It would be comforting to think she doesn't understand.

There are certainly aspects of the situation she feels lost about. She's heard the words "Old Faith" before, who hasn't, but religion has never been her area of expertise. The hooded cloaks are unfamiliar. She doesn't know how they found her. She doesn't know what they're hoping to get out of this.

The basic premise, though? Try as she might to deny it, that much she knows in her bones. She is the Lamb, and she is here to die.

With her hands bound behind her back, she can't wipe the tears from her eyes. She stumbles half-blind over the rough stone bricks, furious and terrified, listening desperately for the slightest hint of a chance to do anything other than this.

But she's tired, and outnumbered, and her chains are very heavy, and she still can't see through her tears. At the end of the path, on the circle of stone in the circle of light, she collapses.

A voice like gravel being crushed says, "Before us stands the last of its kind. All others we have hunted down and put to the blade."

Another voice, chirpy-bubbly like a babbling brook, agrees: "With this final sacrifice, the prophecy will be impossible to fulfill."

A chittering screech adds, "The heretic who lies bound below will be condemned to eternal captivity."

A hissing whisper concludes, "And the Old Faith shall be preserved."

Tear-blurred though her eyes are, she doesn't miss the approach of the executioner, nor the swing of his axe.

And yet—somehow—that final thud is suspended. Cut off, you might say. The wrenching pain she expected slides sideways out of reach, and all she feels is dizzy disorientation and a faint unsettling hum in her bones.

She opens her eyes.

Thick white fog coats the ground like a carpet of wool, and from that foundation, a forest of chains sprout like broad old trees, leaning this way and that but each as straight as an arrow in its chosen direction.

There's something up ahead, a flailing figure, hard to pick out through the fog and the tears. She struggles to her feet and trudges forward. If this is the author of her misery, perhaps she'll get a chance to bite them.

The ground plinks under her feet like she's a rock skipping over a lake, if ever a rock skipped so slowly. She does her best to ignore it.

Up ahead, the figure gradually becomes clearer. A veiled face, dark, red-eyed, with two short horns. A sort of hat or crown, black with a curved red line across the middle. A red-and-white robe, wrapped in black chains, and manacles to chain each skeletal arm to something beneath the fog. The arms are raised, stretching those chains out straight. Two more figures flank it, veiled likewise and with similar though less disturbing features, each half as tall as the chained one and about, oh, four times her own height. Also, now that she's a little closer, she can tell that the central figure has three glaring red eyes beneath its veil.

Her steps begin to slow as she considers whether she should perhaps have walked the other way.

The figure lowers its arms and beckons. Its voice sounds old and hollow and crumbling, like an ancient fallen log.

"Come closer. Fear not, for though you are already dead, I still have need of you."

She takes another reluctant step forward.

"Those foolish Bishops thought they could keep you from me in death. But instead they sent you straight to me."

Its mouth opens beneath its veil into a manic grin.

"I will give you LIFE again, but at a PRICE! All I ask is for you to start a Cult in my name."

Somehow, without changing its posture, it gives the impression of leaning forward.

"Do we have a deal?"

...what's she going to do, say no? Its minions would probably eat her or something.

She nods.

The being closes its eyes and spreads its arms. The black crown rises from its head.

The crown's red curve blinks open into a flaming eye.

Power, power overwhelming, crackling like lightning over her skin, coursing through her veins like liquid fire. She sees nothing. She sees everything. It hurts more than dying did. It's the best thing she's ever felt in her life.

Her chains burst like scattered leaves and the crown on her head is a sword in her hand and the cultists who brought her here are dead on the ground as simply as that, as simply as dancing blade-first between them, flowing effortlessly out of the way of their crude knives, strike and strike and strike until nothing is left and she's panting on the stone circle free and triumphant and beautifully, impossibly alive.

When did she return to the forest, to the real world and not that fog-drenched alien wasteland? It must have been when the crown struck. She shudders at the memory as she races back down the path, clear as day to her now although the woods are as dim as ever. There's the clearing where she woke up, and the cultists that prodded her down the path, and she carves through them as a deadly whirlwind and turns to leave. The path is blocked by a crude barricade of debris—but not to her, it isn't.

As her sword flows back into a crown and she charges recklessly ahead, she lets out a wild whooping laugh. Not captive anymore! Not a victim, not a sacrifice! She is the Lamb, and she is here to kill!

The next clearing holds a one-eyed stranger and she nearly cuts his throat before she checks herself and stops in her tracks, dropping the hand that would have called the sword.

He doesn't seem perturbed.

"Fear not! I am Ratau. I was once a chosen vessel like you, but those days are lost to the winds." He clears his throat. "I was sent to guide you. We are deep in the lands of the Old Faith and in grave danger. My instructions are to lead you to safety. Continue through the woods. Escape lies ahead. I will be close by."

She nods cautiously. Whoever he is, he doesn't look like much of a threat, but that's no call to go trusting him.

Taking this as sufficient acknowledgment, he sinks into the ground.

...sure, that can happen.

His directions may be lies, but they're also the only ones she has, so she follows them.

The next clearing is full of cultists and this time she actually has to put in a little effort to kill them all; that first heady rush of power is beginning to ebb. But she gets the job done. It's not until after, feeling the crown settle back into place atop her head, that she wonders whether she could have done something else. Snuck past them? Knocked them out...? Doesn't knocking people out also usually kill them? Whatever. It's hard to shed a tear over the people who dragged her from her bed in chains to be sacrificed. She has a quick rummage through the pockets of their robes and then moves on.

Cultists, cultists, weird leafy monsters that are like no woodland creature she's ever seen... she hesitates at those, but when they come up and try to bite her, she unleashes the sword and it does for them just the same.

Eventually, she comes upon an archway. It sounds like someone's talking on the other side, but the sound is blurred as though by a door. There isn't a door, unless you count the ominous red glow.

She steps through.

Her guide emerges from the earth while she's still processing what she finds there.

"We have nearly reached safety, but look ahead! Another poor soul about to be sacrificed." His one eye widens with a sudden intensity. "Rescue them and they would have no choice but to join your new Cult."

...that's a deeply off-putting pitch, but she finds it hard to argue with a rescue mission. She turns toward the altar, the tied-up deer-man on it, the robed figures encircling.

Their leader raises one of those ugly knives, chipped and notched as though from an excess of use.

"Oh mighty Bishops of the Old Faith! We ask you to accept the sacrifice of this wretched soul—"

Another, more observant cultist yelps and brandishes their own knife. "Hey! Who interrupts our ritual and trespasses on sacred ground?!"

Surprise, motherfuckers!

The battle is brief. When it's done, the deer-man huddles trembling on the altar, unhurt but terrified. Ratau is long gone.

Never mind Ratau. She rushes to cut the stranger's bonds, and reaches for him to offer a comforting touch.

And as soon as she makes contact, a red glow engulfs them both, and she feels herself... take him, somehow, like she's tucking him into her pocket for later. It feels so natural that she doesn't quite realize what she's doing until she's already done it.

"...I have questions," she says to the empty woods. They decline to answer.

Fine. Onward.

Ratau is waiting for her in the next clearing, at a pentagram drawn in red on stone. It reminds her uncomfortably of the slab where she was sacrificed.

"We have reached safety. You have done well."

Has she?

"The Red Crown will allow you to use those markings on the ground to transport yourself great distances. It will take you to a temple that has fallen to ruin. There you will be able to begin your new—"

"Fine," she says, and leaps into the circle. Ratau's words are washed away by a crimson glow.

When the red relinquishes her, she's standing on a much more elaborate pentagram, encircled by mossy runestones. Ratau is visible just ahead, down a set of crumbling stone steps. She picks her way down them, cautious of the possibility that they might be less solid than they appear, but nothing turns unexpectedly under her weight.

"As I was saying," he says. It's hard to tell whether his creaky voice is amused, reproving, or neither. "This hallowed ground which once was mine, is now yours. This crumbling ruin is to be the site of your new Cult."

He gestures outward at the space enclosed by mossy lumps which may once, a very long time ago, have been walls. Irregular tufts of grass cover the ground, along with occasional wildflowers and heaps of rubble.

"We have much to do," he continues. "We begin by indoctrinating," his eye pops far too wide again, "this poor soul into the warm embrace of your Cult."

Which poor soul...?

Her eyes track the sweep of his arm out to a stone circle with what looks like the shape of her crown marked in its center. The background sensation of having something in a nonexistent pocket releases, and the deer-man she rescued pops out of the circle in a twisting flare of red, looking traumatized.

"Followers are useful for many purposes," says Ratau. "I suggest you put this one to work gathering raw materials for now."

One thing at a time, man.

She doesn't say it aloud, just trots over to the circle. The crown shifts tangibly on her brow; it feels like it's leaning interestedly forward. An unsettling sensation, to be sure.

Her new follower(?) kneels on the stone, a posture that puts her uncomfortably in mind of descending axes.

"Convert me to your Cult; I will follow your teachings faithfully," he says.

She's about to protest that she has no idea what she's doing, but the crown takes over, lifting eagerly from her brow and dragging her into the air after it in an exultant rush.

A look of glazed bliss floods the deer-man's face, and he levitates as well, his ragged clothing mending itself in a wave of phantom dye until he settles back onto the ground dressed in a tidy little red tunic.

"What is your will?" he asks humbly.

"What is your name?" she asks, feeling lost and off-balance and trying to ignore the memory of how good it felt to convert him.

"Meron, if it please my lady."

This is the part of the interaction where she's supposed to give her own name, she's pretty sure, but when she reaches into her memory for the last place she saw it, she doesn't find it there. Has she forgotten, after all these years spent running from anything resembling a conversation? Or is it something the crown did to her? Shivering slightly, she turns her attention back to Meron.

