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.