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the Lamb in Worm
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They spin out together like a spider's drifting thread, through distant spaces so alien and terrifying that groping blindly through lightless lifeless nothingness for the souls of the dead seems downright cozy in retrospect. The crown sometimes forges ahead with strength and purpose, and other times flails in total confusion through a place so warped that even its alien and terrifying senses have nothing familiar to grasp. Everything in its capacious pockets burns away, every coin, every bone, every last fragment of every blade of grass, all consumed to fuel their headlong flight.

It might perhaps have been safe to stop there, but the crown understands the depth of its bearer's terrified urgency. There must be no remaining possibility that the Chained One could find them. There must be no remaining possibility that they could have gone just a little farther, could have obscured their trail just a little better. So it pushes and keeps pushing, until they're both exhausted, until it feels like exhaustion is all they've ever known. It steers them into a howling emptiness that claws relentlessly at their conjoined souls, and presses blindly onward in the shelter of the Lamb's fiercely stubborn will to live, rekindled at last by the slim hope that there might be a life out there worth living.

By the time they land once more in a physical realm, with dirt below and sky above, neither of them has the faintest idea how long they might have been traveling for. All they know is that they can go no farther.

It's not a dramatic arrival; you could be forgiven for missing it entirely, if you didn't happen to be looking. One moment there's nothing in particular happening on this unassuming patch of dirt, and then a wavering black rift opens just wide enough for just long enough that a small fluffy body can slip sideways into reality.

She makes some sort of hoarse quiet sound with her voice, and tries to sit up, and can't remember how. Her crown darts anxiously from her head to her hands and back, flowing through the air like a weightless splash of ink, as she slowly refamiliarizes herself with the business of living. Right, those are her lungs, already breathing on their own, good job lungs, and these many miscellaneous aches all add up to the shape of the four limbs and a head that she distantly remembers having, and which bit is the eyes again? Right, those. She opens them.

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She seems to be in the ruins of a small town - though it might be huge by her usual standards. Crumbling brick buildings loom overhead, anything organic stripped away, much of the rest long damaged by wind and rain and winter ice. There's enormous colorful murals tracing over the ruins - more recent than whatever cataclysm brought this place low, from how their lines follow the broken edges. 

It's quiet right now. There's a thin, grainy sunlight filtering past the clouds overhead. 

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She creaks slowly to her feet, wishing with all her heart that she was capable of sleeping. Her crown settles back onto its customary perch between her stubby horns. Together they stare up at the walls that seem to rise impossibly high all around them.

Great, she thinks. Ruins. Ruins for giants. Giant ruins.

But... those murals...

She hobbles across the street and reaches up to touch a splash of pink paint. Has she ever in her life seen anything so bright? Someone, she thinks, must have felt something like love or joy or hope, to paint like that. Something good must have existed in this world, for someone to have painted like that. This is a world where, at some point, someone was happy enough to make brightly coloured paint, and someone was happy enough to paint with it.

Maybe it's a world where she can figure out how to be happy too.

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To paint a lot with it, and to repair some of the ruins - now that she's close enough to get a good look - and to make colorful cloths to serve as roofs.

And, possibly, to play music somewhere here, if her ears aren't deceiving her. 

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...well.

After a minute of fretful internal debate, she stumbles in the direction of the sound. Walking is getting easier with time, but she's still not great at it.

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There's an assortment of very odd creatures gathered around a fire pit under a colorful tent! Some are playing improvised drums, some are dancing, some are standing or sitting on the sidelines, talking to each other or watching or just sitting quietly. None of them look like the animals she's familiar with - or really all that much like each other.

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She leans on a wall and watches, and then finds herself sliding slowly down the wall until she's sitting on the ground hugging her knees and weeping quietly into them. It's just so—the peace she wishes she could have given her people—she didn't know, at the time, what it would have looked like, but it really feels like it would have looked like this—

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After not too long, one of the creatures - one that looks in turn like a big, shaggy black cat, and a nightmarish melding of human and cat, and a nightmarish melding of a cat and the concept of unrealized potential as represented by a pile of visceral sludge - one of the creatures notices her, and makes their way over, held tilted and yellow eyes glowing eerily. "Who are you?" the cat-creature asks.

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She looks up, and spends a few seconds blinking. The cat-creature is just... a lot. There's just a lot going on there.

 

After probably objectively too long of a pause, she clears her throat. "Um," she says. Wait, how does she speak their language? Crown, do you know anything about this?

Her crown helpfully explains that it's probably to do with #$%##% and shouldn't be anything to worry about.

...thanks, crown.

"Um," she repeats. "I'm... the Lamb. I guess. Where... am I?"

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"Ellisburg. Did you just finish growing?"

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She's not sure why, but she feels like that's a concerning thing to be asked.

"Should I have?" she says warily.

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"Most of us who don't know where we are just finished growing," the creature says with a shrug. 

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Okay. Realistically she isn't going to be able to pass as one of these people. And if things go horribly wrong, there's always the sword.

"I just got here, actually. I'm from... Somewhere else. Very, very, very far away." Thinking of that journey brings an involuntary shiver to her limbs.

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"How far away? Are you from China?"

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"I don't know where that is, but since you've heard of it, I can tell you I'm from farther away than that."

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"Where are you from?"

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"Well, if I say 'the Deep Woods', you probably won't know that much more than you did before I said that, but that's all I've got."

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"Lots of places can be called 'the Deep Woods,' which tells me a bit more but only somewhat narrows things down."

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"I didn't like it there, so I left, and went as far as I possibly could, and now I'm here and I don't know where here is except that it's as far as I could possibly get from where I started. And you called it Ellisburg."

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"Ellisburg is in America," she says helpfully, then thinks for a moment and says, "Which is on Earth. Third planet from the Sun."

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"...I'm not sure I know... what that means..."

(Ooh, the crown knows this one! This is one of those worlds where the sun is a big bright hot thing very far away with worlds whirling in circles around it!)

...well, now that she's asked, she might as well hear the creature's explanation too.

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" - What part? The Sun part???"

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"Yeah, I haven't heard of anybody claiming they knew how far away the sun was, or in what... order?" Oh no what if they think she's too weird. Okay, realistically, there was no way they weren't going to find out she's very weird.

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