text: [Themes: Science Fiction, spaceship setting, gender-neutral protagonist, treasure hunt, science fiction, spaceship, space, maze, far-future]
  
  > Look around
  New suns are condensing here -- an unusual phenomenon in these halo reaches. Their ultraviolet flares have swept this region free of the dust that birthed them.
  
  The odd neutrino flux is coming from beyond the binary. But your sails are rippling loosely.
  
  > look
  New suns are condensing here -- an unusual phenomenon in these halo reaches. Their ultraviolet flares have swept this region free of the dust that birthed them.
  
  The odd neutrino flux is coming from beyond the binary. But your sails are rippling loosely, unable to resist the ultraviolet storm.
  
  > unfurl the sails
  You haul the sails higher. Horizon accelerates across the void, towards the source of the neutrino shift.
  
  Here at the heart of the halo cluster, a brown dwarf star slowly gutters towards exhaustion.
  
  The odd neutrino flux is coming from the vicinity of the dwarf star.
  
  > go to the dwarf star
  You furl your sails, and descend into the brown dwarf star's outer system.
  
  The brown dwarf, you discover, is circled by a lone, frozen planet.
  
  > go to the planet
  You drop the anchor. Horizon glides in towards the dwarf star and its icy companion.
  
  This planet might once have been a chilly wasteland. Now it is nothing but slabs of black ice, layered with the ancient snow that was once an atmosphere.
  
  Or, no. Those protrusions of ice are too angular to be natural. They are monuments -- how old, you have no way of knowing. But sheltering beneath them are row upon row of engraved tablets.
  
  > examine the tablets
  You can make nothing of the engravings. You will have to bring them back to the linguists of d'Accord.
  
  The tablets themselves have a vitreous shine. You realize, inspecting carefully, that they are pure helium -- frozen helium, a substance that should not exist on the surface of a world.
  
  > get the tablets
  You seal several of the tablets in layers of vacuum insulation -- and then layers on top of that. Moving as delicately as you can, you transport the bulky packages to your cryohold. A few tense moments reveal no sublimation of the frozen helium, to your relief.
  
  > weigh the anchor
  The ice-world shrinks behind you, as you rise to the edge of the brown dwarf's orbit.
  
  Civilizations are fragile, and the relics of an unknown race -- a people who might have bloomed billions of years past, in the cold unlight of a dwarf star -- these tablets must be incalculably valuable. You are torn: should you come around, and begin the journey back to the bright worlds?
  
  But so much remains out there for you to take. Just one more discovery. Perhaps two.
  
  > raise the sail
  You hoist the sails once again. Slowly, the infrared glow of the dwarf fills them, and Horizon moves out into the galactic halo.
  
  A rare sight drifts into view, far ahead: a red supergiant guttering on the edge of catastrophe. It is a crimson, billowing cauldron of turbulent fire -- pulsing irregularly, choked with helium and carbon ash.
  
  > go to star
  You vector for the supergiant. Horizon's fast approach compresses its history. Carbon roils in the star's atmosphere; shock-waves roll in fast-forward across its surface.
  
  By the time you see oxygen and argon boiling into the red star's corona, it is too late to turn aside. The light of fusing metals washes over Horizon, and the shockwave is only fractionally behind.
  ...
  
  Lights appear on the control consoles, one by one. Horizon of Night is coming back to life. The walls around you are dim and radiation-scarred; you have no idea how long it's taken the ship to recover enough function to support you. But you are awake. You stretch in your couch, shudder, and take stock.
  
  Outside is blackness, pure and opaque.
  
  > Inventory
  You have the helium tablets, the liquid light, and the iridescent cloth, all safely stowed.
  
  > look at the blackness
  You are surrounded by blackness, pure and opaque. Whatever corner of space you've been flung into, it's dense enough to block all starlight. Only the vague thermal wash of microwaves reassures you that the universe is out there at all.
  
  > raise the sails
  You scan the spars, and then scan them again, but it is just as you expected: your sails are gone. The monomolecular lace was surely blasted apart in the first instant of the disaster.
  
  But then, if the sails had held against the shockwave, you suppose you would have been swept into the next galaxy. Small blessings.
  
  > look at the ship
  Horizon of Night is wounded, but she lives. The hull is sound. The controls and the shipframe are more or less functional. But the sails are destroyed, and the compass must have cracked. Worse: her senses are quite dead. You will have to steer by eye; and there is nothing outside to see, at all.
  
  Stowed in Horizon's hold are the helium tablets, the liquid light, and the iridescent cloth.
  
  > Port
  Spaceships really only fly forwards.
  
  > Forwards
  Your sails are gone; only ruined tatters of lace remain on the spars.
  
  > examine the light
  The hold contains several carboys of the pale liquid light. It seems to pulse faintly in its containers.
  
  > open carboys
  You lever the carboys out of the hold, crack the seals, and expose the liquid light to space.
  
  A thin streamer of light spreads from Horizon's hold. It does little to shift the darkness... but another streamer rolls outward, and then more. Soon you can make out dust particles and shreds of debris -- a star's remains, now aggregated by chance or Horizon's own gravity into a swirling mass. Some aeon this might become a planet.
  
  The light diffuses quickly, but your surroundings are illuminated now. You have a chance of getting clear of this space.