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?