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.