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The Terrible Quest

Death has his scythe. As for Fear, she throws snowballs.

She has many guises, but suppose you are in a forest at dusk, and you see a young girl, perhaps eight years old, skipping playfully through the snow and between the twisted branches. You hear wolves howling, and you fear for this girl who is so very out of place here. And then she turns to face you, and you realise the howls were not in the distance at all, because now you’re looking into her mad, predatory eyes, feeling the stink of her breath as it passes between those long, canine jaws. When the snowball hits, nothing exists for you but the white cold, and you can never remember what happens next.

After years of research, I know where she lives and that she’s guarding something. The scrolls say that if anyone ever finds out what it is, there will no longer be such a thing as hope. I have to know, so I’ve built a swarm of flying robots that see light in all wavelengths and fear nothing. I’ll monitor their progress on this screen.

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