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Chapter Text

With this final sacrifice, the prophecy will be impossible to fulfill

And the Old Faith shall be preserved

Shamura was never known to lie. He, of all people, knew how reliable they were. He'd invited visions from them before. To know the future took the fear out of the present. And he (he knew) was considered a coward by every one of their family. His crown itself likely thought him guilty if it were capable of doing so at all. 

The Old Faith would be preserved, so long as that one terrible prophecy would not be fulfilled. 

And yet

And yet

(He, of all people, knew that the future never should have been told to their family at all.)

It was with Leshy’s death that everything became real.

Before, it wasn't uncommon for the Red Crown to make appearances. It would come back like a particularly difficult sickness to shake. Each vessel that it used to arrive was weak, however. They failed to form a cult. They collapsed under the pressure. They were killed by followers of the Old Faith. They chose to try to attack the Bishops themselves and died accordingly, only to arrive a few more times before the heretic below apparently found them useless enough to throw away. In the heretic's position, Kallamar was not sure he'd manage that even when it became evident that the vessel would never succeed. Kallamar preferred to have the option of hope, even should it be a fool’s hope. Those vessels were the only chance the heretic would have to escape.

It was not as if the ones responsible for keeping each chain secure would ever waver in that duty. 

Narinder never even sent the vessels to speak for him and offer treaties, offer peace, offer anything that might tempt them to free him. Reconciliation was off the table, but surely, if any sanity remained for him to lose, he would try.

Instead, it was vessel after vessel, fool after fool rotted and destroyed by the Red Crown just as their master had been. The latest was barely memorable at all. Kallamar never had to see it enter his realm. It'd tried to cut off the head of the Old Faith and there were few less dangerous than the Bishop of War. (Even injured, as they were. Even diminished and so often missing from all they did, while Heket and he himself took the lead.) Once again, the Red Crown was cast out. Predictably, once again, that foul thing slunk back into their world.

Kallamar knew it would win, he did, long ago, he must've. He must have known all along. Shamura led them to believe prophecies could be circumvented, but perhaps it was he who was capable of seeing the future. Because he must have known (hindsight said) that it was a hopeless war they were waging once the moment came that they chained Narinder successfully and not it. He was death, bestowed by divine right, but it was the crown which elevated him once so long ago, and it was the crown which posed the greatest threat.

He’d argued for placating it, been overruled, and look where it got him. The chains held down their mad brother, but the cause of his madness slipped about undeterred, passing through the afterlife and living plane, uncaring at all of the intentions to cast it out permanently. Knowing those intentions, in whatever ways the crowns ‘knew’ anything, but free completely by its own power to continue interfering with reality as it pleased. 

For the longest time, Kallamar assumed no creature would ever manage to wear it right. That let him sleep. It let him pretend he could believe it was chained in its own way to Narinder and would never be able to thrive on another’s head so long as he ‘lived’ in this limbo. 

For the entire time since that prophecy was first deciphered, Kallamar assumed they could make its future impossible to fulfill. 

Yet-

From the moment he set eyes on it, Kallamar assumed- no, knew the Red Crown would destroy them all and still be unsatisfied in its void of hunger. 

Leshy died.

Leshy died.

Leshy died.

The Green Crown and its Bishop died.

Their youngest was gone, his soul left in the hands of a madman, a heretic, a vengeful beast, and the untouchable, eternal status quo was shaken.

None of them could die.

The chains needed four.

Their family was four.

They would topple completely and quickly the moment one of those facts became a lie.

Oh, and lies.

Let's speak of those.

Shamura lied.

They claimed that it would be possible to survive and it was not. It was not. It was blatant, fate absolute, destiny immutable. They all should have spent the centuries since the prophecy coming to terms, getting affairs in order, seeking peace- throwing each and every option into the gate to bribe him, sway him, make him pause at least a little with whatever he'd dreamed up for their deaths. 

A thousand years he had to rectify himself with this inevitability, and he was not ready at all. 

Death was a chain strangling him. 

The Red Crown left its taint all over Darkwood. Leshy’s corpse was a dissected mess, offered no dignity by the time they found him. The brutality was like Narinder himself was here to finish what he'd started, as if the other three weren't present to tear him off their youngest, (as if the Red Crown had one thing it wanted and didn't need him as its wearer to pull the heart out of a god).