"Sounds good to me," she says, projecting a confidence she does not even slightly feel. "Can you get started sorting through all this debris for stuff we can use?"

"Of course!" He literally leaps to the task, whistling a jaunty tune.

Creepy.

She turns her attention back to Ratau, assuming he hasn't—

His spot by the stairs is empty, but he pops out of the earth right in front of her.

"By your hand, our Cult will grow powerful!" he intones. "But your Followers cannot live on prayer alone; they must eat. You will need a cooking fire."

He's already sinking back into the earth as she nods and steps past him. At least those red berry bushes all over the place are a species she recognizes as safe, and one advantage of being a hermit is that she could build a cooking fire in her sleep, with both hands tied behind her—

She flinches, pushes the memory away, and starts snapping branches off half-dead trees and dragging mossy lumps of rock into a vague approximation of a circle.

Meron helps clear the space, and stacks a neat bundle of firewood nearby, and remains disturbingly chipper about all this.

Once she has the firepit properly constructed, she—doesn't have anything to cook in—

The crown flows into her hand as a frying pan. She stares at it for a second, then thinks hoe-shaped thoughts until it shifts a second time. A bit of digging, and she has the ingredients for a sort of berry-tuber stew. It'll do for now.

Meron is disturbingly chipper about this questionable meal!

Of course he fucking is.

Ratau pops up again once they're done eating.

"Now we must build a Shrine—but first we will need more Followers and more gold," he says.

"Gold like this?" She flashes a pentagram-engraved coin she looted from a cultist's pocket.

"Yes," he says, nodding gravely. "Both can be found when crusading through the lands of the Old Faith."

That checks out, in her limited experience. She nods.

"Our mutual benefactor The One Who Waits has been trapped by the four Bishops of the Old Faith. Each of them guards a chain that binds him to the realm beyond. We have conjured openings to their realms. It is your task to track them down and slay them so that he may be freed."

"...these are the same guys who had me killed, right?" she says, thinking back to those four distinctive voices and the looming silhouettes she only barely glimpsed as they spoke.

"Indeed."

The crown flows down into her hand as a sword, then circles back up to her head. She nods shortly. Killing those four is a task she doesn't mind pursuing.

"Now go!" cries Ratau, popping his eye again. "There you shall find gold and willing recruits, and for those who are not willing, convert them by FORCE!"

The crown hungers at that thought, and for a moment she hungers too. It takes her a second to rein herself in, by which point Ratau has descended into the soil again. How does he keep doing that, anyway. Maybe it's because he's a mole-man? She's never asked molefolk if they can swim in dirt before. It just hasn't come up.

Half curious, half driven from the temple by Meron's cheerful smile, she hesitantly ascends the steps to the pentagram again. She didn't see it last time she arrived, but there's a passage going the other way, too, and when she follows it she finds a statue of her crown with its eye open and burning and weeping black tears.

Ratau pops up while she's distracted by that spectacle. "The doors," he says, gesturing; sure enough, there's a big green door right over there, with her crown carved into it again. "The first should take only a little faith to open."

Once again she wants to protest that she has no idea what she's doing. Once again, the crown takes over. She feels it reach out and seize Meron, and he comes bolting up the steps and down the crumbling hall to stand by the statue and...

The statue flashes with a light so brilliant, it feels like she can see her own bones. A radiant pillar of flame bursts forth from its top. Meron's faith is fueling it, somehow; she can see arcs of crimson light darting like fish out of his body and into the stone. The door glows, shudders, and descends into the ground. Meron collapses in exhaustion. Ratau is gone again.

For sheer lack of any better ideas, she turns toward the door...

No. First, she helps Meron to his feet (ignoring the part of her that recoils from the contact) and gets him safely back to the clearing, where she tells him firmly to rest. Then, she heads back out to try that door.

There's a sign just past the door: Entering the lands of the Bishop Leshy. Those who do not follow the ways of the Old Faith will be destroyed.

Well, it's simple, she'll give it that. Straightforward. To the point.

There's a painting on the worn stone, depicting a crown like hers but angular, with a diamond-shaped eye. That's the only part of the whole setup that gives her pause, and not for more than a moment before she walks right on by.

She kills monsters and robed strangers alike, and pockets anything that seems useful until her pockets overflow, at which point her crown helpfully gathers it all up for her. After that, she is guided in her looting substantially by what her crown seems to want: gold, grass, and for some reason bones. So many bones. Where did all these bones even come from? Will her crown deign to carry some potatoes she finds under a dead leaf-monster? (It will.)

Of course, as soon as she really gets into a rhythm, the rug has to come out from under her.

She's bounding into a new clearing ready to take on whatever it may hold, and pulls back at the last second before she unthinkingly stabs a... red... leafy... triangle... with a beak??

What.

The stranger in the bizarre outfit opens their long mouth and speaks.

"Praise the Lamb, conduit to great power, promised liberator of the One that Waits below."

"...th...anks...???"

They clear their throat. "...so the cards showed me, once. Many lifetimes ago. (Or has that yet to be?)"

Why can she hear the parentheses.

"I have always drawn your cards, Lamb," they say. "And yet, this is the first. Take these cards, and I will draw another each time we meet. When drawn by me, they will grant you power."

Wh—

"What power? Well, that is both known, and unfathomable. The cards, they shall decide..."

And with that, the creature offers her a pair of cards. The one on the left shows four hearts in a sort of flower shape, one teal, the others grey, all bearing the eye of her crown. The one on the right shows a single grey, crumbling, bleeding heart, festooned with veins and eyes and splatters of black liquid.

She'll go with Kinda Spooky over Immensely Fucked, thanks.

The teal heart seems to expand to briefly fill her awareness. It's not clear what exactly it did, but it's clear that it did something.

"Ah, the Lovers!" says the stranger. "You cannot argue with the draw."

Unsettled, she dashes back out of the card-creature's clearing and continues exploring the path.

It's all leaf-monsters and cultists for a bit, but she nevertheless remains on alert, trying to appraise the contents of each new clearing before she almost stabs a peaceful stranger this time.

Leaf-monsters, cultists. Freaky blue bats. A rather pretty necklace. Big piles of rock which her crown gets very excited about.

But the next big surprise comes not at the start of an encounter but at the end, once she's killed all the cultists in a clearing full of bones.

The thin light dims further, turns purple-red, heavy and oppressive, as though darkness is dripping from the canopy. A black portal opens in the ground, and a figure ascends through it.

The first thing she notices is the crown. Bigger than hers - but not bigger than hers was, when the One Who Waits wore it - with a green eye, not a red one. Green like the green door she went through to get here? Maybe. Not sure. It's definitely reminiscent of the starkly angular crown that was painted on the warning sign.

The eye snaps open into a diamond shape and stares down at her. The creature's head is big and round and leafy like the leaf-monsters, and wrapped in bloody bandages that suggest the presence—or is that the absence?—of at least one eye beneath them, maybe more.

"How can this be?" it says in a chittering voice last heard before the fall of an axe. "You were put to the blade, Lamb, as all your kind were. And yet here you stand before me, unrepentant." Almost to itself, it muses, "The Crown... his power... could it be?" Then it focuses on her again. "But I am stronger still. Turn tail and run, little Lamb."

And it sinks once more into the earth. The light clears. The heavy oppressive feeling drains away.

Only once the figure has departed does she realize that her crown has been roiling this whole time. It slowly lowers her back to the ground from her levitated state, and she sets off again warier than ever.

After a handful more leaf monsters, she comes upon a stone-floored courtyard, where a robed cultist waits with eyes aglow.

Before she can attack, the same heavy presence from before slams down like a vault door, stopping her in her tracks just long enough for the same leafy bandaged figure to rise from the earth again.

"You have come far enough little Lamb," it chitters. "My Followers are willing to do anything for me. Can you say the same of yours?"

"I give myself to the cause, oh mighty Leader!" cries the cultist.

"By the blood of the Great Ones, destroy the Red Crown!"

The cultist... melts. There isn't really a better way to describe it. Their robe and body liquefy, they slump and shrink and drip, and finally a leafy beast bursts forth from what was once a person. Its huge red eyes are crazed; its huge red maw is lined with jagged teeth; the top of its head sprouts egg-like growths, one with teeth of its own. It has two mossy wooden horns and a sluglike leafy body.

But most importantly of all, the Lamb can hit it with her sword. So she does, with great enthusiasm.

It's by far the toughest fight she's faced. Sometimes it spews eggs that hatch into smaller leaf-beasts; sometimes it spews mysterious fluids that she dodges rather than find out what will happen if they touch her. A couple of times it manages to bite her, or she's too distracted to dodge its freshly hatched minions; she's bleeding by the time she finally beats it into submission.

Instead of falling apart like a normal leaf-monster though, it crumbles into... a person? Green and leafy and wood-horned, with eggs on the top of their head, but still person-shaped with a person's face and a person's traumatized expression.

"Please... spare me," the ex-monster ex-cultist weeps. "Convert me to your Cult, I will follow your teachings faithfully!"

Instinctively she's having none of it. What could she possibly want with such a fair-weather cultist? Shouldn't she expect them to betray her just as soon as the next bozo with a sword comes along, since they've already proved that's how they do things?

Her crown, though, has other ideas. It's leaning forward intently again.

And... she doesn't want to kill someone who's begging for their life, or abandon them in the forest to whatever twisted notion of justice the big guy with the green crown might favour.

She hesitates for a long moment, then nods. Her crown joyously pockets the fluffy green stranger.

The next clearing has the familiar stone pentagram, and she lets the crown take her home.

