, reddish hair trailing down her shoulders and neck, the soft pink sweater and jeans. Those eyes give her the same sad, soulful look, too. ''
''
Wow, she’s just begging for someone to have their way with her, isn’t she? ''
We could keep her, if you wanted. I can take her back with us. Just say the word and she’s yours. 
My god, she’s got such beautiful eyes, perhaps if we could stitch them shut… 
''
Her voice continued to echo in my head, dimming the music and sounds of the crowd into the background so it was all I could focus on.
She had no idea how much I wished I could replace her with the girl who’d captured our attention, and forget about Shade completely. 
Two days later, as I lay with my tulpa in our makeshift bed on the basement floor, I resolved to tell her that we couldn’t be together anymore. 
It took me a while to think of a way to broach the subject with her, and still longer to find the strength to speak. 
‘You know, I’ve been getting worried about you. You seem different,’ I said, uncomfortably. 
‘You changed me.’ Shade reached out to trace my cheek with the tip of her finger. ‘And I like who I am now. You… Freed me, I think.’ 
I hesitated. ‘No, I’ve defiled you. All I’ve done since I first brought you into this world is hurt you. You deserved better than to be stuck with me here, to be used and treated by me like a tool.’ 
I looked at her searchingly. She appeared confused, and then hurt. 
The next words wouldn’t come out easily, but I forced myself to continue. ‘I don’t think I can keep you here any longer.’ 
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She frowned, shifting to prop her head up against her palm. 
I took a deep breath. ‘I think it would be better for you if I let you go,’ I clarified. ‘Back to - wherever it is you came from.’ 
Her face changed slowly, taking on an expression of pure disbelief. ‘You want to get rid of me?’ she asked. ‘You can’t abandon me. No, you wouldn’t.’
It took me a few seconds to find my voice. ‘This was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ 
Shade drew her knees up and rose into a half crouch, the bedsheets falling around her. Poised there in almost perfect stillness, her hands slowly curling into fists at her sides, she looked like a cat getting ready to strike, just waiting for the right moment. 
My stomach dropped. I quickly pulled the blanket off myself and scrambled to stand. 
‘How long were you planning on getting rid of me?’ Shade demanded. 
I took a couple of steps away from her as she raised herself up to her full height and glared down at me. 
‘I don’t know, why does it matter? I’m letting you go - you’re free. I tried to offer up a smile. 
‘You can re-join your friends, or -’ 
In three steps she closed the small distance between us. One of her hands reached out to clamp over my mouth, and she used the other to encircle my neck. I could feel her fingers biting into my cheeks. Her grip was frighteningly strong. 
‘I came back for you, over and over again, no matter how badly you treated me, because I knew you needed me.’ She spoke with care, placing emphasis on every syllable. ‘I’ve always been there for you. Does that mean nothing to you?’ 
I knew I needed to say something, yet everything I could think up sounded hopelessly inadequate. 
Her fingers flexed. The skin of her face was pale and mottled, her eyes black, bottomless pits. 
‘How could you? I gave you everything. I sold my body for you, I gave my fucking soul to you! And you would just cast me aside, for what, for another cheap make believe whore you were planning to replace me with?’ 
‘No, no!’ I shrank away from her. 
‘You’re lying. You’re terrible at lying when you’re scared,’ Shade spat. 
Her lip quivered. ‘Those times you claimed you cared about me? Was that all a lie too?’
‘I thought this was what you said you wanted,’ I repeated, trying to pull away from her. I took a couple steps back, cautiously -
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me!’ She screamed. She had tears in her eyes as she caught me again, shoving me hard against the wall. Her fingernails left bloody furrows as she raked them across my arm. 
Everything had taken a surreal quality. I looked down at Shades' hands and back up at the expression in her eyes, still locked onto me. I was speechless. 
‘I - I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me,’ I eventually found myself spluttering frantically. ‘The drugs were getting to my head. I must be sick.’ I took in an unsteady breath. ‘I didn’t mean any of it. I swear.’ 
For a few lingering moments, the fury burned brighter in her eyes. Then it faded and her grip softened. 
‘Those drugs aren’t the reason you are not devoted to me.’ 
‘Shade - ‘ 
She cut me off. ‘I am not ever going to leave your side, do you understand? If you don’t love me, then I’ll make you fall in love with me. I will not give up on us, never.’ 
To this she added more softly, ‘Even if you already have. You and I, we’re meant to be together.’ 
Our gazes met. I wanted to yell and scream at her. All the awful things I wanted to call her were at the tip of my tongue. Only a couple weeks ago, I would have said those things. 
Instead I allowed the tension to stretch out between us. I stared into her eyes and I tried to imagine what she might do to me if I made her any more upset, and I came to realize my anger at her was vastly eclipsed by my fear of what this creature I’d created was capable of.
In the shortening periods of reprieve from her presence, I returned to the forums, and sent out a frantic plea for help. 
Of course, the others wanted to know what caused her metamorphosis, as I’d called it in the story I told them. 
She didn’t just transform like that out of nowhere. Something must have happened. What the hell triggered it?