One of four.

Four became three.

They acted as if it wasn't all over. They were all proud and had good reason to be. He thought Heket even suspected their pride was justified, but she was as blind as Leshy in the wake of his death. 

To Kallamar, the latest vessel should die a thousand deaths. Cocky thing. Prideful but unjustified in it. A vessel, not a god. Divinity would never be its own unless the head upon which the Red Crown belonged died. It needed to be humbled. It should give up. Time should reverse to before its arrival, and let this all be a dream. Because a god was dead now. 

They could be slain.

They were not invincible immortals.

He waited for them. Revenge did not require his escape, his prophesied freedom, if instead they could die. They could be sent to him. 

Life as normal would never return with Leshy dead. The Old Faith worshiped four. 

Unheeded, the insatiable Red Crown’s paraded corpse cut swathes through their people.

Chapter Text

At first, he thrilled at showing off how he could reach its feeble cult and bring one of its heretics out into Anchordeep despite how they were hiding in the center of a temple to the Red Crown and its power. The Red Crown always hungered, always clawed, yet he was a god and it had only a beast to use its power through.

Kallamar’s catharsis did not last long. The beast was back in Anchordeep, murdering its way through its population and destroying all the structures it came across. Damned lamb! Kallamar worked hard to rule his lands and strove to make them more organized and beautiful than those domains of his siblings. It was not a difficult competition to win, he granted, but the beast was ruining things and the people were nervous. Faith was dropping. Even after he ordered new sacrifices to inspire more, the Red Crown would somehow be in the right place at exactly the time of the rituals and then would murder everyone per its norm. 

Kallamar reached for the Red Crown’s horrid domain and found he could still access it. So he found the beast once more and showcased just how much it paled as a crownbearer compared to a god. Run, run, lamb. Live out a full, short mortal life without any threat of execution. Quit. The last vessel had. Ratau, that fool was named. A silly thing. The lamb smelled of him and Kallamar was halfway tempted to snap at it to just go enjoy a chance to live free of the looming inevitability of being sacrificed with the rat, two retired cowards doing what they pleased instead of dancing to the One Who Wait’s commands. He was undoubtedly a cruel god to work for. He’d been a cruel brother. 

He’d been-

The time to consider him family was long, long passed. Kallamar just wanted to be able to forget about him. 

Instead, this beast kept coming back again and again to threaten him with a terrible inevitability of its own: sending him straight to Narinder’s chained claws. 

Leshy and Heket went there. It was a horrible thought. He wouldn’t picture what became of their souls, but he suspected they were long lost to him. 

He tried to humble it. But it simply returned to its cult, abandoning its horrible crusade midway through with nasty looks shot in his direction. It shouldn't have been able to do that. It was just a vessel. Just a beast. It shouldn't have been capable of using the Red Crown to open portals this deep in his territory. It wasn't like the beast was the crown’s true bearer, or anything near a god-!

Kallamar wanted to think that.

Its ability to rip open Anchordeep and teleport away spoke for itself. If it continued growing stronger at the rate it was going, it would be able to portal to and from the veil as if it were the god of death itself.

How hidden could he keep his temple from a thing like that?

The idea of running came and found no traction. It would be an insult to his status and all he'd made with his crown in this land over the millennia. His grasp on the chains were a double-sided blade: so long as each lock existed, so too would their Bishops have to remain by their domains. It was far less restrictive than the entrapment faced by the heretic, but it was binding nonetheless. Besides. Even if he could just run, even if that would sever his link to the chains, his freedom would be all but ensured and there was nowhere Kallamar could go that he couldn't reach if he was returned to his former power. Damnable demon. The Red Crown never should've gone to him, nor anyone. Shamura should have buried it deep beneath the earth or cast it alone into the veil long ago. 

Shamura, Shamura, Shamura. Ugh. They were supposed to be wise! They could speak of prophecies and interpret the likes of those horrible ageless birds. They claimed that the one which spoke of their doom was now impossible to fulfill and look at where they all were now! Heket and Leshy, dead! Shamura without the mind they’d once been famous for, doing nothing to interfere and stand in the way while their siblings died! Why had they ever once brought back that stupid prophecy? Why had they told any of their siblings it when the rest of them fell upon the idea of killing the lambs to prevent it? Had they left those sacrifices alone, then none would reach his vengeful hands! Kallamar was angry. Kallamar was frustrated. Kallamar found it easy to lay so much blame upon Shamura’s head.