Her crown feels oddly heavy in that way it gets when there's a person inside. She makes a beeline for the small stone circle in the temple clearing and unpockets the leafy stranger into it with a sigh of relief. Her crown leans in eagerly, waiting to pounce.

With another, quieter sigh, she lets it loose. Once more the levitation. Once more the rush of intoxicating pleasure. Once more the glazed look on her new follower's face.

This time, though, there's something else: a sense of... potential? Without really understanding what she's doing, she flails vaguely at it.

Her new follower descends to the earth as a deerfolk, smaller and narrower than Meron and with wooden horns instead of antlers. He touches his own face in quiet amazement.

"I'm... cured?" he breathes. "Oh, great Leader, thank you so much!"

"What's your name?" she says uncomfortably.

"Amdusias, if it please you."

"That's a good name," she says, more out of concern than sincerity. She gets the sense that if she accidentally came across like she didn't like someone's name, they'd beg her for a new one. "Why don't you go help Meron clean this place up and sort out the usable resources."

Amdusias gets to work with what is by now a familiar level of enthusiasm.

These people are going to make her wish she'd succeeded at dying.

She sighs, though, and looks down at her hands. Can she really regret being alive? Can she really regret Meron being alive? Amdusias is more complicated, but... she thinks she did the right thing, though she isn't sure. She did at least do what he asked. It's probably hard to go wrong with that.

Beds. Her followers are going to need beds. And houses to put the beds in. It won't be the first time she's constructed a crude hut out of sticks and stones, and it's not likely to be the last, at the rate she's acquiring new followers. Maybe a sort of long dormitory at one end of the temple clearing...? And a latrine, a good solid latrine is going to rapidly become a necessity around here.

Her crown fashions itself into an axe, and she gets to work.

Ratau pops out of the ground a scant minute later.

"I am relieved to see you made it safely, and you have not returned alone," he says. "You have convinced more to join our faithful flock."

She needs to start keeping a tally of the times she's almost taken this poor fellow's head off. Or maybe, on second thought, she should definitely not do that.

She grunts noncommittally.

"When your Followers worship at a Shrine, they fill it with their Devotion." He says the word in a portentous tone, as though it's something more than just a feeling.

"So how do I—"

But then her crown flows into her hand as a hammer, and she Knows. Some wood here, some stone there, and somehow the coins also come into it—she works in a daze until the work is done, and then there's a statue in the center of the clearing, a crude depiction of her made of bundled branches. Even having done the whole thing herself, she has no explanation for how the statue ended up with a black crown just like hers, its eye peacefully closed.

"Praise be! Your Followers can now worship you!" says Ratau. "Divine Inspiration is a powerful tool. As you collect their Devotion, you may gain more of it."

She's not totally sure she wants that, but, as with most things that have happened to her today, it seems she's not being given a choice.

"Here is a new Follower," he continues, gesturing to the small stone circle off to the side of the central area. An especially traumatized-looking hedgehogfolk appears there. "Assign them to worship at the Shrine."

...she has so many questions and it does not seem productive to ask them. She goes over to the circle.

"Convert me to your Cult, I will follow your teachings faithfully!" says the newcomer, kneeling on the stone.

She opens her mouth to say 'I don't even have teachings', then closes it. Teachings, she suspects, will be provided. Maybe by Divine Inspiration.

"All right," she says instead, and unleashes her eager crown.

Her new follower gives his name as Pajul and trots happily over to the Shrine when commanded.

What was she up to? Right, housing all these people. And giving them somewhere to shit. She gets back to that.

Slowly, the shrine begins to glow.

The crown notices first, and gets her attention by leaning yearningly toward the center of the temple clearing. She looks.

Well okay then.

Half-dragged by the eager monstrosity on her head, she gravitates toward the statue of herself and... drinks the glow from it. Another fit of inspiration strikes immediately. It's much... bigger than the one for the Shrine; she ends up dragging her followers into it, the crown reaching out and imprinting orders onto them directly, to gather wood or stone, to dig here or build there. It deploys those mysterious gold coins several times, to patch places where the available materials can't quite provide the desired result.

When the building is complete, a long red hall with an eye-emblazoned door at one end, Ratau pops out of the ground in front of it.

"The Temple is the centre of your Cult," he intones. "From there you will preach Sermons to grow stronger and perform Rituals to mould the fragile minds of your followers."

The crown is concerningly excited about moulding the fragile minds of their followers.

"You are responsible for maintaining the faith of your cult," he continues. "If it falls too low, your Followers will dissent against you and eventually leave."

Wait, they can leave?? They can form low opinions of her and then leave on that basis??? That is NOT the way this looked like it was going. She's honestly more relieved than anything.

"Your Followers are ready to hear your word. Show them that you are their great leader. Preach a Sermon from within your Temple."

Given how things have been going, she assumes that her crown is going to make everyone glow, levitate, and orgasm while she just stands there feeling stupid, and that'll be her "sermon". Fine. She trudges into the Temple, feeling her crown reach out silently to summon her followers in her wake.

Although the outside of the building looks like a crude hut more than anything else, the inside is surprisingly sleek. She was there when it was built, she cut and laid these flagstones with her own crown-wielding hands, and yet... there's something here that wasn't here when she built it. Maybe the crown used some extra coins while she wasn't looking, to give the light this faint red tinge and inscribe the intricate patterns on that rug.

Anyway. She trots up the short steps to the dais, and stands before the carved stone altar from which her crown's eye glares in effigy, and her followers assemble before her, and she feels just as stupid as she thought she would.

The assembled crowd—all three of them—gaze up at her with awe and reverence.

It doesn't quite turn out as she predicted.

She's the one who glows and levitates, and feels the ecstatic rush of power as her crown reaches out to touch their minds and sway their loyalty. And it's not just about its insatiable appetite for mind control, either; something returns along that connection, maybe the same thing her followers are supposed to provide when they worship at the statue, maybe some completely different form of worship-related energy. Whatever it is, she has a very close and intimate view of her crown slurping it up voraciously and growing stronger in the process, until at last it releases her and lets her settle to the ground, and her followers smile and nod at each other like whatever just happened was normal and reasonable, and she hangs onto the edge of the altar and tries to catch her breath as they file out the door.

Ratau pops out of the middle of the floor as soon as the followers are all gone.

"You were amazing to behold. A natural leader," he says. "I see why you were chosen."

sdkjfdjsj STOP DOING THAT

Unperturbed by her spluttering, he continues, "If you are to guide your Cult you will need to declare Doctrines so that they might obey you."

Okay. She can't take it anymore. She's just gonna say the blunt ill-advised thing, come what may.

"And will declaring Doctrines involve saying words to people about what I want, or will it be some kind of freaky magic divine crown nonsense?"

"There is power in Doctrines beyond the words used to describe them," he acknowledges. "Without that power, your followers' adherence to them would not grant you power in return. For now, your best source of that power is Commandment Stone fragments. Return to the lands of the Old Faith and seek them out, that you may declare new Doctrines to your followers."

He sinks into the floor again before she can ask any follow-up questions.

Of course he fucking does.

Fine. Fine.

Feeling incredibly grumpy about the whole business, she trudges out of the Temple and up the steps and over the big stone circle and past the statue of her crown and through the green door.

Everything about this jaunt is just about as normal as these jaunts ever get, right up until she dashes into a new clearing and finds a fluffy purple spiderfolk in a pointy purple hat, rubbing their forelimbs together and gazing hungrily at a nervous pigfolk wrapped in web and hung in a wooden frame.

Before she can find the words to respond to this spectacle, the spiderfolk turns to her and says earnestly, "Yessss, you like? I find many of these tasty morsels..."

"Eight gold for this one! It is sickly," says the spiderfolk.

A lot of thoughts flash through her head all at once. If she pays money to buy captives, she's paying for more to be caught. On the other hand maybe if she doesn't pay for this one, the spiderfolk will eat them. On the third hand there's six more captives staked out all around the clearing, so maybe the spiderfolk is just going to snack on those instead...

Fuck it. She can save this one, so she will. It doesn't have to get more complicated than that.

"I'll take it," she says, calling on her crown to deposit a stack of coins in her hand and holding them out to the spiderfolk.

The very instant that the spiderfolk takes the money, the web holding the captive in place bursts apart like the chains did on that rescued sacrifice, and her crown pockets the captive. The spiderfolk does not seem perturbed by this.

"I am Helob! Pleasure doing business."

"...sure."

She moves on. The path to the next clearing is long, and ends in a stone circle containing a statue of - well, from context, she's going to assume it's Bishop Leshy, the one with the green crown and bandaged eye. Her crown reaches out to drink from the statue; the taste of Devotion is at once familiar and alien, and she suspects there's a difference between Devotion made by her own followers and Devotion she's stealing from someone else. Not like she objects to taking it, though, not from that asshole.

(It turns out that, if you hit the statue with your sword until it falls to pieces, the pieces uncrumble themselves and levitate right back into place.)

Ugh. Whatever.

Next clearing?

Big sluggy leaf monsters! Though not so big or sluggy as Amdusias.

After that, though, comes a strange birdfolk in a weird costume. Different from the red triangle one. This one appears to be more... dressed up... as an owl? And yet that is not an owl's beak on their face.

"Eons agone, these lands were rife with Gods and their adherents," they intone.

...sure. Okay. This is what's happening now.

"What befell this pantheon? Alas. 'Tis the nature of beasts to forget, and Gods to be forgotten."

You know what, actually, this sounds like it might be useful information. She listens, frowning thoughtfully.

"Mayhap they left. Mayhap they slept. Mayhap they devoured and were devoured in turn. Those few who remained spread roots, spun webs, molded this world to meet them and theirs."

There's a crown on the birdfolk's head, nestled amid the feathers of their costume. Its eye is closed, not as though resting, more as though scarred. As though it will never open again.