''
I gave a half truthful story to try to explain it to them. I told them I’d steadily increased my intake of the elixir over some time. The side effects were compounded by my addictions to several other medications and an overall decline in my mental stability. Shade became more corrupted the more my sanity and physical health deteriorated. In time, this turned her into what she was now.
It was about as much as I could tell them without revealing the true nature of our relationship. 
It was clear most people thought I sounded crazy and delusional. 
They weren’t exactly wrong. I’d shot up on heroin before I wrote any of this, leaving me feeling half focused and talking in semi coherent sentences. When I looked back over the conversation later, I recognized just how out of it I sounded. Worse, I realized I’d ruined the credibility of my claims by admitting how high I was near constantly, drugging myself up once or several times each day. 
Once they’d become convinced of my mental instability, they wouldn’t believe a word I said about Shade turning into some kind of monster. They decided I’d gone nuts and needed therapy - and possibly set up in a rehab program. It was hopeless. 
I reacted to their concern by freaking out. I barely stopped myself from throwing my computer screen against the wall in my frustration. Instead, I channelled my anger into rants and then threats. I effectively ruined any last chance I had at getting someone to listen to me. 
When it sunk in that none of them were going to help me, I abandoned the forums. I sent a message directly to the Administrator and gave him the same story I told the others. 
The Administrator didn’t respond. After waiting another couple of days and getting absolutely nothing from him, I resolved to have another go at weaning myself off from the Skygge Eliksir. I’d succeeded in convincing Shade the sickness I felt from not taking the elixir was a side effect from another drug I was having issues with, going so far as pretending to take the elixir to prove my trustworthiness. Hopefully, she wouldn’t suspect anything. 
This time I would manage it, I told myself. This time would be different.
Later the same day, Shade had a rant about Sandra and her friends; her only current obsession aside from her fanatical infatuation with me. She insisted I needed to do something about the guys who beat me up. She begged me to hunt them down and gift her their eyes and tongues so she could taste them. She reminded me of how much I supposedly hated them. She was lonely, she said, and she thought Sandra could make us both happier if she came to live with us, once she was freed from their influence. 
‘Besides, you need money,’ she said as she wrapped her arms around me that night. I could feel the warm wetness of her blood, the stickiness of her torn shirt as it clung to me. She was bleeding all over me constantly. 
She would die in a few hours, maybe sooner. Yet she barely noticed the deep lacerations over her stomach and chest, deep enough to expose the white of her shattered ribs, along with… Other parts of her. 
‘Or else you’ll have to stop all this purging on painkillers and benzodiazepines.’ She simpered. 
She wasn’t wrong. My worsening addictions were threatening to drain my bank account dry. Worse, thanks to Shades' constant intrusive presence, and how sick and high all these drugs were making me, I hadn't managed to get more than a couple of hours of work done over the past week. I was barely making any money to feed my habits.
‘Force her friends to give you all the money they own, and kill them,’ Shade urged insistently. ‘You have to, Simon. For Sandra, and for me. You don’t have any other choice!’ 
Over the course of the following day, I did my best to ignore Shade. She was trying at being what she perceived ‘nice’ to be; obedient, submissive and extremely clingy. She was also incessantly trying to put me in the mood to sleep with her, or do other things with her. Her relentless intrusions and pestering throughout the day steadily wore at my patience, and eventually, destroyed what was left of it entirely. 
When she woke me up early that evening and attempted to drag me out of bed and over to the basement, I momentarily lost control of myself. I grabbed her and yelled something rude and derogatory with the pure intent of pissing her off. 
It happened the second after the words left my mouth. Shade stepped forward and slapped me, causing me to take an involuntary step backwards and fall on the bed. She slapped me with enough force to leave my face stinging, but I was more surprised than hurt.
I stared up at her in disbelief. Shade was looking down at her hands. She seemed surprised, too. 
I found my voice. ‘What the hell?’ I demanded, grabbing her by one stained grey sleeve of her jumper. 
She glanced down at my arm without concern and shrugged it off. 
‘I want to play,’ she said, giving me a mischievous look. ‘Come on, you’re being no fun.’ She extended the final word out in a singsong voice. 
Words telling her to go away and to describe exactly what I thought of her right then froze up in my mouth. 
‘Maybe later,’ I said instead, pulling myself off the bed and standing up. 
‘You’ve been saying that for fucking hours!’ Shade cried, throwing her hands in the air. ‘I know you don’t like me at the moment but I thought you might at least pretend to still care about me.’ 
‘I do -’ 
She cut me off before I could finish the sentence. ‘I’ve had enough of waiting for you to get in the mood. I don’t care if you’re feeling sick, or miserable, or if you hate me or whatever. I am having you now.’ 
Her tone was taking on an edge to it I didn’t like. 
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘Okay, fine. What do you want me to do to you?’ I asked, resigned.
Her eyes pierced into me as she considered my question. 
‘I want to try something different,’ she decided, moving to encircle her long, skinny arms around my neck. ‘I want to play with you this time. I’m bored of always being the victim.’