Anything to make it not his fault.

And why would it be?? He hadn’t wanted to cast the Red Crown out! He hadn’t wanted to try the stupid chains on Narinder and hope he’d just stay there instead of seeking revenge! He hadn’t told the rest that they should just kill off all the species they used to grow stronger consistently in sacrifices, and give them, essentially, to the very prisoner they were trying to weaken! It wasn’t his fault they all were dead!

And he-...He had to get that point across. Then maybe, just maybe- 

What? He could escape the inevitable with his life while Shamura died? 

Shamura led them to this. Kallamar shouldn’t have to go down for their sins. 

So the next time that it cut its way into Anchordeep, he didn’t plan on reaching into the Red Crown’s territory again. He could inflict the worst of diseases on all of its heretical followers and it still would somehow return in time with treatments and cures to make his efforts moot. 

How?

It was a reanimated corpse! An undead beast!

How did it understand medicine at all? Surely, it was not a knowledge passed to it by its foul puppetmaster. Narinder wouldn’t care if the entire cult died, since new followers could be found. He was far more interested in other souls: those of gods, of family, of wardens. 

There was a chance that this vessel was more alive than Kallamar wanted to view it as. The viewpoint held on livestock was always rather low. They were thinking animals, but they were also sacrificial beasts. Unless they fought their way into another title, they would always be known most for their inevitable fate. 

It wasn’t as if this vessel would have a different future than the rest! It could destroy every chain and then it would die for its master! The Red Crown wanted him. None let it get away with as much as he always had. He was enabled to become a monster through the power it fed him. 

Kallamar felt it, ruining and stinking up his realm. Oh, how he wanted to crush it. To squeeze it and use its bones to hold celebration rituals in his temple. 

But he needed to approach it differently this time. Leshy and Heket had threatened and told it off every time they came across the beast. They never once faltered in plan or the confidence in being able to handle the Red Crown alone, for surely it would be weak when limited by a simple vessel. 

He’d not be making the same mistakes. He tried that route twice now and all that came of it was a vessel that looked at him with even more desire for violence. 

So Kallamar found the beast and decided instead to…simply talk. Yes. Simply talk, about simple talk. He restrained it with his crown and could feel the Red Crown lashing out at the hold. It reminded him of-

Claws and terrible, terrible eyes and teeth-

Holding him down like an unrecognizable monster that only grinned at his tears, with teeth upon teeth, shark-rows, face bleeding on his-

The unholy screeches he could still make out through all the blood in his ears while he retreated-

Horror. 

The horror of that day, and, with its hindsight, every other interaction he’d ever had with one he once called a brother. Shamura adored their darkest sibling, but Kallamar saw the eyes within his face, the blood-flesh, the angry mouth with all its rows of fangs disappearing into an infinite darkness, hungry, hungry, hungry. The Red Crown’s appetite put Heket’s to shame. It wanted more. As its proxy, the one it influenced most, then, he wanted more. 

If he were ever to get a hold of Kallamar…

No.

He couldn’t.

Kallamar would NOT be sent to him.

He wouldn’t. 

The ugly vessel writhed in the air, fighting against his power to restrain it. Its eyes bled from the effort it was exerting. It reminded him of the Red Crown’s true bearer. Of the ichor stains of black left on bloodied face when- No, thank you. No. 

Kallamar grimaced down at this shallow replica of the monster that his brother became during that fight. 

“It seems you cannot be stopped by disease or hunger.” He paced, hovering, while the tentacles beneath his robes wound and unwound from each other uneasily and dragged in the mud. “And he sends you back from death stronger each time.”

Clawed hands- and ugh, how he shivered at that sight, so very unbelonging on a lamb- were jerking to fight against the pressure making its head leak and ooze. What an ugly creature. Kallamar grimaced again, this time from the side of the room he’d paused in his pacing in. He released some of his power over it so that it did not have to break its own bones from all the insistence on moving arms where his bindings told it not to. The sounds and sights were all unpleasant and it was clearly too occupied in its rabid rebellion to listen to him.

