On Pixie Dust

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So far, none of my efforts have borne any fruit. The plague rages on. Neither medicine nor alchemy has brought me closer to finding the cure.

Since I’m growing desperate, I intend to try something new. I’ve read legends about the sanzhani (some call them pixies), small flying creatures, fond of playing with children and stealing human teeth. In their presence days feel like hours and years like days. So I thought: maybe I can’t stop the plague, but I could at least buy the infected more time. They would still die within days, but to them it would feel like an entire fulfilling lifetime.

The problem is, only children can see the pixies. So I asked some orphans for aid. They will help me catch the pixies as one catches butterflies. I will then have to kill the creatures and produce some sort of powder, pixie dust if you will, that an infected person would be able to ingest. Let us hope this works, and then I’ll keep looking further.