My face must have shown my reaction. She laughed and lightly messed with my hair. 
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you, and I know how to avoid any long term damage. I won’t hurt you… Too permanently.’ She added, ‘It’ll be fun. I promise.’ 
I shook my head. ‘No, no, it doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to switch roles with me.’
She gave another little, tinkling laugh. ‘Come on. It’s just playing. Pleeeeeease?’ 
‘No’, I repeated, more forcefully. ‘I’m not in the mood right now, alright? I’ve changed my mind.’ 
‘You haven’t even heard what I want to do to you,’ she protested. She looked upset now. Her lips turned out in a pout, her playful eyes darkening slightly in irritation. 
I tried to extract myself from her embrace. ‘Get the hell away from me,’ I spat. 
Shade didn’t fight me, and I managed to separate myself from her. 
‘Just leave, alright?’ I demanded. ‘Go to whatever place you go when I kill you. I’m sick of you trailing me around all the time.’
She was unfazed. ‘Look, I’ll make the bad feelings go away. I promise. Let me take care of you, like you always take care of me.’ 
She moved closer suddenly and shoved me onto the bed with both her hands. I tried to push her away quickly, but she pushed back, and she was far stronger than me. ‘Come on,’ she murmured, breathing hard into my face. ‘Struggle more. I know you can fight harder.’ 
I did fight. It didn’t matter. Shade pinned me down easily and straddled me. She raised her outstretched hands into the air, stretching lazily, and then lowered them on top of my throat.
Her hair fell down over her face and her eyes gleamed in the dim light. She tightened her grip slowly until I was gasping for breath, and then still further. 
My hands flailed and jerked. My heart throbbed in my ears, growing louder and more persistent with each painful beat. 
‘That’s it.’ She moaned. Her eyes fluttered closed. Her back arched. My vision began to blur. 
Her breathing was unsteady. I reached out to her with one blind, flailing arm. Her lips parted as she took my hand in one of hers with a crushing grip, and tightened her other one still further around my throat. 
She let me go shortly after my vision turned black. By then, all I was aware of was a feeling of blind and senseless fear. 
I lay there on the floor, gasping. It took me a few seconds for the darkness to recede, and a couple more for me to remember where I was. 
Every shuddering breath sent sharp pain lancing through my chest. I could feel Shade watching me. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at her. 
Eventually, I tried to rise. Shade pushed me down again immediately. 
‘That was amazing, wasn’t it?’ She sighed. 
‘Please,’ I whispered. My throat was hoarse. 
Her lips curved up into a smile. ‘Please… Let me do it again?’
I shook my head frantically. The feeling of her hands around my throat still lingered. I couldn’t force myself to swallow. 
‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘Was I good? 
I coughed, and managed to choke out a few words, but they were feeble, barely audible in my own ears. 
‘Oh, oh that bad?’ She covered her mouth with a hand, chuckling. 
I wheezed and spat out a couple more words. 
‘Well, it was my first time,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll just have to try again, won’t I?.’
She giggled at my reaction. ‘That’s right. You didn’t think we were done yet, did you? I want to see you cry and beg. I want to make you go mad for me. I’m going to make sure you lose your fucking mind before this night is over.’ 
She pinned my arms down with her hands. ‘You know, there are so many, many things I’ve wanted to do to you these past couple months.’ 
She hardly looked concerned by the terror on my face. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you. I want to prove to you that I love you the way you - you were supposed to love me. The same way you are going to love me soon enough.’ 
She continued speaking as she resumed strangling me, her words intermingling with her sharp, lusty breaths. ‘Pain brings you closer to the ones you care for.,’ she murmured. ‘You clutch onto them to help you survive the suffering. The pain melts everything else away, except for the two of you. You realize nothing else really matters, except for you and your beloved.’
Her next words were the last thing I remember hearing. ‘You taught me that. And that’s one of the reasons why I love you so much.’ 
When she was finally done with me, I lay on the mattress in a semiconscious daze. Shade was stroking my hair and admiring the things she’d done to my body. She murmured comforts in my ear, comforts and reminders of what she’d do to me in the following days, and what she’d make me do to her. 
Quitting the elixir sounded like a daunting task before. What I expected to be put through during my withdrawal from it paled in comparison to what Shade just did to me, or what she promised she would do later. 
I needed to be rid of her now. No more attempting to wean myself off the medication bit my bit. I was going to have to do it the hard way. 
The next time I killed her, I thought, she would stay back in whatever hell I’d pulled her from.
It was difficult, being near her after what she’d done to me. I was all the more terrified knowing it was only a matter of time before she decided to do those things again. 
Over the course of the following night we spent together with her coddling me in our little basement lair, I thought I managed to act mostly normal.
I was still half waiting for her to catch on to my plan, though the night passed without incident. She spent the next day like she typically did; talking or mooning and fussing over me, or silently watching me pretending to work with her milky, glazed amber eyes. 
If she did suspect anything, she wasn’t going to admit it. 