And Kallamar needed it to listen to him. 

He was closer to it in an instant. The power of Anchordeep, of the Blue Crown, crackled around them. 

“Please know, it was not my idea to cast out the Red Crown!” he insisted, desperate for it to understand. To realize it was true. He’d argued against the decision a millenia ago, and if he’d been listened to at that time, then it wasn’t like the lamb would be the last of its kind, for they’d never have needed a prophecy at all. Please know! Please do not be so dumb and mindless as to not connect A from B. “The other Bishops, my siblings-...”

Its affinity to that crown still wasn’t good enough that it could wrench itself out of his hold. He could feel it straining against him, though- trying. 

And in a moment of brief distraction as his thoughts were trapped on whether it was listening, whether it could listen, if he should just retreat and work on keeping his temple hidden- it did wrench out. Just enough to drop to the ground.

Maybe-

Maybe what he needed to do was extend an opportunity to trust.

Maybe he shouldn’t instantly restrain it again. It wasn’t- After all, it wasn’t instantly attacking him now, even though it’d got its ugly hooves back to the ground.

He hated its eyes. He hated the way it looked at him.

“The blame lies with them,” he whined.

There.

There, see? It was glaring with those soulless, lifeless eyes, but it stayed where he put it. He did not need to lift it again. It would expend all its energy fighting his hold if he did, instead of listening and comprehending a word he said. 

As the Bishop of Pestilence and Plague, he was quite immune to such things now. But Kallamar felt like he’d contracted some terrible sickness. He was nauseated beyond belief. Oh, but he knew it was not due to any curse or germ. He was just sickened by himself for doing, saying, believing, everything he was about to try now.

It didn’t stop him from going through with the terribly unfair and treacherous offer.

“Please, I beg you, spare me. Kill Shamura, but do not send me to my death.” It was their fault. It wasn’t fair. They weren’t even the same person that they were before Narinder’s betrayal, not even the same creature that decided to cast him out. He offered them up to slaughter as if they were and he did not feel nearly so remorseful as he predicted he would.

Kallamar had not been alone for such a long, long time. The very world felt surreal in these years since Leshy and Heket’s deaths. It was not at all right. When Shamura died, he would be entirely without his family. That was suffocating. To be all alone and left like that, without any distractions or relief, to waste away waiting for the Red Crown to somehow break free anyway and come to torture him. If the beast did listen and leave, and inevitably went, unstoppable, ever-returning, to kill Shamura, then that would be Kallamar’s future.

Maybe it was not so bad to not be the last one to die. To be completely alone with only that fate hovering over him. Leshy had died but in his final thoughts, he must have been granted some relief in the belief that Heket, Kallamar, and Shamura would kill the vessel. Heket had died, but she would hold onto the thought that her elder siblings would keep the two remaining chains secure forever. 

If it went, if it listened and went to Silk Cradle, Kallamar wouldn’t get to hope for final reliefs like that while he existed in apprehension and terrible anticipation. 

But if it listened, it would agree not to kill him at all! And then he could calm down any of that anticipation with such a reminder that it agreed to spare him. 

Really, see, this betrayal was not as cruel as another one Shamura had faced from a family member. This one was almost a favor. They’d be as Leshy and Heket and not die all alone with only the reality of total loss, the heretic’s return, and their new future of whatever eternal horrors death had for them hanging over their dying head. They’d die as Leshy and Heket: with hope. 

He was sick.

The vessel’s eyes were not leaking blood, though they remained a glowing, bloody red. He petitioned to those desperately.

“Do not send me to him!”

And-

It listened.

That undead head of its could think after all. 

Kallamar stupidly let himself hope that, anyway. But then it used its chance to speak its own words, since the Blue Crown was not currently gripping it in place and preventing noise from leaving its foul mouth. It opened such and-

“Bow,” it said. 

Like her. 

Mockery. Not even blight humbled it. Why should it? When it could reverse the flow of death for itself and all affected who it did not manage to treat in time? It had as much humility as an immortal that knew it was untouchable as well.

