Fear

In the poem fear is the subject of the first canto before the beasts are: Dante is afraid of the wood, afraid of the animals, and stops being afraid only when he finds somebody to guide him. In the game it is a number between zero and one with no bar anywhere: you see it as a view that tightens and drains of colour, you hear it as a heart beating, and you feel it as a tremor in the head. It starts in the dark wood and holds from there down, in every chapter that is built.

The rule the rest of the game runs on works here the other way round: the beasts do not read the player, the player reads the beasts, and his own heart may look as long as it likes. What gets counted is the distance to the nearest thing that is a threat right now: it starts to be felt at sixteen metres and is full inside four and a half. Whatever bears down on you weighs more than whatever stands still, and whatever is looking at nobody does not count at all, so a beast bent over its kill puts no fear in you, which is exactly where the theft in the wood is played. It climbs a little over half a point a second and falls a tenth on its own, because fear stays; within nine metres of Virgil it is quieted fast, and that comfort ends with him, since from Dis down there is nobody beside you to give it.

Whatever frightens you declares it for itself, with two things only: whether it is a threat right now, and how much it weighs against a beast standing still. The three beasts of the wood, Charon while you are still on the bank, Cerberus until he is full, the Minotaur and the centaurs and a Fury and a devil inside the walls, the ten Malebranche along the ditches; and each of them also says when it stops, blinded, full, silent, gone back in, fallen in the pitch. The roll of who is there is taken again every four seconds and not once, because some of them are born only when the canto reaches their step. Under all of it there is a second thing, the heartbeat, which is not fear and should not be mistaken for it: it rises with distance alone, from a beast or a lost soul, it rises while the animal is fast asleep, it rises when it has already lost you, and it never says whether you have been seen. Anybody using it to work out whether he has been found would be deceiving himself, and that is as it should be.