"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.