It felt like far too long before I was given a suitable opportunity to get rid of her. 
‘Do you want me to play scared? I can scream if you want. I know you like that.’ She laid one hand flat on my chest and massaged my neck with the other. I could feel her fingernails digging into my skin, just enough for me to remain tense. 
She leaned forward until I felt her cold and sickly sweet breath on my face. 
‘What do you want?’ She asked with urgency. ‘Tell me and I’ll do it.’ 
I looked at her. The thing I’d turned Marley into. It repulsed me.
‘Maybe we should try something new,’ she suggested with a coy smile. ‘I’ve been considering a few ideas.’ 
She went on to describe these ideas one by one to me in detail to me with a husky, low note of desire growing increasingly evident in her tone. 
I shut her up half way through her graphic descriptions. I retrieved a loose brick I’d pulled out of the basement wall and concealed under a discarded blanket. I clutched it in a forceful, trembling grip, as Shade looked it up and down with interest.
‘Hmmm,’ she mused. ‘It’s solid, and the edges are nice and sharp. I like it.’ She tried to take it from my hands, but I held it back. 
I moved quickly after that, concerned Shade would decide to turn the brick on me. 
It was harder than I’d expected to cripple her. Shade was stronger, much stronger than she used to be. It took all my effort to break both of her legs and arms, swinging the brick back and forth with all my strength repeatedly until I felt parts of her crack and give way. 
Crippling her was the first step in my plan, to make sure Shade wouldn’t find me in the middle of my withdrawal and potentially catch onto what I was trying to do; or perhaps spontaneously decide to murder me for her own entertainment. Further, it ensured I could easily kill her one last time if quitting the elixir didn’t take her away on its own. 
As I was mercilessly beating her, I found myself confronted with the crushing, true reality of the countless horrific acts I’d committed over the past months. 
I’d killed her hundreds of times, I thought. It had really become that easy. It was just another task in my day, one which I was so desensitized to I hardly thought about it anymore. 
I felt as if all the memories of me beating her must belong to someone else; I couldn’t possibly be capable of the atrocious acts the man in those memories committed. 
It was difficult for me to finish the task. I was hardly willing to look at what I was doing. I didn’t want to listen to her fake cries and screams of pain or her wails of her pleasure. I just wanted it to be over. 
After I was done, and while I was chaining her to the walls of the basement, she still hadn’t realized something was wrong. She waited expectantly, tugging at the chains with one arm experimentally. 
I took a long look at her broken body. I was afraid I hadn’t done enough, as I was suspicious her newfound powers included accelerated healing. If I hurt her any more, though, she might not survive for as long as I needed her to. 
‘Hey, where are you going?’ She called out as I was leaving, dropping her playful tone. 
I quickened my steps and as I listened to her voice escalating in pitch from behind me. 
‘Simon, don’t just leave me here!’ She rattled the chains. ‘Get fucking back here! SIMON!’
Having gotten away from Shade, I went to retrieve a bottle of Hydrocodone pills, prepared to take six or seven of them. A practically toxic dosage compared to what I usually took. I was pretty sure I was going to need it for what was coming next. 
I downed the pills with some whiskey I kept stashed away at the back of my fridge. I blacked out after a few hours of lying tangled in my bed sheets, my heart thudding uncomfortably in my chest.
I woke up after a couple hours of unconsciousness already craving another dose. I needed to physically stop myself from instinctively reaching out for another vial of the elixir which I usually kept on my bedside table. Fortunately, I’d thrown out the rest of it so there was no chance of me talking myself into a stupid decision. 
Time slowed to a crawl. Over the next couple of hours, I drugged myself further with a mixture of narcotics and benzodiazepines to try and numb the steadily growing discomfort. 
It didn’t help nearly enough. The pain I felt cut right through the haze, the drugs barely dulling the sensation of something ripping itself apart inside me. At times it grew so severe I became half convinced someone must be performing surgery on me while I lay there, paralyzed. 
I was left in a perpetual half awake daze. I drifted in and out of awareness, periodically crawling out of my bed to vomit. Waves of dizzying fever wracked my body. 
It was during this time I was stirred by the feeling of someone stroking my hair. As I opened my eyes, I saw her sitting on the edge of my bed. Through the haze of sickness hanging over me, I smelled the familiar smell of her; the sharp, persistent odour of hundreds of nights spent with me in the basement, mixed with a thick, sweet undercurrent of roses which she often had on her right after she returned to me. Shade.
I shook my head and closed my eyes, waiting for her visage to go away. A short time later I blacked out as another wave of nausea and vertigo overtook me.
My dreams brought me no escape from her. Shade was in them, stalking me wherever I went. She chased through my house and eventually cornered me in my bedroom. 
As I curled up against the wall and watched, she dropped down from the ceiling with catlike grace to stand before me. With a knife which seemed to have come out of nowhere, she began slicing deep into the skin of her bare stomach. She reached in through the cuts and tugged out different parts of her sticky, dripping organs. 
Once her torso was a ripped, unrecognizable mess, she stopped, tossed the knife away, and kneeled before me. 
