Every man you had ever met would be lying if he told you he had never experienced fear. You feel it when you're a child and the night's shadow creeps in, transforming into ghosts howling in your room. You feel it when you get your first heartbreak; the fear of losing someone you had once told all of your secrets, shared all of your scars with. You feel it as you die-black flooding your vision and your limbs growing numb. Your tongue, thick in your mouth, in choking breaths before you pass. All that's left is a rotting corpse for your loved ones to weep over, if you even have loved ones.
Everyone knows fear, those who do not are tailed by it in a shadow. It's in human nature. It's in every being's nature. Of Earth or other worlds, even worlds lost to time, natural disaster, or war. Fear, like death, favors no man.
Fear dares not favor the one woman who could speak its language if only she knew how, nor does it favor one of the last women in a hunted species. To the two, both death and fear had become old friends who were greeted with fondness, and it would take years before they met someone with experience enough to dare challenge their own stunning records.
As their lives would progress, fear would seep into them. Drown them in it; cloak them like a second skin. They would realize the one thing that most people refuse to cope with.
That life is a beautiful lie and death is the wicked truth.
