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."