Lunar New Year (1 of 4)

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✅ Read the Stories
✅ Collect the Tokens
✅ Join the Community

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554 days after a wizard cursed the REALM…

“So your village was cursed. So your REALM was destroyed in an apocalyptic NIGHTfall. So your people have been scattered as refugees in a dozen directions. It’s not the end of the world. Believe me, I know what the end of the world is like. I deal with the end of the world on a daily basis,” said the Man at the End of the Earth.

Wordler 376 looked around them at the idyllic parkland that overlooked the tranquil ocean. The grass was dotted with dozens of rabbits, munching away at the lush greenery without a care in the world. “Somehow your end of the world is a lot more peaceful than mine,” she told the Man.

“But it wasn’t always so.” The Man sat back in his Adirondack chair and stroked a long-eared ball of white fluff that he held in his arms. “Even this End of the Earth was a place of monsters and madness, back in the day. That’s why I started raising rabbits.”

376 also held a rabbit, at the man’s insistence, but found herself unable to look it in its cute little eyes. It reminded her of one she’d had one just like it, named Sir Fluffernutter, back in Wordler Village. Which reminded her of the last time she’d seen Sir Fluffernutter, falling into the dark maw of an Apocalypse Beast.

“You’re trembling,” the Man noted. “Give the rabbit a squeeze. She’ll warm you right up.”

“I’m not cold.” 376 tried to force herself back from the edge of her seat, to make herself as comfortable in her chair as the Man looked in his. But ever since that awful night of fire and death, she’d been unable to properly relax again.

She sighed. “So what you’re saying is that you have no sympathy and can offer no help.”

“I didn’t say that,” the Man stated. “What I meant to express is that ends aren’t as dire as people make them out to be. Every End of every World enables a new Beginning. You see, worlds are like rabbits—”

“No they’re not!” 376 shouted. “Rabbits are kind and cute, and you feed them, and you care for them, and you name them Sir Fluffernutter, and in the end you have to watch them get eaten by a monster while you stand by helplessly even though you’re supposed to be a heroic Wordler.”

During the Wordler’s rant, the rabbit that resembled Sir Fluffernutter had tumbled to the ground. But unlike Sir Fluffernutter, this was one of the Man’s rabbits, so chill that it just shrugged its rabbit shoulders and hopped away to join its friends.

“You are upset with yourself for no reason,” said the Man. “You couldn’t have saved your people.”

“I couldn’t even save Sir Fluffernutter,” 376 mumbled.

“Do you need an emotional-support rabbit?” the Man asked. “I could offer you a loaner.”

376 thought again of her dead rabbit and frowned. “I’m not ready.”

“Then all I have to offer you is a quest.”

“No thanks. I already had one.” 376 tapped a necklace that the QUEEN herself had dropped onto her neck upon her return, on her namesake day, with the Protective Word that saved her REALM. “Eight days later, everything was all set afire anyway, so what was the point of it all?”

“An old world ends to make room for a new world. What you need is a new quest to make a new beginning.” He reached out to her, offering a bright red envelope. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

The tumbled the envelope over in her hands. The Man had drawn a crude picture of a rabbit on one side. Otherwise, the envelope was blank. “What is this?” asked 376.

“A gift. It will help you get to where you’re going?”

“And where’s that?”

The Man stroked his rabbit. “From the Last Island at the Ends of the Earth, into the Ocean at the Ends of the Sea, over the edge into the Winds at the Ends of the Air, into the Flames at the Ends of the Fire.”

376 blinked back at him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take an emotional support rabbit with you? Last call…”

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