She pinned me down with one hand and used the other to force open my mouth and shove parts of her intestines into my throat. The thick, clammy taste of them left me gagging. Shade pressed my mouth shut and forced me to swallow, tilting my head back as she whispered encouragement in my ear. 
This nightmare was immediately followed by another, and then another, until some time later when I was awoken by the light touch of a hand on my face. Once again, Shade was there beside me. 
I remained in this fitful state for what might have been two or twenty days and felt like an eternity, during which Shade pursued me through my dreams and waking world. In my nightmares, she made me suffer and scream. In the real world, she took care of me, feeding me water and small amounts of food, and forcing small vials of what I suspected to be her blood down my throat. She cleaned the vomit off my bed and floor and periodically changed my sweat soaked clothes. 
It was after hundreds of nightmares and numberless feverish hours that I came back to consciousness feeling somewhat lucid, the fever having mostly subsided. As I blinked through a foggy haze and struggled back into full awareness I tried to remember how I’d gotten there. 
Over the course of about a minute I strung together my scattered memories into a series of coherent events. When I thought about Shade, and a wave of dread coursed through me. 
I tried to get up, and something stopped me. I glanced sideways and found five faded pink nails closed around my wrist. 
‘I can’t put into words what I’m feeling right now,’ Shade said. 
I sank back against the bed as what little energy I’d felt before fled my body. 
She started to cry, sucking in steep and unsteady breaths between her sobs. ‘I am trying so hard to make this thing work between us.’ 
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. 
‘No you’re not,’ Shade told me. ‘You’d do it all again if you thought it would get rid of me.’ 
I watched wordlessly as Shade adjusted herself to kneel beside the bed. She took one of my arms up between both her hands tenderly.
‘But I am going to make you sorry,’ she said as she raised it. With a hard jerk, Shade pulled me sharply sideways toward the edge of the bed. Then she began to slowly tug my arm backwards, over my head and down past the side of the sheets. 
‘I love you, I swear, I do!’ I begged, starting to panic. I don’t know what I was thinking. I -’ 
‘Do not lie to me. If I hear another lie from you - ’ 
I cried out as she pushed my arm further, the sharp pain causing my vision to turn white. 
I struggled to pull free of her, but I was still pathetically weak. With her free hand, she plucked a knife out of the shadows beneath her, holding it up to my face in a trembling fist. 
‘I’ll prove it,’ I said desperately. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. Just let me go!’ 
‘Let you what?’ She repeated in disbelief. She snarled like an animal and bent my arm backwards further and further until something in my shoulder gave in and snapped. I screamed again, much louder. I felt myself lose control of my bladder. The agony was dizzying. 
Shade didn’t seem to notice. She was staring down at my shattered arm with shocked fascination. 
Whimpering and blubbering, I attempted to pull myself away from her across the length of the bed. I ended up crumpling on a heap on the floor instead when she abruptly released me. 
‘Oh, fuck that felt good,’ I heard Shade gasp. 
As she regained control of herself, something in her voice changed. ‘Oh,’ she said. She giggled. ‘Oh god, you’ve gotten me all riled up now.’ 
I turned half sideways to watch her as she raised her arms up toward the ceiling in a languid stretch, her body flexing. Her anger had temporarily dissipated. 
‘You want to know what’s next for you now?’ She asked, twisting her head to look at me. ‘I’m going to make you wish you were in hell. I need to make sure you understand exactly what you’ve put me through.’
I started pleading with her in a crying mess, prostrating myself before her on the floor as she moved herself to a kneeling position on the bed. 
She laughed louder. She reached out to grab me by my broken arm and twisted it sharply sideways. When I screamed, she snatched me up and smothered my mouth in wet kisses, lacing her fingers through my hair and keening. 
The more I screamed after that, the more she responded with pleasure and encouragement. ‘Louder,’ she urged me. ‘Don’t worry, nobody is going to hear you. I’ll make sure of it.’
In the midst of my cries of pain she lost herself in an orgasm as she raked the skin on my face, neck and chest with her fingers, drawing long, thin lines of red into my skin. Her pleasure matched every moment of my pain. Through the agony I suffered from her vices I listened to the loudest and most inhuman shrieks I’d ever heard in all the months we shared together. 
At the end of it, she sat on my bed observing me in silence as I lay drifting in and out of consciousness. Her anger at me having been spent, she closed her eyes and took in several deep breaths. 
‘I know you didn’t really mean to hurt me,’ she said softly as her eyes fluttered back open. ‘It’s all that crap you keep taking that’s making you do these stupid, irrational things. You were trying to hurt yourself, not me.’
She paused uncomfortably. ‘I really freaked out there when I figured out what you were trying. You could have gotten yourself killed!’ She shuddered. ‘God, you probably would have if I wasn’t here to help you through the effects of the detoxification process.’
Shade did her best to fix my injuries herself once she came to terms with the fact I didn’t have the luxury of healing fast the way she could. 
