The sun is sinking, the light dimming. It's almost time for her cultists to sleep.

She has to decide now whether she thinks he'll live to see the dawn without help she doesn't know how to give. Or else, what? Dither about it for the next six hours while he grows weaker and weaker, then drag everyone out of their beds at midnight to suffer for her indecision? Let him die alone in the dark so she doesn't have to face up to the consequences of her mistakes?

"Please, Lady," Julnana whispers tearfully. "Don't let my husband die forsaken."

There's that word again.

"I won't," she says, picking Joobre up to carry him to the temple.

The crowd gathers naturally this time, drawn by threads of rumour.

It goes much the same as it did for Amdusias. A circle of worshippers. A Follower barely able to open their eyes. A bittersweet celebration.

Afterward, walking out of the Temple, she sees the chest where she's supposed to sacrifice goods to the One Below, and she's too angry to stop herself from walking over to give it a vicious kick.

Now her foot hurts, and Joobre is still dead. Great job, mighty Leader.

The crown is not really sure what to do to cheer her up. She isn't into Sermons (baffling but valid). Gardening...? This is not a gardening type of problem. Building? They could build something? She was going to build a cabin for Gusion and Amdusias...?

Right, yes. Separate housing for couples so they don't have to sneak off to fuck in the woods. Sensible, except for how if she tries to do that right now she will think about Julnana and Joobre and definitely, definitely cry.

Ugh. What if she went fishing, what if that.

The Fisherman is always happy(?) to sit in stoic silence and fish next to another person who is also sitting in stoic silence and fishing.

It occurs to her, halfway through the night, to wonder why the Fisherman also never sleeps.

Then she decides to ignore that question in favour of more fishing. Her Followers are going to have so much fish to eat.

She gets back to the camp just as dawn is breaking and the first of her Followers are beginning to stir from their beds.

First things first, she starts a big pot of fish stew. Then, as an afterthought, she dumps a bunch of fish into the One Below's offering chest. In her heart of hearts she imagines them falling disgustingly onto that veiled face. It's probably not healthy to hate her patron so much, but in her defense, her patron is extremely hateable.

Then she realizes she's been so desperate to avoid social contact that she hasn't distributed blessings in... she can't actually remember how long. She sighs and affixes a benevolent smile to her face and goes around greeting the early risers and offering the kindest words she can excavate from her brain, and it does, in fact, tip one person over the edge of the glowy-eye thing and allow her Crown to connect to them, so she should be glad she did it, and not desperate to escape by any means necessary.

However, since she is in fact desperate to escape by any means necessary, she stops distributing Blessings after that. Do we have enough for another Doctrine? What Doctrine could we even make next?

Her crown has ideas about that, actually! It thinks they should forge the Ritual of Feasting first, because after the Ritual of Feasting comes the Doctrine that lets her Followers survive happily on a diet of nothing but grass! And if they had that, then the next time this situation comes up maybe the starving Follower wouldn't die and make the Lamb sad?

The Lamb tries to picture throwing a feast right now. She feels that she would rather throw herself off a cliff. Point taken, though, she would rather have better options if this happens again. And grass-eating will make her Followers easier to feed without forcing any of them to learn to cook.

Absent-mindedly, most of her thoughts still focused on the future, she sips Devotion from the Shrine. Her crown, its thoughts feeling oddly shy in her mind, offers her an Inspiration. It indicates that it's been working on this one all night, refining it from a cruder and less effective version. A building for healing, so that when people are sick or injured she can do something about it, so she won't be helpless in the face of death again.

The Lamb stands frozen. All her willpower is consumed by the effort to not just sit down in the grass and cry.

Thank you, she manages, and the crown gives a pleased little hop on her head. Her face cracks into a smile and she nearly loses control of herself, but after a few moments' struggle, she takes a deep breath and opens her eyes, blinking back tears. Okay. Okay. She can do this.

She accepts the Inspiration, and in a whirlwind of motion and magic they build it together, a little hut just across the way from her Temple. There are camellias twined into the doorframe. Looking at it makes her want to cry again.

This is perhaps not the best time for Julnana to approach.

"My Lady?" she says tentatively.

"What is it?" She learned this person's name yesterday and is already blanking on it. She'd read their—her—mind to find out, but actually the Lamb thinks that if she reads anyone's mind right now, she will have a breakdown.

"I—thank you so much, of course, for your generosity in granting my husband ascension—and I know it's greedy of me to even think—but, Lady, I was talking to Amdusias just now, and—" Her voice grows very quiet. "I miss him."

It's not that she wasn't planning to bring him back. She was absolutely planning to bring him back. It's just—it's just that—fuck.

"Of course," she says, feeling very distant from the movement of her body. "Of course I'll resurrect him."

She could make excuses about how she needs time to prepare, but she feels like shit even thinking about doing that, so she just heads for the Temple immediately instead. Her Followers assemble at the call of her Crown.

It's the same as it was last time, again. The same alien geometry, the same search through a distant unfathomable space.

Joobre rises from the floor just the same, and vomits out his death just the same.

This time, though, as the ritual releases her, the Lamb reaches out to read his mind. She wants—she doesn't know what she wants. She wants to know.

It's mostly pretty confused in here. The process of being resurrected is literally and figuratively gut-wrenching; Joobre feels like a wrung-out cloth, like paste squeezed out of a tube, like he's been washed the way you wash fancy pillows, hollowed and flipped inside-out and scrubbed and wrung and dried and flipped back the right way around and stuffed with new life. Vomiting the black sludge does make him feel a whole lot better, but there's a lot of sludge to get through and even though releasing it is oddly satisfying it's still, on the whole, a pretty miserable experience.