It mimicked her voice too successfully, capturing the aggressive power, the expectation of submission to her might as all in the natural order for so long did. Bow. It hadn't when she demanded it to. 

Her lands no longer had her shepherding the Old Faith, no matter how loyal the remaining inhabitants were. She had no more ground to expect subservience, to expect that she'd be recognized as the god above a mortal. 

She of Might, felled by a tiny sacrificial beast. 

How wrong that was, how wrong it all was! 

He was a mess of emotions. Rage warred evenly with calmer thought, rational analysis of the situation, and panic alike. He wanted to rip the vessel apart and sacrifice its heart to Heket even though she was dead and only her memory could receive the devotion. Let its demon crown bring it back. He’d feed her temple with its blood again. He’d make it an eternal sacrifice until the powers beyond it realized it would never do more as a vessel than die repeatedly on a tragic, terrible altar. Knowing the heretic below, the vessel itself could have its will unbroken and still be discarded by its god. 

Such images were worth little. The idea was folly. It couldn’t be done. He’d have less power in Anura and he refused to die in any temple but his own. Besides, it wasn’t as if it would bring Heket back. He may have been furious on her behalf, but she was not alive to receive the fruits of his fury. 

And what right had he to be offended for the pride of his siblings? He’d just lowered himself to begging a tool to kill Shamura. The last few moments were as repulsive as his best plagues. 

Death’s tool was waiting, just like its master. He would swear there was a sadism in the thing. Did it truly expect he would bow to it? And bring his head closer to its gruesome weapons? No, he wasn’t about to do the work for it. Beast. It wanted to see him grovel more than his begging here already had? It wanted the chance to claw at his eyes, to shove its gauntlets down his throat and tear it into two parts from the inside, to rip his lips off and leave his face as flayed as the one Narinder hid from so many?

Then let it take him first to the ground under its own power. He would not make it easier for the beast. 

He would not die at all. Not today, not tomorrow, he refused. Death would not have him. He would not have him.

The Blue Crown forced the vessel still with crunching bones, though he didn’t bother to lift it now. It could struggle from a distance in its futile effort to reach him, but it was a foul, filthy blasphemous thing that did not deserve to touch a god.

Kallamar rose higher, tentacles lifted from the ground. “No,” he muttered. “Yes. You will not find me in my temple. I will be safe there. Yes, I will be safe.”

His crown kept the thing at bay while he opened the portal beneath him. It was fighting the invisible wall, but not nearly so fervently as it should have, considering the murder in its eyes. Hateful beast. 

The hideous thing dared watch him go. It was there to lift lips up over terrible fangs, while he, the god, was the one rushing away. 

He wished it actually wouldn’t reach his temple. But even if it took another thousand years to chance upon the location, he would be having his tools continue to search for all eternity. How did one stop death? One did not.

All they’d ever done was stall the infection from ending them. The disease itself was incurable.

Confidence warred with cowardice. Fear and that desire to simply be hidden forever warred with terrible offense and anger over the pride of this vessel, to think it was anything like him. He may have fair reason to fear the Red Crown, but the beast itself was not a match for him and its arrogant assumption to the contrary made Kallamar quite angry. Shamura taught him very many things; and he invented more tactics and weapons still. He was a fighter capable of keeping that beastly brother of theirs occupied so that the rest could start to bind him. Even though it had not been his idea to cast the heretic and his blasphemous crown out, it was only because of his skills in terrible combat that the Bishops of the Old Faith succeeded in doing so. 

He stood before his lock and cursed the Red Crown and Narinder. This room would be where he must fight, if it did find his temple through the maze that he was busy twisting his realm into. Doors pointed north dropped the lamb off far into the east. Doors leading west left it lost in the south. Still, it did not give up in frustration.

Kallamar cursed it too, for good measure.

If- if- it reached his temple, it would head for the chains. And who knew what corrosion it could cause them. It should be none- after all, Narinder had a millenia with the crown to try to corrode the shackles on his end and never had-, but was he about to risk that?

The bloodlust of the beast itself might make it forgo its master’s chains just to search and rip out the Bishop’s heart, too. He could not discount that possibility.

Just as he could not discount the possibility it would find him, no matter what he told it through his icons throughout Anchordeep.