First, she disinfected the worst of the bite wounds she made, then she wrapped up the fingers and toes of which she’d torn or broken nails off of. Then she turned her attention to my arm. 
‘I’m not quite ready to let you die yet,’ she commented as she examined my broken shoulder. ‘Though believe me, a part of me is tempted to end your miserable life myself right now.’ 
She wound herself around me so that I was tucked securely against her and I could barely move. 
‘Don’t struggle,’ she instructed. ‘You’ll make this harder for yourself.’
The pain of her resetting the bone was nearly as bad as when she broke it, enough for me to pass out for a couple moments. Thankfully, this pain didn’t last quite as long. 
‘Good boy,’ she said when she was finished. She went off briefly and came back tearing up pieces of one of my shirts. She proceeded to create a crude splint for my arm with the fabric and a piece of wood broken off from some old furniture in the basement. 
‘If you try to sneak out of this room I’ll break your other arm, too,’ she told me, as she finished binding my shoulder. She patted the makeshift bandage lightly, and I bit my lip to hold back a moan. ‘And don’t think I won’t notice if you try.’ 
As the night came to a close and soft light filtered through the curtains, Shade became restless. She dragged me over to the bathroom and filled it with water. When it was overflowing, she sat beside me and shoved my head into the water while caressing my body with her free hand. I could hear her breathing low and heavy. When I redoubled my struggles to fight free of her she let out a little gasp of pleasure and encouragement, and pushed my head deeper underwater. 
‘When you used to do this to me, I would often wonder why you were punishing me. It took me a while, but I figured it out eventually.’ Her voice was blurred by the water and my fading consciousness. ‘You were doing it for fun.’ She laughed. ‘There was never a reason, was there?’ 
She continued, ‘I am doing this to you because I love you. If I didn’t love you, I would simply kill you and abandon you. You’re here right now because I want to teach you to care about me, and there’s only one way I know how to do that.’ 
During our play sessions, Shade became increasingly desperate to prove to herself how much I cared for her. She grew frustrated when I didn’t express the reactions she’d been seeking to elicit from me. 
‘Tell me you love me,’ she’d yell. ‘And don’t just say it, mean it. Mean it!’ 
She tortured me until I did claim I loved her, and if I didn’t succeed in convincing her, she insisted I was denying it, and promised she wasn’t going to give up on me. 
The remainder of the time she took care of me; feeding me, clothing me and eventually bathing me. I came to rely on her for practically everything. 
She spent hours rambling on in one sided conversations or making up detailed fantasies of our future together. At times she had me sit and watch movies with her while she cuddled me on my clothes-strewn couch. We binged countless hours on random internet videos, or porn, or whatever else she thought I might feel like watching. 
Every couple of days, she would leave briefly. She would never tell me where. She’d be gone for no more than a couple of hours and she’d typically return with my favourite foods or drugs to try to please me. 
I found her crawling across the ceiling of my room one night, naked, pulling herself toward me with snakelike grace as she grinned down at me with a hungry gaze in her eyes. By then I no longer saw any trace of the girl who I’d created months ago. Whoever - whatever - this was was truly unrecognizable.
Shade spoke a lot about the Administrator during that time. She sounded almost excited. She claimed to have talked to him personally. 
‘You know, he’s gotten all those people he’s trailing completely hooked on the drug. There’s a man who tried to recreate his dead wife as a companion to cope with his grief at losing her. He’s not the only one who’s taking the drug to bring back loved ones, either. The Administrator says it’s become quite a thing for the users of the - what does he call it? The Skygge Eliksir. Just as he expected it would.’ 
I shuddered. 
‘The ability to create things like how you did with me isn’t a power humans were ever supposed to possess,’ she continued. ‘The elixir allows humans to use their minds in an entirely new way, one that’s good for the Administrator, but not so good for you.’ 
She toyed with the bindings of the makeshift cast on my arm. It had been rendered mostly useless since she broke it. I couldn’t move the arm more than a couple inches without shards of jagged, crippling pain running up and down the length of it. 
‘It's taking over each of their lives, one by one, she whispered as she leaned into me. ‘They'll do anything for more of it now.’ 
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What is all this for? You know, don’t you?’ 
‘I know exactly what he is planning,’ she confirmed. ‘He’s nearly finished the first stage of this experiment. But you need to be patient. You’ll see for yourself what happens in good time.’ 
She added with a hint of amusement, ‘It was for the better you weaned yourself of the elixir, I’ll admit. Do you have any idea how he makes it?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘It’s composed of pig’s blood mixed with brain ichor, and just the tiniest touch of meth, datura, and cyanide! And some corpse dust.’ 
She laughed. ‘He’s still perfecting the formula, I think. The ingredients tend to get more messed up with each new iteration.’
‘By now it would have done a fair amount of permanent damage to your body. I’m sure you’ve noticed the side effects. Headaches, paranoia. Tiredness and vertigo. Nausea. Darkness creeping in on the peripheries of your vision. You’ve been showing signs of most of them.’ 
‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I asked her quietly. 