And though the memory of death is fading quickly from his mind, he thinks he remembers... peace, and safety, and comfort, and light. A good place. A place he misses already, though of course his Lady's will is paramount and he's grateful for the chance to serve her by living. And he's very glad to see his wife again.

The Lamb cannot handle this. She cannot handle this. She is trying to handle this, and she is failing.

Isn't it good news? Isn't it good to know that when she grants her followers Ascension they really do go to a better place? Shouldn't she be happy?

But the thing is—

No. She needs to not be thinking about this. She needs to not be thinking about this because if she thinks about this right now she will have a breakdown, right now, in front of her whole flock, and this will shake their faith in her, and the One Below will notice and get mad about it and probably fucking devour her soul or something, so she can think about this later, and right now she will instead graciously endure Julnana's gratitude with a smile she feels like she has to carve into her face with a chisel and then she will head out into the encampment and clear a couple of spots to put individual cabins, one for Amdusias and Gusion, one for Julnana and Joobre. And a third, why not, just in case.

Building things... should help. Does kind of help. It doesn't make her feel less like the specter of an imminent breakdown is looming just over her shoulder, but it does make her feel like she can keep functioning even while under that constant threat. Okay. Okay. Just have to focus. Just have to get through one minute, and then another minute, and then another after that. Just have to get these cabins built. When the cabins are built and her followers are no longer in danger of making bad decisions, or at least not that specific bad decision, then she can... can... fuck. She knows there was something else she meant to do soon, but she can't for the life of her remember what it was. Her mind is blank, too weighed down by thoughts she isn't thinking to function.

One cabin done. What time is it? She can't seem to make herself look up at the sky. There's still light. The shadows are... a shape, definitely. Not too long, she supposes, so maybe near the middle of the day?

She works on the next cabin, dragging her body through the motions. Her supernatural strength and speed and the crown's magical building assistance don't make her feel powerful, right now, they just make her feel tired. Everything makes her feel tired. Existing makes her feel tired. What she wouldn't give for a nap.

Two cabins done. The third is standing there half-finished and she can't bear to look at it. She wanders over to the campfire instead, and finds that her last pot of stew has been devoured, and starts another.

The shadows stretch. The sun descends.

At last, her followers go to sleep.

The thing fucking is, she's trying so so hard to be good to her followers, to be kind to them, to offer them comfort and safety and freedom and not change their minds for her own convenience, and she keeps failing. She keeps being thoughtlessly selfish. She resurrected Amdusias because she couldn't imagine not resurrecting Amdusias - but now she's found out that (assuming his Ascension was like Joobre's) he really was happy, even though she couldn't have imagined him being happy. What else can't she imagine? What else is she assuming that will lead her to make decisions that harm her Followers without her even noticing, without her even being able to imagine she could have done something different?

Maybe she should just stop trying. Maybe she should just stop thinking of them as people she cares about. It's obvious that that's what the One Below wants. It's equally obvious that that's what the One Below thinks of her, and—nope, not finishing that thought anytime soon. Even though her crown says she's safe inside her own head. Some things are just too dangerous to think.

When did she end up curled up on the Temple floor with her face pressed to her knees and both arms wrapped around her head? She needs to get up. She needs to get up and she's not getting up. She needs to stop having visible breakdowns or the One Who Waits will notice and she needs that to not happen, it's not safe to show weakness. She's not safe. She's never safe. It's not safe to have feelings, it's not safe to care about people, it's not safe to try to be good to her Followers—and yet—and yet—

And yet, she thinks, if she's going to turn into Leshy devouring his cultists for power, if she's going to turn into the Bishops beheading an innocent stranger for fear of a fate that stranger never wanted... there's no point in being safe, if that's what safety means. You can push the Lamb a long way by threatening her life. A long way, but not quite forever.

So what does she do? Where does she go from here?

...she needs to get up, first of all. She needs to not be having this breakdown, or at least not visibly. She needs to not give the One Below any more reason to doubt her.

Slowly, grimly, with difficulty, she drags herself to her feet and steps outside. She heads for the third cabin, the one she didn't finish building. She unpockets a log and shoves it into place. Step by step by step, she builds. So that she'll be doing something that isn't "visibly freak out". So that she'll have a spare cabin the next time two of her Followers decide they need some alone time together. So that she'll have something to focus on that isn't the sheer colossal depth of the hopelessness of her situation.

Dawn breaks.

She enters the Temple and calls everyone to a morning Sermon, because she may be having an awful time but that doesn't mean she needs to neglect her crown. Her crown is mildly terrifying but it's also more or less her only friend in the world and she wants to be nice to it.

(Aww! Her crown appreciates her friendship. It's not sure anyone has ever tried being friends with it before.)

More fool they, she thinks, and she calls on it to help her forge the feasting ritual. She may feel hollow and lost about this prospect, but her followers are wildly enthusiastic. She tries to feel joy in their joy. It doesn't work.

Earlier she was trying not to rely on cutting a bloody swath through the Bishops' territory as a form of stress relief, but now she's not even sure it would relieve her stress if she tried it. Her stress seems unrelievable, as steady and solid as the ground beneath her feet. She can't remember what it was like to feel okay. Has she ever felt okay? She must have, right?

This is perhaps not the best moment for Joobre to nervously approach, but here he is, lingering after the Sermon and the forging as everyone else disperses into the camp.

It's not like there are any better moments available.

"What is it?"

"My Lady... um..." He takes a deep breath and visibly steels himself.

"...will you teach me to cook?"

She can distantly imagine the relief she would've felt, if this had happened back when she was capable of feeling relief.

She forces a smile onto her face. "Yes, of course."

Joobre is an eager and attentive student—and, once he's been puttering around the cookfire with her for a few minutes, Valefar hesitantly joins them.