"Right, but it happens at all. It's the sort of thing that can happen. Thousands of times, even. As opposed to being insane and not how anything works."

"Yes. It is arguably still insane."

"I had a lot of other questions I can't remember but I think the important one is—you just keep doing this? Getting more and more fucked up until something breaks and you start all over again?"

"...yeah. I guess at some point I might... let it go... but."

"I don't want to die."

"What if someone brought you back to life?"

"...it might work. It might just start the cycle over. I might just... dissolve into the void so there was nothing left of me, not even enough to bring back."

"Why???"

"I don't know! Nobody's ever brought back a dead Excrucian! I know the rules are different here but that doesn't give me an advantage in figuring out which set applies!"

Despite not strictly needing to breathe, Eadmund is clearly hyperventilating.

"...so, I don't usually tell people this, but I can raise the dead. Not because there's anything left of them. There isn't. But they used to be real and alive, and that's—enough by itself, to reach back into the past and find the... memory, if you like, though the world doesn't really remember things... of who they were and what they were like, and create them again from scratch. It takes a while, though, because building a whole person from scratch is a pretty big job."

Eadmund nods. Or possibly just trembles in a coincidentally similar way. He's doing a lot of trembling.

"...are... you okay?"

He starts crying by way of response.

Um...???

"Sorry," he says, through the tears and general effluvia. "Um. I'm usually more. Functional. Than this."

He wipes his face partway clean with his sleeve. "You -" He makes a face, then blows his nose, also into his sleeve, and continues. "You make a compelling case. It's just... really scary. I've been holding on, making myself keep existing, making myself keep hurting, for... a while. Because I can't keep going if I flinch. And you want me to let go."

"There's no being sure about this. I only know what I know and you clearly come from an insane place with very different rules than I'm used to. But—I don't know. If the problem is being dead, or half dead or whatever, seems to me the obvious solution is to make you be alive. I don't even know that I'd have to ask you to let go first, though I suppose it would be very weird, watching me make another of you."

"...I don't know if that would be worse but it wouldn't be better."

"Fair enough."

"It would sort of... highlight how I'd be killing myself to let somebody who looks like me keep existing without being some of the important things that I am. Most of which are bad but some of which aren't."

"I don't... usually think of bringing someone back to life as killing them?"

"Well, you said yourself that they're usually dead dead, not running around having experiences. A lot of my experiences are about being dead. And, I don't want to confuse the point: most of them suck. But I'm pretty sure that a living person who was me couldn't see Ninuan, not properly. A living person who was me might not be able to understand Ninuan. ...Ninuan is the kingdom that doesn't exist that was destroyed before reality started existing, where I live when I've recently died. I am led to believe this is hard for living persons to wrap their heads around."

"... that's not... how... those words... normally work? A lot of things about you are not how things normally work. I almost begin to wonder if what you need is... something that's as strange to you as you are to me. Something where you can take a turn saying 'that's not how that normally works!' but then the way it works is also a solution to your problems. Either that or I need to figure out a lot of things that I have no idea how to figure out about bringing back the dead."

"...and while I'm looking, I might end up destroying another civilization. While stumbling around realities, getting high and killing people."

He shrinks in on himself.

"I don't think getting more of what I want is worth that."

He shrugs. "I'm not going to tell you what you should do with your life; it's up to you to figure that out. I'll bring you back if you want, though. And if you ask again in a decade or two I'll help you look for something weird enough to solve your problems for you. I shouldn't try any sooner than that, people won't take well to me being gone again."

"I'll hold you to that, you know."

And Eadmund lets go. It doesn't actually look like much. One moment he's there; then, he isn't. If they were planetside, there'd be a pop as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum. But they're on the moon. So he's just... gone.

Well. Seems clear enough, all things considered.

He makes sure he's seen around the palace for a little while, and then he takes off from the edge of Skygarden and goes for a long flight, chasing the stranger who killed him.

It's not hard to find the person he's looking for; it's harder than he expected to get a proper grip, to patiently redirect the confused tangle of magic and memory that keeps falling to pieces in his metaphorical hands. He's very good at this, though. That he's the best in the world goes without saying because he's the only person who can do it at all, but he is, additionally, very good.

Not much more than a day has passed when Eadmund finds himself standing in a cool breeze under warm sun, a soft blanket settling around his shoulders.

"I didn't have time to warn you that resurrection is a little inconvenient in the clothes department," says the Emperor, standing several feet away. "I tried to make you something like what you were wearing before but I'm not sure I got it right, it was an unfamiliar style and I didn't see it for very long."

The outfit in question is, for some reason, sitting neatly folded on a stout little table which is in fact not a table at all but a living flower with silver-grey petals. He's done a decent job matching the look, though it's not an identical copy by any means. The part he reproduced most accurately is the sword, which is lying next to the stack of folded clothing.