"'Twere a land of many Gods, once. Hundreds. Now..."

The birdfolk shrugs, and ascends silently into the canopy. Several fragments of crumbling stone lie scattered on the ground where they stood.

When she recognizes the crown, she jolts as though struck by a physical blow, but stays silent.

When the stranger departs, she stands still for a long moment before allowing her crown to pounce on the stones. By the weight of them in its immaterial pockets, she suspects they're what she's looking for.

Now if only she understood what the fuck just happened.

The other cryptic birdfolk, with the weird triangle costume, is waiting in the next clearing.

"Tell me, Lamb; do you believe destiny immutable?"

She squints sharply at their head, but if there's a crown there, it's hidden in the point of the triangle and out of her sight.

"What's your name?" she says instead of answering. It's not like she's given much thought to the mutability of destiny in her life.

"I am Clauneck."

Once again, the choice of two cards: the immensely fucked-up heart, and another heart, half painted in teal, held aloft by skeletal arms.

...she'll go with the less fucked-up one again.

"You cannot argue with the draw. One might as well argue with the ocean," Clauneck says peacefully.

This time, she lingers long enough to notice little details, like the open book on a stand next to Clauneck's mat, and the icon of her red-eyed crown on that stand. Who is this stranger? What's their connection with her? What's their connection with the other birdfolk who gave her the fragments?

She hesitates, glancing back and forth between birdfolk and book, before finally asking, "Do you have any weird friends who might be gods?"

"Your cards have been drawn. The path lays ahead."

...okay. Sure. Whatever.

Unsettled, she continues.

Behind her, Clauneck is saying to themself, "All is as it should be, as it ever was, as it always will be."

She ignores that in favour of killing leaf monsters and feeding their bones to her crown. Why does her crown have such an insatiable appetite for bones.

For a little while, she is undisturbed at this work.

Then, while she's still fighting leaf monsters in the latest of many clearings, Bishop Leshy's presence descends on her surroundings.

"So you foolishly persist, little Lamb."

It's a little easier to take, this time. She can notice things like the fact that her crown is levitating her in the air and suffusing her vision with an all-consuming red glow.

"I hear your lies and I smell your fear."

Fear? Fear? Oh I'll show you fear you overgrown mossball—

"The Red Crown rises again... but what an UNWORTHY bearer it has."

After pausing for a moment to let her suffer helplessly under the weight of its contempt, Leshy sinks into the pool of blackness beneath it, and is gone.

She drops to the ground and regains her ability to move only after its shadow has passed.

Something is moving in front of her. She kills it. Oh, it was a leaf monster, and that's a cultist. Good. Die. More cultists, you say? DEATH.

Afterward, when there is nothing left to kill, she stands panting for a moment. Her crown has already collected the gold and the bones. There's nothing for her to do but grapple with the enormity of her rage.

It's not... good, how angry she is. It's not fair. It's not safe. Someday she's going to kill something that doesn't deserve it. Maybe she already has.

But it's a hard world out there and sometimes you have to kill if you want to live. She takes a deep breath, tells herself everything is fine, and moves on.

There are leaf monsters and cultists and Clauneck again, but nothing else out of the ordinary until she bursts into another clearing and finds a fluffy red monster with four red eyes and a ring of enormous teeth, very reminiscent of Amdusias's transformed state, complete with wooden antlers and a long sluglike body.

With a quiet sigh, she gets to work. Her sword hacks away at the new creature, and although it manages to wing her with a couple of fireballs, in the end she triumphs and it shrinks into a fluffy red person, just like Amdusias did. She pockets this one without waiting for them to ask, and only then realizes that the waiting for them to ask part is actually kind of important.

Well, whatever. If they object when she gets them home, she can... no, actually, it's probably a bad idea to let them run off from her temple, they might lead someone else back to it. Fuck.

It's probably fine, right? They probably faced the same ugly choices as Amdusias and felt the same way about them, right? Right??

No, she fucked up and that's all there is to it.

She tries to unpocket them on the spot, but it doesn't work. Apparently the little stone circle is important to the process somehow.

Feeling more unsettled than ever, she heads home.

Except that home is not what happens, when she steps onto the circle with the inscribed pentagram and tells her crown to take her there.

Instead, there's a sick wrenching feeling and an unpleasantly familiar thick white fog, and she's looking the One Who Waits straight in its veiled three-eyed face.

"Very good, my vessel. It seems I chose well when I kept you from Death."

augh augh augh

"I will be watching your every move." It grins. "Do not disappoint me."

Then, without her conscious intervention, her crown pulls her away again and sends her properly home this time.

She sits down heavily on the big stone circle when she arrives, and for a few minutes she just stays there, her crown heavy on her brow, while her entire being cries out to run and she reminds herself over and over that there's nowhere to run to.

Then she trudges into the temple clearing and heads for the little stone circle to unpocket her new followers. The one she bought, first.

He does look pretty sickly, but he takes to conversion just fine. His name is Hutrear.

She tells him to get some rest, and unpockets the fluffy one.

"What's your name?" she says first, before letting her crown loose on them.

"Valefar... please, spare me..."

"I can transform you into... some other kind of folk, I'm not sure which it'll be... or leave you like that," she says, gesturing at the fluffiness. "Which would you rather?"

Part of her wants to ask if they even want to be converted at all, but the rest of her is very conscious that her patron said it would be watching, and it might not be safe to let people go even if they themselves pose no danger, which she's not at all sure of.

"Oh!" Valefar gazes wide-eyed up at her. "I... would like to be transformed, please, Lady."

She finally lets her eager crown get to work, and Valefar floats up and glazes over like all the rest, and finally ends up as a... purple foxfolk. Sure. She can't even swear that there aren't normally purple foxfolk, it just looks weird to her personally.

"Thank you!" says Valefar ecstatically as soon as they see their new purple hands and touch their new foxy face.

"Help the others clear out the debris," she says, because she's uncomfortable asking them to worship at her shrine, and then she heads over to the temple to figure out what to do with these stones still weighing down her crown.

The temple does turn out to be the right place to look. The crown leads her up the steps to stand at the altar, and then...

It's hard to describe what happens, exactly. There's a sense of... fitting pieces together, like assembling one of those wooden puzzle blocks where all the funny little bits come together into a cube. Except it's more like there could be a lot of different shapes, and the crown is sorting through them and picking one. The whole process is fairly dizzying, and at the end of it she doesn't really feel like she understood or contributed to much of it, but also the crown is bouncing eagerly on her head and impressing upon her the knowledge that they could call all their followers in to dance around a bonfire together and it would be delicious.

She's honestly a little afraid of what that deliciousness might mean. But her crown is pretty insistent, and it's hard to say no to something that is all at once a part of her and her greatest benefactor.

If doing the bonfire ritual turns out to be a terrible idea, she can always decide not to do it again.

She lets the crown have its way.

Her followers pile into the temple carrying sticks and twigs to build a bonfire right there in the middle of the room, and the crown fills in what they didn't bring with—something extracted from the bones in its mysterious pocket.

It's a rush, there's no denying that. The wild whooping dance of all these worshipful creatures excites her crown to no end, and she gets swept up in the feeling, floating exultantly over the crowd in the flame's flickering light.

Eventually the light fades, the bonfire crumbles down to ash and dust, and everyone leaves. The Lamb sits on the floor and tries to catch her breath, except it's not her breath that needs catching, it's her... brain. Something. She just needs to sit.

Ratau pops helpfully out of the floor.

whyyyy

"Indoctrinating followers is well and good, but there is so much more you can take from them," he says with undue excitement.

With some effort, she keeps her mouth shut.

"Give them gifts, attend to their requests, and perform blessings for them, and you will increase their loyalty to you. Once they are totally loyal, they will give you everything they own."

The crown is loving this. The Lamb feels queasy.

"Your crown will show you the way." His eye pops dramatically. "The more loyal Followers you have, the stronger you'll become."

Her crown is nearly vibrating with excitement at the thought of all those delicious, delicious followers pledging their undying service or something like that. It's deeply uncomfortable and she just wants to go home but she can't go home because the One Who Waits will fucking eat her soul or something if she abandons this racket.

"Fine," she says, swallowing her discomfort. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Now, come with me," he says. "I have much to teach you, but I am old and grow weary. I will show you the way to my home, and you can visit me there to learn how to harness the true POWER," eyepop, "of the Red Crown."

Somewhat reluctantly, she follows him out of the temple and up the steps to the big stone circle where she returns after all her expeditions.

He steps up into the middle of the elaborate stonework, and does something that doesn't look quite the same as his usual burrowing trick.

(Since his usual burrowing trick passes harmlessly through the wooden floor of the temple, she's not at all sure it isn't fundamentally the same thing. Is he even a molefolk? She assumed so, but it can be hard to tell.)

She steps up after him and tries to tell her crown to follow wherever he went. The red light enfolds her, and off she goes.

Ratau awaits her in a cozy little clearing, with a neat row of berry bushes, a hut with a rounded roof, and a candlelit shrine that looks like a miniature temple. He gestures invitingly to the bushes.

She picks a few berries and has her crown pocket them, then lets it slurp up all the Devotion out of the shrine.

"I must thank you," says Ratau. "By relieving me of my duties you have granted me what I desire most: peace."

She does her best to stifle her sudden surge of envy. What she wouldn't give to be able to live in a cozy little cottage in a cozy little clearing and grow berries.

"But before I can retire to pass my days playing Knucklebones, I have one last lesson to offer."

He leads her to the next clearing over, where he's set up a ring of effigies that look vaguely like leaf monsters and vaguely like cultists and very much like targets.

