"Maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe I need to leave before this place realizes that me existing is impossible. Or before I stop thinking straight again."

"Well, we don't have another Emperor lying around, so at least you can't make the same mistake twice. But if you can leave, I might recommend it, all the same. This world's like to be no place for a child, the next little while."

"...'m not a child," Eadmund says, in the exact tone of voice used by twelve-year-olds the world over.

She shrugs. "It'll be no place for anybody, but the rest of us are stuck with it."

There's not much he can say to that.

Except "Sorry," again, and walk out into the sunlight, and the un-light, and then... walk away.

There's a Waylet a few miles inland. He invokes Maugrim, once he's out of sight, and hops on his back, and rides the great black wolf to that place where the world's skin is a little thinner, and he cuts his way through to the other side.

Then he walks the Ways, and walks away from another world he's ruined.

Eight years have passed. Eadmund hasn't really been keeping track. He's older and wiser, though it isn't necessarily obvious to look at him. Or to talk to him. Or, really, in any respect.

He knows more about the Ways, and usually he goes where he intends to go. But this is not universally true. Sometimes he gets turned about, and comes out somewhere he doesn't know.

...or somewhere he does. Huh. He remembers this floating island being significantly more cursed?

It's a remarkably un-cursed floating island, really, though it's also... smaller... than it was before he happened to it. And quieter. Less busy. More of a somber mood.

The Horrible Tree is still there, but someone has remodeled it into something green and living and fantastically beautiful, its spreading branches laden with sunset-coloured flowers the size of cities. One of the airships coming in to land at the Skygarden docks seems to have sails made of its enormous leaves.

He walks through the streets. Beholds the tree.

Is there still a palace complex in the middle of the island. He remembers that the palace was beautiful.

The palace has been completely overhauled in design, but it's just as beautiful as the last version, perhaps even more. Its wings stretch out into the city like a glorious sunburst, open and airy and full of light, and in the center of it all a rocky hill emerges, ringed by a spiral path leading up to a shining white tower, which—

—he's on the moon now.

"Fancy seeing you again."

It's a decently pleasant bit of moon. There's air. Nice view of the planet hanging in the sky. The Emperor is gazing expectantly at him.

"Well I'm not killing you again," he says, a bit befuddled. "Look how it went last time."

"We didn't exactly have a lengthy conversation last time you were here. Not much time to get a sense of who you are as a person and what you were after."

"You wouldn't have gotten one. I was barely conscious." He pauses. "...I didn't actually get much idea who you were, either. Certainly not enough to justify killing you. So... sorry."

"Mm. If it'd been just me you arguably wouldn't have been wrong; I'm not that ticked off about it. The mess that was made of my empire while I was out, now, that's trickier to forgive. War's a thing I'd prided myself on getting rid of, before."

"I certainly don't know you well enough to apologize competently for the political consequences of assassinating you. Rest assured that I did not consider them beforehand."

"Sure. So, why're you back?"

"It is difficult to navigate the interminable void, and places you've been before have a metacausal gravity that can pull you off-course. ...not that I was aiming anywhere in particular, admittedly."

"So... you wander the spaces between worlds at random, getting high and killing people? Do you... need... help?"

"I wasn't high. I - this is going to be complicated to explain. But I guess you do deserve a proper explanation."

Deep breath. "When I was nine years old, I took candy from a stranger. I knew I shouldn't, but I'd never got a very clear picture of why I shouldn't. It was drugged. She took me to her house and... hurt me. Kept me there for a while. Kept hurting me. The police came, eventually, and she went to jail, and I went home. But... nothing was right, anymore. I didn't feel like a person. Home didn't feel like home. The world was wrong. It shouldn't have happened, because a nice lady giving you sweets shouldn't be able to hurt you like that.

"After that, it seemed like whenever I did something I knew I shouldn't, it went badly. Worse than you'd expect. I'd steal a pie and puke for days. I'd make fun of a girl's braids and her brother would break my arm. And I couldn't stop doing things I shouldn't. It just got worse and worse. And then I drank some liquor out of my parents' cabinet, thinking it'd make me numb and make it all easier to take, and instead I passed out and choked on my own vomit and I died.

"I remember dying, and thinking, at least it was over. And I wondered if I'd go to Heaven, even though it didn't seem very likely. And I thought, even Hell couldn't be worse.

"And my soul went down. And Hell tried to catch me, but my soul slipped past it, past everything, past the roots of the world tree and the burning wall that guards it. Into the nothingness. And it was just... dark. And I felt myself dissolving.

"And I was furious, suddenly. I was mad at the woman who'd hurt me and I was mad at the world for letting her. I was mad at myself for not knowing better and I was mad at everyone else for not teaching me better. I hated everyone. I hated everything. I hated the world, and I realized that the world had hated me, that everything that happened to me was because I was wrong, I was broken - and it made me so mad that I knew, all of a sudden, that I couldn't die. Couldn't let the world win. I'd kill it first.

"Um. To elide rather a lot of further exposition, I did try to kill the world. But eventually I just... got tired of it. Threw down my sword, all that. And I went looking for something else that would make my existence make sense. But when I stopped trying to kill the world, I realized that I hadn't actually stopped having my trouble with... temptation. It still went badly for me, when I did things I knew I shouldn't. And it got worse over time, until it was dangerous for me to do things I wanted even when they weren't bad. And if I went long enough, I started to have trouble telling what I wanted. And eventually, something I wanted would kill me, and the cycle would reset.

"When I arrived in your world, I was so deep in that state that I barely knew what was happening around me. I was surrounded by your slaves. One of them was saying you wouldn't hurt a child, another of them said they'd seen you do worse. And I wanted to kill you, because... I guess because you'd hurt people. Not that I haven't hurt people."

He sits on the ground, looking miserable. "So I killed you. And that killed me. And I woke up a few hours later on the surface. With a headache. I still remember the headache."

"Um," he says. "So. To start with. I don't think... the world... is a thing that can hate, or win or lose? At any rate I think this one isn't. Is yours?"

"Yes. Or at least everything that makes up the world is, even if there isn't one big spirit at the top of the whole coalition - but, yes, in my experience of where I'm from anything can hate you. I've met a woman dying of Kittens. Not specific kittens, just... the concept."

"...that doesn't happen, here. That is not... a thing that makes sense to have happen. I also don't think I really understand about heaven or hell. When people die here they just, sort of, are dead, and aren't there anymore, because that's what being dead is."

"I didn't have accurate information about Heaven or Hell, but the idea is that there's good place you can go when you die, where you're happy forever, and a bad place, where demons torment you. It's substantially more complex than that, but the gist turned out to be accurate."

"And the... part where... you were so mad about dying that instead you didn't... that's also the sort of thing that happens, in your world that can have feelings?"

Handwiggle. "Also more complicated. Almost no one can do that. Explaining why it happened would involve an amount of philosophy that makes me physically nauseous but can be summed up as it happened to me because it was always going to happen to me. Out of the trillions of humans and similar people who have ever died... what is it, three thousand? Have ended up like me."