Hungover as fuck, that's how it's going.

Eadmund of Cold Comfort has just woken up. He is sitting in the dirt, and looking at the hateful blasphemy in the sky, and thinking that thought that only blackout drunks and particularly irresponsible Excrucians can have: did I do that?

Okay, Eddin, let's backtrack. Reconstruct. What happened, and why is there now a hateful blasphemy in the sky of this otherwise inoffensive world?

This would be easier if he didn't have a blinding headache. He starts trudging towards a coastal village, on the assumption they'll have potable water somewhere.

He was in the throes of Infection. Never a good start. Things start getting very psychedelic when he's in an Infection state; temptations that he can't even really perceive, things he doesn't know he wants. He's a walking time bomb when it gets that bad.

He... went traveling, through the void. He landed in... a seraglio? It seemed like a seraglio. He talked to a nice girl... a nice boy? A lot of people look like boys when he's in Infection. A nice person, wearing too few clothes, who was very worried for him. Somebody else was saying He wouldn't hurt a child, but the person wasn't convinced, said they'd seen Him do worse.

He doesn't really remember from there, but he suspects he was tempted into drastic action. Probably against whoever He was.

Who explodes when they die, he thinks, hypocritically.

The coastal village approaches. He squares his shoulders and tries to squint less. (It draws attention to where his eyes aren't.)

The village is very busy. People seem to be packing up all their stuff and loading it into little fishing boats. There are at least five arguments going on at once. A sample:

"...don't even know if it'll be any better."

"Well if it isn't, we can always turn back. Meanwhile, do you want to live like this," backwards gesture at haunted horizon, "if there might be somewhere better out there?"

"Well, no, but..."

"I heard they're trying to evacuate all of Southport."

"Sucks to be all of Southport, then."

"How will there ever be room for us?"

"Plenty of places with room for us won't have room for all of Southport. And, you know. We are bringing help."

"...the tree."

"Trying not to think about the tree, thanks."

"It's hard not to!"

"The sea'll steer us right. Nobody's turning into a tree on her watch."

...yeah that makes sense. As a thing to do.

He looks for someone who looks non-panicked and, ideally, maternal-looking enough to be a lost child at.

(He does not recall, at this time, that he is dressed in his princely raiment and has hoarfrost collecting in his hair. Or that there is a sword belted at his waist. It is difficult to remember these things, in the same way that it is difficult to remember that one is breathing, or blinking, or committing cellular respiration.)

There are variously maternal figures available, largely not panicked, including one whose actual ten-year-old son seems to be helping her bring water to the people doing the heaviest lifting—

—aaaand he has been intercepted by an old woman, complete with walking stick and faded blue shawl, who gently asks him, "Where'd you come from, then?"

"I don't know," he says, not inaccurately, and "My head hurts," entirely truthfully.

"That so? Well, you've come at a busy time, but you're welcome to sit in my hut and have a drink of water." She gestures to one of the nicer available huts.

He goes to sit in the nice hut. (Everything is actually kind of overwhelming right now, he's not entirely acting a part.)

The old woman lags behind by a minute or so, but when she shows up she has a cup of fresh cold water for him.

Oh it's cold. He'd be worried this was a Temptation, if it weren't for how he literally just exploded in a cloud of bad decisions. He drinks gratefully. It helps with the headache, probably on a more or less psychosomatic level.

"Do you know..." He gestures vaguely at the blasphemy behind him.

It's not so bad from inside the hut. Like, still bad, but less insistent about it.

"No more than anybody else does," she says. "That's where Skygarden used to be, or at any rate where we think it was. Now instead of Skygarden there's That. Going to be a civil war or two about it, I reckon." She says this almost like she's remarking on the weather, but there's an edge of tiredness in her tone, or maybe just the anticipation of future tiredness.

"...I'm sorry. What was Skygarden?"

"Flying city. Capital of the world. Home of the immortal Emperor. You know," she says, raising her eyebrows slightly. "Except it seems that you don't."

"...I'm not going to lie," he says sullenly. "I'm too tired and sad to lie.* No, I don't know what Skygarden was, or who the Emperor was. I mean, I think I remember the Emperor, a little. He was tall. And... ugh, I don't remember. He looked evil. But I don't know if he was or if I was just..."

He's crying, a little bit. He hates crying, it makes people look for his eyes.

*And he's not Iolithae, so it doesn't just kind of happen regardless.

If she's looking for his eyes, she's not remarking on what she finds there.

"I don't know if I'd call the Emperor evil. He certainly isn't kind. Dangerous, yes, he's dangerous. But if That," she nods at the wall behind which It distantly hovers, "had happened anywhere else, I'd have gone to him about it and expected him to help."

"I..."

He blows his nose on his sleeve. His hand comes back down to the table, the sleeve pristine.

"I'm sorry," he says again. "I wasn't - I wasn't thinking right, and he was hurting people... and it shouldn't have happened like that, anyway. Killing someone shouldn't do that. It's always bad to kill people but it's usually morally bad, you know?"

Despite the apparent resilience of his sleeve, she passes him a handkerchief. It's old and worn and not especially fancy but it functions for its intended purpose.

"Well. He's the Emperor," she says. "Wouldn't have expected anything less." She considers. "All right, the fact that you can't sit where it shines without feeling it is a surprise. But if you'd said to me last week, 'if the Emperor ever manages to die, the city where it happened will be on fire for a hundred years'—that, I would've believed." She considers further. "Not sure if I would've believed the part where if you stray too close you turn into the cursedest tree I've ever seen."

"People shouldn't explode when they die," Eadmund mumbles, scrunching the handkerchief between his hands. "It's a terrible deterrent because nobody knows it'll happen until it does, at which point you're dead."

"I suppose," she says. "I wouldn't have thought of it that way. Just seems that if you do something as impossible as kill the Emperor, something uncanny and dreadful probably happens."

"I do impossible things all the time! Almost none of them have been this terrible!"

"...if you do them all the time, how do you mean they're impossible?"

"...well, they should be impossible. They can't be done, by the rules under which reality operates. But I don't follow the rules. Anything that is, I can cut. It doesn't matter if it's a mountain, or sunlight, or a mother's love, or what. I can cut it. That doesn't mean it's not impossible to cut sunlight. It just means I can do it. You know?"

"...I think," she says slowly, "that you might... come from a place where it is normal to do impossible things. And have ended up in one where it isn't."

"I guess that makes sense. And... if I'm far enough away from home that doing impossible things does... that..."

When he trails off, she waits to see if he'll elaborate.