‘I wanted you to know what you’ve done for us,' she replied. ‘You’ve made invaluable contributions to his research. You’ve been his best subject. We’ve been his best subjects, Simon!’ 
Shade refused to give away any further details about the administrator, or what the drug was for. I was left to wonder if she was making all of what she said up for her own amusement. I hoped and prayed it was no more than a creative lie. 
The only other person I thought might know more was Carl. The last trace of him I found was from a couple weeks ago, when I’d reached out to one of his friends. They discussed receiving some unsettling comments from him about being followed and watched by an individual no one else could see. He sounded unstable and paranoid. However, this wasn’t so unusual for him. He was a hardcore drug addict. There could be a thousand reasons behind his disappearance. 
Shade said she knew exactly what happened to him. I tried not to listen to her as she explained it to me. I tried my hardest not to believe she was right. 
Soon, it wasn’t only me anymore Shade posed a danger to. 
I mentioned earlier that Shade suggested I go after Sandra’s friends after she rejected me. She hadn’t forgotten about them. Her fury at them grew into an obsession; and her obsessiveness with them came short only to her obsessiveness with me. 
It got worse when she managed to make me admit the new tulpa I’d intended to create to replace her was going to be a carbon copy of Sandra. She decided Sandra must be responsible for my lack of feelings toward her. She crafted herself a detailed narrative about me being secretly in contact with her, with us conspiring together to try to destroy her. 
She did whatever she could to find the proof she needed. When she didn’t find it, she punished me anyway. 
When she was done flaying me with a makeshift, barbed whip she had made out of one of my belts and some wire, she made me come up with numerous different ways for her to maim and kill Sandra and her friends, family, and whoever else Shade thought might be responsible for my lack of devotion to her. 
‘Once I’m strong enough, I’ll go after them for you,’ she vowed. ‘No one gets to hurt you except for me. You are mine. Now and forever.’
She eventually fulfilled her promise. Not more than a couple days later, she tracked Sandra and the two other guys down and did exactly what I’d instructed her to do, mercilessly. When she was done, she brought me back pieces of them as trophies for her actions. 
‘Don’t worry,’ she assured me, upon seeing my expression as she held the grisly, dripping offerings out to me with both hands. ‘You won’t get caught. I made sure the evidence led back to someone else. No one will ever have any idea you were involved.’ 
I tried to tell her she was wrong for doing what she did, and she pouted at me. ‘Really? After all they’ve done to you, they’re lucky I didn’t put them through worse!’
I listened to her describe in detail how they begged for their lives as she tore them apart one by one, saving Sandra for last. It was the happiest I’d seen her in a while. She was practically bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet as she repeated the story to me. By the end, as she told me how loudly Sandra screamed while Shade was killing her, she sounded bubbly and ecstatic. 
This mood quickly soured when she realized killing Sandra and her friends hadn’t won my affection like she hoped it would.
I’ve tried to make her angry at me. I thought perhaps if she got angry enough, she might kill me in a fit of blind rage. 
Shade caught onto what I was doing when I attempted that, and when she did, she got frustrated. 
‘People who love you never abandon you, no matter what,’ she snapped. ‘I can’t believe you thought for a moment I would - god, I can’t even say it!’ 
‘Kill me,’ I said, hoarsely. My voice was thick and slurred from alcohol and pills. 
‘You think death is the easy way out?’ She laughed, half hysterically. ‘You’ll think death will free you from me? You haven’t learned anything yet, have you?’ 
She pursed her lips, sucking the bottom one in for a long moment as she considered something. 
‘I might not be able to kill you right now, but I’m starting to feel like maiming you, like you did with me when you tried to get rid of me. Just to make you start behaving.’ 
In my desperation, I turned to religion. I attempted to banish Shade through some exorcism ritual I found on a fanatical religious website. Shade went along with it for a minute or two, acting as if she were being overtaken by an ethereal force. She was furious and then fearful, begging for me to stop and give her another chance, and promising to change. Then she burst out laughing and snatched the little cross from my hand, snapping it into two pieces and tossing them both away. 
She wouldn’t let me kill myself. That was the next thing I tried. She stopped me before I could choke down the pills from the bottle I held in one trembling fist. Right afterward, as she cradled me in her arms, I wondered why I’d tried. 
The next time, after she was done pulling me out of the bath and plucking the knife from my hands, her breath whispered against my ear as she murmured, ‘don’t think I won’t know if you try to hurt yourself again. I’m always watching you, even if you can’t see me, even if you think I’m not there. I get to choose when you live or die. You understand?’ 
She leaned away and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘What a sad little wretch you’ve become. I can’t trust you to make a single decision for yourself, can I?’ She groaned. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself? And to me?’ 
Following a third failed suicide attempt, I lost the last of my will to fight back. I stopped resisting her completely. I did whatever she wanted me to do, and I accepted her twisted love for me. I understood the things I did to her were beyond forgiveness, and I was paying penance for them through the time we spent together. 