"Your Crown has the power... of curses," he says with a dramatic eyepop. "Try focusing your wrath on these bundles of leaves."

As usual, she has no idea what she's doing, but as usual her crown is eager to help. She tries focusing, and the crown nudges her thoughts into a slightly different shape, and she focuses again and WHAM. The target she was looking at is obliterated by a bolt of red-black rage.

"Wow," she says, impressed.

"The power of your curses depends on your Fervour," Ratau explains. "The heat of battle, the glory of victory. If you expend many curses fruitlessly, it will run dry; as you fight and kill, it will replenish."

She nods slowly, already thinking of how this will expand her tactical repertoire.

"That is all, then." He sighs heavily, then smiles. "Visit me in my cottage if you would like to play a game of Knucklebones."

"Wait—" He has already sunk into the ground.

She sighs and trudges back over to the cottage, running a hand along the doorframe for a moment before she steps inside.

"Ah, you have discovered my humble cottage," he says contentedly. "Be careful you don't make the same mistakes I did, or you will end up in a place just like this." There's not much heart in the warning, though; he sounds almost proud. "Now, perhaps a game of Knucklebones?"

"Actually..."

She hesitates, scuffing her feet on the wooden floor for a moment.

"...did you build this place yourself? It's just—I couldn't help admiring the way you've got the thatching blending with the grass so it looks like a little hill—"

"Oh?" he says, surprised. "But with your crown's Divine Inspiration, you will be able to build so much better than a mere mortal like me ever could."

"I've spent my whole life building with my own two hands, I don't want to stop now!"

He smiles, touched. "Well then. Let me show you how I built these walls..."

A lot of the techniques are similar to ones she already knew or figured out for herself, but some of the details are different, and having a fresh perspective on things helps her understand better why this or that aspect of construction works the way it does, or how to do something more reliably than she's been able to before. And the thatching trick is genuinely pretty neat. The doorframe, too, once she works up the courage to ask about it.

She heads home in a better mood than she's had since all this began, and only looks up after a few hours of hammering together foundations for the dormitory to realize that she's thinking of it as home. Wow. Weird.

Her congregation is very excited to help her put together a place to sleep. By the time night falls on their little encampment, there's not much in the way of beds but they do have a partial roof to keep the weather off, and piles of leaves and grass to soften the hard ground.

At which point the Lamb discovers that sleeping is not a thing she does anymore.

She spends a little while lying outside the half-finished dormitory, hands tucked behind her head, staring up at the distant stars.

Then she sighs and gets up and heads out to have another go at the Darkwood.

Only a few clearings into the latest maze, when she's barely had time to cut some grass and certainly hasn't had time to fight anything, the world darkens and three Bishops emerge from black puddles on the ground.

"So it is true," rumbles the one on the left, whose crown glares with a yellow triangle. "The Red Crown sits on the brow of another."

"But how?" warbles the one on the right, whose pointed head bears a pointed crown with a round blue eye. "We did everything we could to—"

"It matters not. We need not bother Shamura with this. Deal with it, brother."

"As you command, my sister," says Leshy, standing between the others.

The three of them sink into the ground, and for a long moment she's frozen, even after her crown stops gibbering and releases her. Only the sight of a cultist advancing with knife raised snaps her out of it.

What do you know, that curse thing really does come in tactically handy.

She kills the cultists. She cuts the grass. She digs up potatoes and picks berries wherever she finds them.

Clauneck is as cryptic a big red triangle as ever.

Some of the clearings have traps in them now that put up big angry spikes when stepped on, so that's new.

Great! Wonderful! What fun! After her first near miss she learns to recognize the circles on the ground and stay the fuck off of them.

She almost misses the tarot card tucked between the branches of a tree at the edge of a clearing, but the white paper catches her eye and she goes over and tugs it free.

The picture on its face is of a telescope, which she has just enough time to notice and absorb before her crown pockets the card and... eats it, somehow. She gets the sense that her crown is thinking hard about something, and then it settles into place and gives her a sort of mental tug in a specific direction. If she goes that way, there will be wood to finish her buildings with!

"So that card lets you... see farther?" she guesses.

Hesitant agreement. It's not the full picture but it'll do as a summary.

"Huh. I was wondering what those things even did. Sure, let's grab some wood. Let me know if you see anything else useful, okay?"

Cheerful agreement. The crown bounces slightly on her brow as she proceeds.

The wood comes in the form of numerous tidy stacks of lumber plus a mysterious statue. It takes her a second to understand that the blocky, roughly-carved shape depicts a cultist in prayer. She scowls and chops it down with her crown-axe, and her crown happily pockets the debris. With that and a few small, easily-cut trees from the edges of the clearing, she moves on.

Not long afterward, her crown directs her down a specific path with a wordless promise of power and safety.

An enormous catfolk with a red plaid coat and an improbably fancy hat presides over a small assortment of things.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all ye need know of your heart."

"...hi?"

"That we lived three summer days, I could fill my heart with such delight, more than fifty common years..."

Her crown is leaning eagerly toward a small chunk of stone; she allows it to reach out and pocket the thing, and instantly knows that it's one of those Commandment Stone fragments she's supposed to be picking up for doctrinal purposes.

The shopkeeper(?) reaches out and sweeps most of the rest of the pile away. "Oh but a thing of beauty is a joy forever!" he purrs.

The only thing left in front of him is a tarot card. "Thirty gold," he says when he sees her looking at it.

That's a ridiculous price, but she consults her crown anyway. How many of those coins does she have on her...?

"Bugger, I can't afford it," she sighs.

The shopkeeper shrugs.

Next her crown directs her to a clearing with a sacrifical ritual ongoing, like the one she rescued... what's their name... Meron from, way back at the start of all this.

"The worm, it is hungry," a robed cultist intones, waving their knife over a bound horsefolk. "It feeds. It partakes of our flesh. But that is the price for safety. For that, we gladly give it all we have."

Well, that makes the Lamb somewhat less comfortable about murdering all these people.

She consoles herself with the evident knowledge that they're the ones trying to murder that terrified captive. She is against the sacrifice of helpless, unwilling creatures. That seems like a solid principle to wage a one-lamb war over.

They fall beneath her blade like so many before them, and her crown shatters the altar and pockets the weeping stranger.

The more she uses her new curse, the more there's a sense from her crown of flexing muscles long disused.

After a while, it gets her attention in the aftermath of a battle, and she pauses to listen. Something about... changing the form of her curse, from a bolt that flies straight through the air to... a line drawn across the ground that then erupts with violent power? Sure, she'll try that out if the crown thinks it's a good idea.

Making the ground erupt with violent power turns out to be... concerningly fun. She has a great time obliterating burrowing leaf-monsters for a bit, until she arrives at a familiar-looking stone-floored clearing and sees another of the enormous creatures waiting for her there.

This one has four huge red eyes set around a fanged maw, with wooden horns reaching out all around like the petals of a flower. The maw vomits burning green orbs and she decides she would not like to find out what happens when they touch her.

With the help of her new curse, though, this one goes down even faster than the other two.

Reduced to the size and approximate shape of a person, the creature reaches out to her with trembling hands and a pleading look. "Please, spare me..."

She sighs, and lets the crown pocket them. One more for the collection.

And back at home—

Nope! It's Chained God Surprise!

augh she HATES Chained God Surprise

"Do not make the mistake of becoming the servant of your Followers," says the grinning apparition from behind its threadbare veil. "They are for you to use to your advantage!"

Well, it's always nice to know how people think of you. She feels like she doesn't dare even finish thinking that thought.

"Their faith is a resource; spend it as you would gold. For you can always regain their trust with a well placed gesture of kindness."

The One Who Waits grins a wide, toothy grin as it dispenses this wisdom.

"Let it empower you, let it give you license to do unspeakable things. Bend them to your will."

Ooh, the crown loves bending followers to its will~! It vibrates excitedly atop her head, while she stands uncomfortably beneath it.

"I grant you the power to read their feeble little minds."

Some sort of energy flows from the chained figure to the crown.

The crown laps it up eagerly, nearly bubbling with excitement. It's honestly adorable, even though it's also deeply concerning.

Then it finally takes her home properly, and she trudges down the steps and flops into the grass next to her temple, feeling exhausted and terrified and generally overwhelmed.

Her crown doesn't understand at first, and she's not sure she wants to explain. But it keeps pestering her, and after what feels like an hour of enduring its concerned prodding, she sighs and rolls over and buries her face in her hands so she won't accidentally say any of this aloud.

Can anyone other than you read my mind? she asks.

An immediate flood of reassurance. Of course not!! The crown is hers now, and she its bearer; their bond is as close and tight as a soul's bond to its body. Closer, even. No one could ever come between them.

Really? But you used to belong to—that one—and they can do things like give you that power...

It does still hold some fondness for its former bearer, of course. But that was then, and this is now. She doesn't have to be afraid. Her crown will keep her safe beneath it. Also, reading minds is really fun!! She should try it!!

...they're all asleep, she points out. I don't want to go rummaging around in the dormitory and wake everybody up, they'll be cranky.

Oh but couldn't she unpocket those new followers?

That, she's forced to admit, is actually probably a good idea. Unless... Are they awake in there right now?

The crown concedes that they are not really exactly conscious, and will in fact pop out well-rested regardless of when she releases them, accounting for the inherent stress of the transit method.

Then I think I'd better let them out first thing in the morning instead, so they don't wake everybody else up going to bed, or end up staying up all night and getting cranky about that.

The crown reluctantly admits that this is probably for the best, even though it really, really wants to show off her new mindreading power.

Luckily the sky is already beginning to brighten in anticipation of morning. She spends the meantime attempting to start a garden in a newly cleared corner of the encampment, as far away from her sleeping followers as possible.