Begone, beast! Find satisfaction elsewhere. You will not cross the threshold of my temple!

It was undeterred. 

It had the power of a crown. It could go do anything else. It could kill Shamura, it could cross the seas, it could use its blasphemous doctrines to rip reality and fold it onto itself through every resurrection. There were plenty of options for finding satisfaction, outside following Narinder’s every order and killing Kallamar. 

No.

His disciples gathered at his psychic screamed orders. The sun shone too bright through his mosaic ceilings and walls, all the split colors painting his already hazy vision like a menticide trip. His body had not released itself from a state of heightened stress still. He was a god, but that godhood evidently could still feel prolonged, acute panic. 

He collected weapons from his armory, returned them, came back again to take them once more. He went back and forth in his temple. He set the ritual circle on the floor, then laughed an hour later in practical hysteria over being so defeatist about its need. The circle was erased. He swore that he was safe. Not long after, his disciples were drawing it up once more.

It was, in layman terms, a shitshow. 

This was the most humiliating day of his life. As long as it was not the last day, he would live with that.

Kallamar checked his fortifications a second time. The temple was safe. Outside-

…outside, there were two crowns that didn't hold this domain as their own. 

Shamura was in Anchordeep, confronting the beast. That was- Well- That was-

They'd arrived recently enough, and their presence vanished soon after. There were very few chances they'd heard anything!

He hoped they'd heard nothing. 

The Blue Crown put all its energy into hiding the temple. For all that, his confidence wasn't nearly strong enough that he wouldn't call in high level followers to use for a ritual to boost his strength. He must not die.

It didn't matter, though. It could return from death. It returned stronger.

It only had to kill him once.

There was only one thing to do, then. Defeat it. Again and again. And let that monotony convince it to quit. If it stopped coming, he would live. 

He had to live.

He had t-

The Red Crown’s presence was like the stench of a corpse wafting in from an open door. It was here. As hidden, as careful, as fortified as he'd made his glorious temple, as he'd made the land outside a maze, here the vessel was. 

It walked in bloodied. Bleeding. Its eyes were horrible empty things. Red. Red pits like his were, would be, had he not instead bled black ichor as a god did. 

The Red Crown itself had all the vibrancy in its blazing eye to make up for how it hollowed out the ever-weeping sockets of its best bearers. This beast’s predecessors were unfashionable, forgettable mistakes. The lamb, though, resembled him uncannily. 

Maybe it was that thought which stalled Kallamar. His words caught in his throat. He paused enough that it bared fangs and spoke.

“So many preparations.” Its terrible eyes scanned over the circles of followers preparing for their ritual. The crown’s own eye stayed on him in a way that made his insides feel wobbly. The beast grinned, now. “And here you said I would never reach you inside.”

Cocky thing. Prideful thing. It should learn its place. It would learn its place!

But it would return to learn again.

Again.

And again.

Kallamar rose and felt the lives of his devoted strain alongside his crown. 

“Insignificant critter! You will learn your place!”

The power that rushed into him was almost unbearable. He could feel bones snap and form from godly ichor, black, spiny things a little too much like his and misplaced on him just as badly as that monster’s eyes and teeth within his face were on a cat. The light of devotion was blinding white. He couldn't watch it happen and was left only feeling these arms shove through his sides. 

It was nearly too much. This ritual was a terrible last resort because of that risk. Kallamar was old and well versed. He did not lose himself to the power that contorted him and tried to burn his mind into nothing but brute, animalistic presence. 

Brute power hadn't let Heket or Leshy live. He needed to keep his wits about him. 

So blood flowed into faith, hands held great weapons, and he felt his body threaten to collapse from trying to use the Blue Crown this way. 

Death’s vessel looked small now.

Unfortunately, that just left it a harder target to hit. And despite himself, Kallamar couldn't stop the mindless panic when it was near him. He had blades and wasted them. No matter. It had blades too, and though it threw its ax, he was nearly always far faster than the telegraphed trajectory. It relied on curses, then, to touch him. He had far more options.  

So the room stank of burning lamb meat. So the beast grew ugly, the empty mask it used for a face instead alive with bruises and blood. 

So it was poison, finally, that brought it down, and a summoned charger that landed on its legs while it was prone, crushing both.