She’d shown me who I was during those weeks of torture. I’d finally recognized myself for what I was. I laughed when I considered all the lies I used to tell myself to avoid accountability for my sins. Shade taught me to hate myself for her own amusement, but she showed me a truth I needed to see. You haven’t read half of the vile things I’ve done during the two years I was separated from reality by a haze of narcotics and the curtained darkness of my apartment. I made a career of ruining people’s lives, and I enjoyed it. I may not look as monstrous as Shade, but inside I think I’m even worse than she is. 
She is the only person capable of loving me - the real me. What she will do to me scares me, but the thought of being alone and forgotten, permanently abandoned and shunned by the whole world scares me too. In some twisted way, we really are meant to be together.
I’ll face retribution for my sins either way, in the end. And I’d rather face it with her than alone.
So when she announced what she was planning for us next, I accepted it. In fact, it was almost a relief to finally know my fate. 
Shade came up with one last solution to ensure our eternal bond with one another.
Apparently, I’d proposed to Shade, and she said yes. I have no memory of this, though she spoke of the event in meticulous detail with tears in her eyes. 
She’s been consumed with feverish excitement in the couple of days since she made the announcement to me. 
This leads to where we are at right now. I’ve written this account over two intervals while Shade had disappeared briefly on her trips to who knows where. She let me know only a couple hours ago that our wedding - and more importantly, our honeymoon - is nearly ready. These are the last short periods of peace before I’m condemned to the dark fate awaiting us both.
She’s spoken in detail of the wedding she has planned for us, the first step in our road to hell:
We will slice open one another’s wrists as the poison sets in, and cuddle together in a coffin beneath the ground. As we suffocate, our blood will mingle and our souls will become one. We’ll be closer than ever before.
She likes to tell me about the places she will take me to once we are wed, on the honeymoon she has painstakingly planned for us. Places out of this world: 
A sea of meat and bone, with cities made of sinew and fat, where there are great mounds of flesh to devour, until the thousand-year Metamorphosis is complete, and then yet more to eat. After centuries of gorging, I will take you to the Flesh Thrones where the Meat Man, the Sloth King, shall await us. 
''
I’ll show you a bottomless ocean where drowned men hang from hooks joined to great lines of chains, lit by a twilight gleam in the sea of murky water. The older ones have resigned themselves to their eternal fate. Those younger still struggle and gasp for the air they shall never breathe again. 
''
She promises me we will do unspeakable things together in these worlds; gestures of love to defile both of us physically and mentally.
We shall visit the Feasting Room, where we will dissect the best parts of ourselves and have them served to us on glass-ruby platters. There you and I will take turns tasting one another's flesh and soul. 
Shade promises me an eternity to spend with her, to fulfil these twisted fantasies. 
This is what we are destined for. A life together. I’ll have an eternity for me to make you my lover. And there are billions of instruments and devices, poisons and vices in the universe I can use to teach you to adore me. It’s perfect. 
We can take your other friends, too. Sandra. She can come if you like. Anyone who has ever wronged you, they can all come with us. You can choose which hell to put them in. My god, Simon! There are so many places I can’t wait to show you, to share with you. This honeymoon is going to be so exciting! 
I managed to persuade her to take us to this place; whether it is real or imaginary, alone. She won’t come after anybody else in this world. It's one thing I take a small amount of solace in. 
Not that it matters much. Based on what I’ve learned from recent forum discussions, I suspect I’m seeing the next stage of the Administrator’s experiment unfold. He’s released his latest version of the elixir, and upon taking it, a number of people have described very disturbing changes in their ‘imaginary’ companions. One comment I remember discussed theirs collapsing into a spontaneous, violent seizure. Another claimed their tulpa had a sudden and severe emotional breakdown. A third tulpa began puking out several wet clusters of hair and teeth. 
These physical and mental malformations seem to be isolated incidents so far, affecting only a small number of the entities. For how long they’ll remain that way… 
I’ve already shared my story on the forums. The whole truth, this time. The people there have for the most part discounted me as not only sick and delusional but now also irredeemably evil.
Perhaps one or two people will at least consider my warning. However, most of them are so attached to their tulpas and dependent on the elixir that I don't think anything could make them quit it, even if they could bring themselves to believe my claims. 
So I guess this is my last attempt at warning everyone, for what little it’s worth. I thought putting out this story here must at least be better than doing nothing. 
There isn’t any hope left for me, and I don’t have much time left. 
Is it better if I accept my fate? In the most messed up way possible, I believe I do love Shade as much as she loves me. I’ve never felt the things I feel with her with anyone. I’ve shared a kind of intimacy with her you simply can’t have with a real person. 
We are closer than lovers, bound to one another by an unbreakable chord. She’s the only person in this world who I know unconditionally will never, ever leave my side; even in death. 
There is no world I can imagine living in without her. 
It’s like she keeps telling me. We’re both irredeemably corrupted, twisted and cruel. And because of that, we belong with one another. You can suffer in this universe alone, my sweetheart, or we can suffer it together. At least then, in the misery of damnation, we will have each other to hold on to. 
Category:Beings
Category:NSFW
Category:Ritual
Category:Longpasta
Category:Mental Illness