By dawn's early light, the horsefolk she rescued introduces himself as Hano, and the defeated creature as Barbatos. Barbatos gratefully accepts a transformation into, for some reason, a vibrantly teal catfolk.

Do catfolk normally come in vibrantly teal??? Whatever. Probably best not to question it.

With a quiet sigh, she allows the crown to reach out and touch Barbatos's mind as soon as they settle back to the ground. Her new follower's thoughts unfold into her awareness like a blossoming flower, and, okay, she can see her crown's point, there's something to that. There's something to the fact that she can just see the lingering shadows of anxiety and uncertainty melting away into an untroubled faith—setting aside for the moment how fucking creepy that is—and see, too, the genuine gratitude for new hands and new fur and not having the entire top of one's head be a big ugly mouth. It's obvious how this makes her followers easier to manipulate... but it also makes them easier to sympathize with.

Okay, she tells her crown, we can read everybody's minds if you want.

Yaaaay~! It bounces up and down like an excited child. She can't help smiling as she makes the rounds, letting the crown touch everyone's minds. This is also how she finds out what Ratau meant about performing blessings for them: a few moments of her personal attention, with her crown quietly extending its presence, and her dazzled followers increase not only their feelings of personal loyalty for her but also some kind of underlying resonance, a low note that only her crown can hear, and which her crown is very, very excited about.

Overall it's a peaceful morning. She finishes transplanting the scattered berry bushes into neat rows that mimic what she saw at Ratau's cottage, and coaxes her crown to help her transmute some spare stone into a nice big clay pot she can make stew in, and helps Pajul finish cutting down one of the more stubborn trees, and gets four walls and a door onto the dormitory, and teaches Meron and Amdusias how to lay thatch so they can help her finish the roof. (It's a good thing she can read everyone's minds or she would be starting to forget all their names at this point. She's never needed to keep this many names straight before in her life.)

Around noon, she calls a halt to all the work so she can portion out the stew. Everyone is thrilled about it—genuinely thrilled, too, like they've never met someone who can cook before in their lives. It's weird. She tries to ask if anyone wants to learn the extremely simple recipe but it turns out they're all nervous about the fire, half out of the sensible primal fear that any reasonable person has for that which burns, half out of... she tries not to physically squint as she examines their thoughts... some kind of deep intuition that a flame is a sacred thing they are not worthy to use.

Hey crown, she asks. If we're going around declaring doctrines anyway, can I come up with one about how cooking is great and everybody should get to do it?

It isn't sure, but it doesn't think so. Oh, but speaking of declaring doctrines! She should give another sermon after lunch, and then maybe #$%&$% and perhaps if they're lucky ^^&*#$%#@...

I'm not sure I caught all that, but if you want to do a sermon, sure, I don't see why not.

On the way to the temple she stops by the shrine to pick up its collected Devotion, and her crown changes its mind. She's seized by inspiration and pours out materials in a haze of power, and when she comes back to herself, the crude stick-and-twig effigy has been replaced by a taller, more finely sculpted statue. Of herself. Made of stone. There's a great big stone statue of herself in the middle of this clearing and it's leaking black fluid from the eyes.

Okay. Fine. Anyway. What was that all about, exactly?

Her crown explains that a better statue (with better runestones—see, it made the runestones better too, carved them a little sharper, pressed them more firmly into the ground) can hold more Devotion and support a broader range of Inspirations. And because ((*&%$@, the Shrine being better also improves the Temple—look at her followers decorating the door with flowering vines, they can sense its new power. Now she can give an even better Sermon there!!

...the Lamb takes a moment to reflect on how utterly bizarre her life has gotten. Then she heads into the Temple to preach to her flock.

This time she's more aware of herself and her followers during the process. This awareness is... not a comfort. She is, no two ways about it, reaching into their minds to mold them to her will—or more accurately, her crown is doing that through her. She is not sure she wants to be doing this, but it's what she's doing, and she'd better learn to like it because the One Below will probably murder her if she stops.

After the sermon, she senses that faint resonance through her crown again, and how in the wake of her, let's face it, mind control, everyone is resonating just a little louder. Her crown is so excited about this. She's having a little trouble mustering a positive reaction to that at the moment, though.

Her crown thinks for a bit... and then unpockets something into her hand. She has to stare at the pretty beaded necklace for several seconds before she remembers picking it up, at some point during one of her Darkwood jaunts.

The crown nudges her through the departing crowd of followers and touches their minds one by one until it finds Valefar, the second defeated creature. It suggests that she give them the necklace.

...why? she asks, feeling lost and confused and more than a little wary.

Followers like being given things, and maybe making her followers happy will cheer her up! Also, if she gives this one a present now, something really good and important might happen!

Okay. Fine. She clears her throat awkwardly and then just sort of hands Valefar the necklace.

Valefar clasps it ecstatically. Their mind bubbles with excitement and happiness. Their loyalty deepens. Their resonance peaks.

Their eyes glow with an unearthly light.

What.

Her crown, vibrating with anticipation, leans forward and connects with Valefar. It's less of a one-way channel like when the crown drinks Devotion out of shrines, and more like an exchange of energy in which each participant strengthens the other. Valefar staggers back, dazed and blinking, and the crown reads in their thoughts how blessed they feel, and feels in their soul how it was nourished by this contact. Meanwhile the crown has collected its own reward: the same stuff that's contained in Commandment Stone fragments, the power that allows a crown to declare Doctrines. They should have enough now to make another one!

...that's... acceptable. Maybe. She's honestly still pretty concerned.

But okay, she'll head back into the temple to do another Doctrine assembly.

This time, again, her bond with her crown is deeper and it can show her more clearly what her options are. The selection is pretty hazy, but there's one possibility she latches onto as it spins by.

I can teach my followers that there's an afterlife they should be happy about? But will that actually grant them one, or will I just be lying to them about what they can expect after death? I don't know what happens to dead people normally but I've never imagined it's anything good.

The crown pokes uncertainly through her thoughts, trying to understand the distinction she's asking after, before finally replying. No, telling her followers to believe in an afterlife doesn't grant them one. If she wants to affect what happens to her followers after death, she must do it with an act of her power—either sacrificing them to become part of her crown, or ascending them to grant their spirits peace and comfort. Ascension would be an easy Doctrine to declare from here, if she wanted! They just have to **$#%) and then lean in this direction and loop that through here and... the crown pauses, waiting politely for her to give the go-ahead before it finalizes the decision.

Yes. Yes, if she can grant her followers peace and comfort after death, she would love to be able to do that.

The Doctrine goes through. Her assembled followers cheer and praise her generosity.

She mostly hopes it's never going to come up.

There's more gardening to be done in the afternoon, and more blessings to give out, and more Devotion to collect. Her crown excitedly Inspires her with the knowledge of how to use coins and wood or coins and stone to generate much more of whichever resource than you started with, but she doesn't have enough coin on hand to actually build such a thing.

After enough blessings, several more of her followers glow with that unearthly light, and she lets her crown pull power from them and grant them strength in exchange. It's enough, apparently, to declare another Doctrine.

The previous one went well enough that she feels pretty okay about doing another. Into the Temple she goes.

Her crown explains to her amid the extransensory upheaval of Doctrine assembly that if she wants to not lie to her followers about the afterlife, she can instead impress upon them that to be sacrificed to her glory is a worthy cause.

I don't want to do that either!

She must eventually pick one or the other, or be forever held back from the fullness of her doctrinal might. It's because of the &$#*() and the !!)@#( and the way the #$@$ lines up just so; at each level of each branch of the edifice of doctrine, a balance can be tipped to one side or another. When she chose Ascension she was giving up on declaring a right to murder her followers at whim; in retrospect, her crown probably should have told her that, but it was excited to be able to offer her the Ascension ritual and suspected she wouldn't feel like she was missing much.

...you're right about that, she admits, shivering slightly. Ugh, just the thought of getting up there and shoving 'I get to kill you whenever I want' into everyone's heads... no. Absolutely not.

(Her crown is so pleased that it guessed right!)

But... this question of Afterlife or Sacrifice... what am I giving up, if I just never make a choice there?

Among other things, the power to bring back the dead!

—fucking EXCUSE ME?! —fine, yes, all right, I'll take Sacrifice if it'll lead me down the road to resurrection. That's worth it. I'm not sure what else could be worth that, but resurrection is.

The loop is closed, the decision set, the Doctrine declared. Her crown is gleeful.

Her followers are concerningly excited about their new belief, and the Lamb feels like she needs a nap, except she can't fucking sleep anymore. Instead she digs grumpily in the garden until night falls and she decides to head back out into the Darkwood.

Leshy greets her almost as soon as she comes through the gate.

"Finally... let us end this. I'll be awaiting you in my temple... come! Witness true power."

She hates the sensation of being spoken to by Bishops so much. Ugh.

Well, as ominous as that was, at least maybe it'll mean she gets to fight Leshy soon. And hopefully kill him. Though at this point... no, she's not going to finish that thought. Fuck off, thought. You're a stupid thought. She is going to kick Leshy's enormous leafy ass and rip the crown from his head and fucking eat it or something, and that's that.

With renewed determination, she sets out into the woods.

Cultists, leaf monsters, grass, bones, the occasional rock.

Another cryptic encounter with Clauneck, but this time one of the cards is familiar: the telescope she found in the woods earlier.

She hesitates, but then picks the other one, with a picture of a spider. Her crown being able to give her directions is useful, but the more different ones of these things she tries, the more she'll be able to figure out about what they all do.

A few clearings later, Leshy makes another appearance.

"Your persistence is beginning to ANNOY me, little Lamb."

Didn't he explicitly taunt her less than an hour ago to come to his temple and fight him??

