Slowly the conjured place thawed, and from the warm hearth of this sheltered dream they were returned to the cold ruin they had been pulled from.
And as the cold winds resumed their hoary howl blowing ice between the ruins, Ochazuke's footsteps fell over the snow where he stood over their diminished hostess.
"Nothing happened? Look around you." As the gales would through the derelict, their passage seemed to carry to his ears a hollow requiem.
"Avalon would continue to stand apart from this mundane world," he said. Snow and dust lay trodden below his boots as he moved past her. "Yet here Avalon rests."
The creeping shadow within the sleeping Earth brushed against the field of his sense-awareness once more, and as he reached his senses to the lonely peak in the distance, there were signs of life gilded in that ravenous aura.
"A lie will not change that this is all that remains."
As Ochazuke forged ahead, Zaofan approached the familiar from behind. Though the chef had only his weathered kitchen garb, he unbuttoned the white jacket and laid it about Morgan's shoulders. His breath still fogged from the warmth of the tea, and his body was sustained by the training of his spirit, and in spite of the ever present winter, where he laid his hands over her, a small bit of warmth spread.
"...for what it's worth I'm sorry," he said, "you've lost a great deal. I can't imagine what that's like...but believe it or not, he does."
For the better part of two years, they'd been finding figments of the Earth's past, a common thread that wound through the ages. What once had brought people together had been used to sow division through the world, but in his salad days as a journeyman chef, Zaofan had seen that there was something fundamental to the peoples of Earth, for all their frailties, that endured through upheaval and hardships.
It was at that time he remembered he was touching a ghost, and the chef chuckled. "But you know, the kingdom isn't entirely gone. You've shown us you have quite the keen memory!"
Rolling up his sleeves nervously, he offered Morgan a hand up. "Perhaps if you show us around, we can figure out how to restore what you've lost."