...is he scared...?

"You may think yourself clever. You may think yourself righteous in your service to HIM. But you should not be so trusting of the Chained One."

In the privacy of her own thoughts, with her crown too busy howling indecipherably to talk to her, the Lamb acknowledges that she has never trusted the Chained One any farther than she could hypothetically throw it with its chains still hooked firmly to the ground. She'd be doing something else, if she had the option. She doesn't.

On the other hand, this leafy motherfucker ordered her to be dragged out of the woods and murdered over some stupid prophecy or something, and she is entirely at peace with herself regarding her desire to separate his head from his body about it.

"Oh, well. It's too late for talk. One such as you deserves no absolution. This will not end well for you."

Leshy sinks into the ground, and several cultists appear in his wake.

She's quicker on the draw this time; one Bishop is a lot easier to take than three. Is she going to have to fight him with her crown totally incapacitated? She fucking hopes not, but she will if she has to. Maybe she should keep an eye out on the way for particularly sharp sticks.

The next clearing has some pretty flowers which her crown is happy to pocket. The one after that has not only flowers but berries, which she's very glad to see since she's much less sure of her food supplies for all those followers than she would like.

The clearing after that has a pair of pedestals, one holding a figure of a heart half painted teal, the other holding a figure of a horrible gribbly grey heart covered in eyes. She picks the teal one, and tries to pay attention to what it's like. Sort of... fresh, energizing? Is this related to the tarot cards with similar motifs? She rather suspects it is. After cutting the grass around them, she moves on.

Another of those Leshy statues, full of tasty Devotion for her crown to drink. Another encounter with Clauneck, and a choice between two heart cards, the awful one and one that's full and red and admittedly does have eyes painted on it but they look like a weird stylization choice instead of like malignant growths.

"All is as it should be, as it ever was, as it always will be."

"I'm not totally sure you can hear me when I speak," she remarks, and heads out.

Bats, grass, leaf monsters, bones...

Pond!

She has so many questions.

How is his face like that? Why, with a face like that, is he out here fishing? Where did he come from??

"Hey kiddo, keep your eyes off my fishies!" he burbles. "There ain't enough for the both of us. The best fishing can be found at Pilgrim's Passage."

"...I... have no idea where that is."

"Really? Let me show you..."

He extracts a crumpled map from his pocket and tries to point out a specific bit of coast.

She's not sure she's ever actually seen a map of these lands before and certainly couldn't place any landmarks she knows about on it, but when her crown indicates that it has a fix on the location, she nods.

"See? Now get out of here!" says the Fish-erman.

Are fishfolk even real?? She's never met one before.

No, okay, he said to go, she's going.

After some more nice, uncomplicated murder, she fetches up at a glowing red archway, and steps through it.

First there's a Leshy statue - "don't mind if I do," she says, smashing it to bits with her sword and letting her crown suck out the Devotion within.

Then there's a few more clearings. More than she expected, honestly; that red arch looked like it was going to be it, and instead it seems she's wound up at one end of a long trail, not even entirely sure whether Leshy can be found at the other. Her crown seems confident, though, and it's not like she knows how to go back except by going forward, so forward she goes.

Another one of those incredibly weird birdfolk is waiting for her in a little stone-floored hut not long after that.

"Step forward," he trills, "from the swirling mists of chaos that surround. Allow me to regard you wholly."

The swirling mists of fucking what, now?

Wary, she shuffles another step or two into the little room.

"Hmm," says the stranger. "You carry the weight of ageless centuries upon such diminutive shoulders."

?????

"Yet, what is this? It seems your stature is deceiving. A weapon is naught without the hand that wields. To fell enemies, to defend honour... to break chains."

Well that sure sounded significant in a way she's not sure she likes.

"Let your Crown take the form of one of these works of iron, forged in everlasting fire."

He gestures to a set of three weapons set out before him: an axe, a twisted dagger, and a very weird-looking sword.

Oh!! Oh yes!! Excited crown.

"May you wield them well, Promised Liberator."

She lets her crown choose between the three, and after some dithering it settles on the dagger, first absorbing it and then swirling into her hand as a perfect replica of its wicked-looking curves.

This isn't permanent, right?

It assures her that it is not. Switching weaponforms takes a moment's peace and concentration, and is best done where one is not likely to be interrupted, but besides those constraints it's a trivial act. From now on they can choose freely between sword and dagger.

With the choice made, the vendor(?) sweeps his other wares(?) away.

"Forged in eternal flame, sharpened on the stone wet with blood. They seek destruction as their nature demands. Can the same be said of yourself?"

And isn't that an uncomfortable fucking question.

"You have your Followers, and I my weapons," the stranger says serenely. "One must find comfort and power where they can."

How about she LEAVES and DOESN'T THINK ABOUT THIS. How about that.

It's pretty obvious, when she comes to the big red door covered in eyes, what it's doing there and what's on the other side.

She was hoping for a chance to try out her new dagger before this point, but alas.

She takes a deep breath, and steps through.

Yes. This is it.

There's a long stone-paved corridor first, which she tries not to let psych her out too much with its resemblance to other long stone-paved corridors she has walked toward unpleasant encounters with Bishops.

The decor is very menacing, all spikes and spears and bleeding skulls.

Leshy is waiting amid a circle of devoted worshippers. There must be a dozen of them.

His presence is intense but not overwhelming; the Red Crown can still function here.

"I grow tired of you, little Lamb," he says. "Time to put an end to this FRIVOLOUS MASQUERADE!"

Of his followers, the inner ring—five robed figures, each stood at one point of a complex symmetric figure in the floor—all glow red about the eyes. Torrents of blood, or something like blood, depart their bodies and home in on Leshy, who looks exultant insofar as it is possible for a bandaged leaf orb with no limbs or facial features to look exultant. He twitches, then writhes, then his twiglike horn-things grow into full leafy branches, and he erupts out of his robe and his body into the absolutely gigantic form of a leafy worm the size of several entire fucking houses. The outer ring of followers is casually obliterated in the course of the transformation.

Whatever was once beneath his bandages, his face now consists of one gaping toothy gullet big enough to swallow the Lamb whole with room for six more, and four glaring red eyes, two on either side. The diamond-eyed crown still perches comically atop the whole business.

He lets out an utterly unearthly screech.

FUCK OKAY IT'S TIME TO FIGHT THAT

She fights that.

It's by far the most harrowing battle she's ever faced, despite the crown's new dagger form being lightning-fast in her hands. Leshy's new head is big enough to hollow out and use as a room to sleep in, and despite the urgency of the situation she is still continually boggled and alarmed by this. Also, its speed aside, the dagger really has less reach than she'd prefer for fighting such an enormous opponent, and she has to spend waaaaay more time than she's comfortable with getting really, really up close and personal with the enormous monster's leafy trunk.

But in the end she prevails. The monster goes down, ravaged by her curses, cut and cut and cut and cut again by her tireless blade.

She stands over the wreckage of his body, exhausted and triumphant.

—hang on, is something twitching in there?

She leans in for a closer look, and her crown happily pockets the toothy, veiny, unpleasantly pulsing heart buried deep in the mess. Delicious!

...delicious???

Oh yes! It will be so tasty! They should head home right away so the crown can devour it properly at the altar in the temple.

...sure. Fine. Okay. Home.

The enormous door at the back of the chamber, chained shut six different ways, bursts apart at the slightest brush of her crown's power. She steps through it and lets her crown sweep her away to—please let it not be Chained God Surprise—

"Leshy fell before you like a grain of sand before a tidal wave," it says, waving its arms in celebration.

Okay, now they can go home.

A circle of delighted followers awaits her at home, standing around the big stone circle where she arrives. They smile and dance happily in celebration of her victory.

This is not, actually, the last thing she wanted—it's no Chained God Surprise—but she has an incredibly hard time keeping a smile on her face and vaguely appropriate words in her mouth long enough to escape into the Temple, where she can wedge the door shut with an unpocketed rock and lie down on the floor and cover her eyes and tremble uncontrollably.

Fuck this!!!!!! Fuck her life! Fuck the One Below and fuck all three remaining Bishops! Fuck being someone who people worship and FUCK standing on a stone circle ringed by devoted cultists who it's APPARENTLY possible to DEVOUR ON THE SPOT for UNIMAGINABLE POWER!!!! Fuck!!!!!!!!!

Okay. Okay. Okay. She needs to stop doing this. She is being constantly watched. She cannot have breakdowns on a daily basis or her loyalty will begin to be questioned and nothing good will come of that. Fuck. Okay. Get up, little Lamb, and go tend to your flock.

She takes a deep breath, drags herself up off the floor, repockets the doorstop, and trudges up to the altar to see about devouring that heart.

Her crown is trying very hard to respect her disturbed state and not bounce excitedly, but, also, is very excited about devouring that heart.

The moment the heart is unpocketed onto the altar, there's a sense of potential pulling in a number of different directions, and in the very next moment her crown has pounced on the one it likes best. There is a sense of...

Why is the grey gribbly heart covered in eyes here?? she demands, incredulous with an edge of hysteria.

Her crown tries to explain—see, she keeps seeing that symbol out in the world and being afraid of it. But actually it's really useful and nothing to be afraid of at all! And now it will be with them always, and she can see for herself how much it helps!

The Lamb takes a deep breath, and then another. I know you were just trying to help, she says, and I appreciate that. Her crown can read her mind; she amends after a moment to, At least I'm trying to appreciate that. But next time you have a great idea for how to reassure me about something by shoving something I'm scared of directly into my soul? EXPLAIN. FIRST.

...yes, okay, in retrospect the crown can see where it went wrong here. It is sorry. Would she like a nice sermon to cheer her up? ...she doesn't like sermons. Maybe she can go dig in the garden? Or build something! They could build something together!!

...despite herself, she smiles slightly.

Yes, okay, they can go build something together. Do they have the coin to put together those stacks of wood and stone? They do! Excellent.

A few hours later, when as far as she can tell her heart is not covered in eyes, and she's built the stacks of wood and stone and then assigned people to help organize them and pulled enough Devotion from the shrine that her crown managed to Inspire her with a way to turn wood and gold into a sort of half-assed leafy bedroll (which she's pretty sure is its idea of another apology gift), and she's gone through the dormitory and made one of those for every follower plus some extras, she finally feels settled enough to preach another sermon. Her crown insists on going around to give everyone blessings first, which she doesn't see much point in until after the sermon when it feels like half the crowd is glowing. Actually only three people are glowing. Is that half the crowd? How big is her crowd? She'd rather not make them hold still to be counted.

Anyway.

Three glowing followers is enough to add up to another Doctrine, apparently, and she's downright eager as she trots back up the steps. Her crown weaves its mysterious bits of something-or-other together, and presents her with a result that she gleefully leans into: Resurrection, the power to raise the dead. At least if they're her own followers. Dead strangers fall under somebody else's purview.

This time, when her followers celebrate, she really, truly feels like celebrating with them.

The sun is sinking. Her crown suggests she should probably unlock the next gate before her followers go to bed, since she doesn't like waking them up in the middle of the night, and she might want to go hunting in the next bishop's realm sometime tonight. She reluctantly agrees, and asks her followers to assemble by the gates.

There's the clearing, with its statue of her crown bleeding black ichor from its open eye. There's the four gates each with a crown depicted on it—not hers; she's well-versed enough in all the different crowns now to recognize the triangle and the circle, and the crescent eye must be the final bishop who has never accosted her.

Above Leshy's gate, what was once an emblem of his diamond-eyed crown is now a cracked and broken circle.

And there is a fifth gate, up a set of steps, which she has never paid attention to before because she's only ever come here on a single-minded mission to get through that green door. That fifth gate is tethered by four massive stone chains that remind her uncomfortably of the One Below's fog-smothered dwelling place. Except that one of those four chains, now, has crumbled away leaving only a dangling fragment.

Well. She approaches the triangle-eyed door, since it's nearest. Does she have enough faith to open it...?

Yes. Yes she does.

Her gathered followers exult in the chance to contribute their streams of mysterious red energy to this project.

Oh fuck it looks exactly like when Leshy ate his own followers to ascend into an enormous monstrosity.

Definitely not hyperventilating because that would be inconvenient, the Lamb lets the crown conduct the energy through its statue and through her to open the door that leads to the next bishop's lands.

By the time it's over, night has fallen, and she's wishing more desperately than ever that sleep was still a thing she could do. She attempts to content herself with the knowledge that her followers are all sleeping in beds more bed-like than piles of leaves, and it helps, but it doesn't help enough.

The door with the triangle-eyed crown stands open, but she doesn't want to step through it.

So, on a whim, she stands on the big stone circle and tells her crown to take her to that place the fish(er)man spoke of.

It's a quiet little place, with a sandy shore and a scattering of berry bushes clustered where the grass gives way to the sand. Off to one side there's a lighthouse with no light on top; straight ahead there's a little pier.

The fishfolk(?) is standing near the pier, opposite the lighthouse, casting a line into the water.

She snags a few berries from the bushes on general principle, then heads down to the water to talk to the fish(er)man, not really out of any desire to speak to him, more because it's an acceptable way to avoid doing anything else.

"Well, look what the tide dragged in."

Great, he's being rude again.

"What're you just standing there for? Think I'm gonna fish for you? I'm not one of your mindless acolytes!"

...

Crown, can you be a fishing rod?

Absolutely.

Great, she's fishing now. Never mind that she's never used such a fancy fishing rod before in her life. The basic principle should be the same, right?

Whatever creature first bites her bait is a real fighter. She nearly loses it several times before she finally manages to drag it squiggling onto the shore.

"Hm," he sniffs, glancing over at her. "Not so useless after all."

She is holding an octopus. It's a very unhappy octopus. Why is this her life.

"Listen, perhaps we could help one another. I happen to have caught some extremely valuable treasures in my time." He leans in conspiratorially. The mouth on top of his head opens and closes without apparent relation to the sounds of his speech. "Things that a fish like me—er, I mean a fisherMAN like me—has no use for. But to you... well. You look like you like valuable things!"

Does she??

"Below these waves lurk some of the hardest to catch beasts that ever lived, and I've been trying for years. If you can snag 'em, these treasures are yours. Catch me a Crab, a Lobster, an Octopus, and a Squid."

She is at this very moment struggling to contain an Octopus, and he can't possibly have failed to notice, but she can't actually figure out how to hand the damn thing over so after a few seconds of fruitless wrestling she has her crown pocket it. It's alarming and mildly offensive how it's possible to cram so much wiggle into such a small creature.

"Take this," he says, indifferent to her struggles. "As a gesture of good faith between two non-fish friends."

And he hands her a tarot card with a picture of a dead-looking one-eyed fish on it, eerily reminiscent of his own silhouette.

Her crown absorbs it, but either can't or won't tell her what it does.

"...th...anks...?" she says, and after a moment, when he seems to have gone back to his fishing and be totally ignoring her now, she shrugs and trots over to check out the lighthouse.

An elderly axolotl presides over a congregation of robed figures in a room filled with flickering candles.

They look enough like Old Faith cultists in general silhouette that she almost starts stabbing before she has time to think about it, but after a very tense moment she decides against murder.

"WHAAA! Who dares enter our sacred house of light?!" wails the leader, but, very importantly, absolutely no actual violence ensues.

"...I can go?" she says tentatively.

The leader sighs heavily and shakes his head. "Apologies...it's just that the lighthouse is getting dimmer no matter how hard we worship, and the ships keep sinking on the rocks. No ships means no new pilgrims to walk the sacred path!" The axolotl begins trembling violently. "If only our leader was here - she would know what to do! We have not seen her since she went for a walk on the pier late one night."

"That, uh, doesn't sound good," ventures the Lamb.

"We begged her not to go, we all know of the 'Teeth in the Darkness'. But she would not listen. Now we have no choice but to pray until the lighthouse is lit once more! ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY LIGHT!"

The followers bow repeatedly toward the scattered candles.

...she's just... she's just gonna go. These people clearly have a problem but it is not her problem and she's really not sure she wants to load it onto her plate when her plate is already full of lightly mind-controlled worshippers who refuse to cook their own meals for cultural reasons. Speaking of which, (she sighs) she'd better get back and put on another pot of stew for everybody.

With tomorrow's breakfast safely bubbling away, she spends the rest of the night expanding her garden, resolutely ignoring the knowledge that the second gate is open and waiting for her. It is going to be such a good garden with so many berries and potatoes and whatever other shit she can find, and her followers will not starve even though they're all useless louts—no, stop that, don't think of them as useless louts, if you resent people under your power you're going to end up fucking them over for your own convenience and then you'll be no better than the Bishops.

Bright and early the next morning, a follower approaches her, wringing their hands nervously.

She's so curious what's going on, but despite her crown vibrating with the urge to find out directly, she decides she'll let them explain in their own words. It feels less weird that way.

"Glorious Leader, I have a craving..."

They lean in and lower their voice.

"I need to eat a meal made from a Follower!"

She's almost afraid to read their mind, but okay, let's hear it.

This is Hutrear, the follower who she bought from the creepy spiderfolk.

Among Leshy's cult, eating the flesh of other followers was a special honour reserved for rewards and celebrations, and was also one of the only times followers were allowed to eat properly cooked food that tasted good. Having spent entirely too long strung up on a web listening to Helob mutter about delicious flesh and crunchable bones, and now here in this safe, relaxed setting where absolutely nobody seems at all worried about being eaten, Hutrear is slowly finding that they can no longer get the thought of delicious flesh out of their head.

"I'm not feeding you a person," she says immediately. "I'm not—I want this to be a place where nobody has to be afraid I'll kill them for my own convenience, I'm not killing somebody just because somebody else wanted to eat them. But," she says before Hutrear can get too disappointed, "I'll try to find something for you to eat that tastes better than potato berry stew, okay? Maybe even some meat. That is definitely not people meat."

...that's honestly a better response than Hutrear expected, in that they are still alive. They sigh semi-disappointedly and nod. "Thank you, Glorious Leader."

She opens her mouth to ask them to cut it out with the Glorious part, then hesitates for a second—the One Below is always watching—and closes it. Probably she shouldn't have even said the thing about not wanting people afraid she'll kill them for her own convenience. Maybe if she has to she can spin it as manipulating them into trusting her. Ugh.

Now in a much worse mood, she stomps away to go bless everyone again. A couple of them glow, but it's not quite enough to add up to another Doctrine. And besides, what would she even make? Surely Resurrection is the pinnacle.

The last one to be blessed this round is Valefar, who wasn't worshipping at the Shrine when the Lamb first passed it a few minutes ago but is now.

"Leader!" they say as soon as they see her. "May I speak with you?"

Right, she remembers this one even without reading their mind. The necklace helps jog her memory. And the purple.

"Yeah, sure." That didn't sound very glorious of her but she has no idea how to increase her glorious-soundingness. "What is it?"

"I was exploring the woods near our camp and I found a stranger camping nearby! When I asked if they wanted to join our cult, they cursed our way of life but then said they wanted to join anyway. What should I do?"

The Lamb tells herself sternly that the answer to this question should NOT be 'kill them'.

"Can you show me their camp?" she says instead. "And did they say why they wanted to join if they don't like how we live?"