Kallamar need not have the Red Crown to tell its life was now draining from this world rapidly.

It would be back.  

The vessel brought one arm beneath it to force its shoulders up and sneer at him with bloody teeth.

Kallamar forced himself to keep its gaze. Why should it cause any sense of nausea in him? He could not fear for his life when it was dying on the ground and he held most of his health still. Even if he did get into its reach and it hit him with another attack, he would be safe. 

It would be back.

The greedy monster wanted them all, and he could be very patient. It did not matter how many tries, how many years, how many failures. He knew already that he was guaranteed his own victory from his chains because death could not be killed and it could not be forever outrun. 

He'd send the vessel here again, that was a certainty. 

Kallamar did not approach it, but he did settle closer to the floor and tried to impart his will upon it.

“You do not understand, lamb.” But oh, it still did not.

It was losing some of the awareness in its eyes. It bobbed more and wavered where it was trying to keep its head and shoulders up. 

Kallamar grimaced. “Heed my warning and stay away!” he tried once again. 

It lifted its lips higher in its bloody sneer. 

He went to it quickly and used his knife to take its head. Leaving it to die might have been a better blow to its will, though he doubted it would amount to anything except a minimal frustration, and it would take a hundred or more of those deaths before it gave up on being a vessel. Offering it this mercy would likewise amount to little in the goal of making it leave him be. So he did it in order to, if nothing else, make it stop staring. He hated its eyes very, very much. 

They were so so close to his. And they were a dreadful reminder of how likely Kallamar was to be seeing him again.

(It would be back.

Outrunning death was a hopeless battle and the inevitable truth was that it had infinite tries to kill him once.)

He burned, staying in this ritual's battle-ready status. He knew it would appear once more, however, and he expected it would be a worse strain on himself and his crown to repeat the ritual over and over again. He could master it and stay intelligent in the waits in between. 

The temple had finally begun to smell of salinity and peace once more when the foul heretic crossed its threshold. 

Insolent thing. It hadn’t learned its place yet. Its death would stench up this room once more.

And it did. 

He was a Bishop of the Old Faith. It was a fledgling vessel to a god with a fraction of that patron’s powers. 

It burned. It died to explosive chargers. It was stabbed and cut and bashed. 

He expected he fought more dangerously than even Shamura, these days. Fear was a motivator they lacked in their dreadful acceptance, their foggy mind of regrets. Kallamar had good reason to be prideful, but even humbling the beast like this was not deterring it.

The sun set and rose. It rushed its way through his realm. Kallamar felt like a sewn ragdoll, bursting through its seams. Whether that was an analogy of the white-hot power burning through his reserves repeatedly or it was the frantic, derealized sense of looping that came from the vessel’s attempts, he could not name. The latter was disturbing, though. It chewed at his mind, dared him to wonder if maybe he’d already died after all and these were the delusions of death throes. Dreams carried this surreal deja vu. Reality shouldn’t. 

He did not want to be trapped in an eternal struggle with this creature, killing it and being cut by it again and again while he never had time in between to check on his realm or people or sibling (that he betrayed in spirit).

There was where his strategy changed.

He moved gradually, but irreversibly, from attempts to humble and disparage it until it quit, to instead arguments they’d be too busy bleeding out to reply to. 

Burned too badly to stand. Glowering in the corner that his fireballs had finished it off in. 

“Heed me. Give up this venture and find peace instead.”

(Unheeded, of course.)

Broken under a charger that was lazily hopping on its back still. Glowering once more, through tears of blood that made his flesh crawl. 

Pity or disgust or fear, who knew. He himself was bleeding and hurt and knew it would be back within the hour, so he was hardly in a place to be exploring his own emotions. 

He made himself stay to speak with it despite how his skin wanted to crawl off him to get more distance from the Red Crown and its dying vessel.

“Stay back, beast. Stay in your cult. Make the most of all those so devoted to you.” That was a more specific argument, no? Appeal to its leadership, its sense of haughty glory at having weak-minded followers as if that made it anything special. 

It had seemed angry with him for sending a plague to its camp. Its presence here was keeping it from those cultists, surely lowering their devotion and weakening its cult as a whole. 

Few were able to have a real crown when they started a cult. 

Take advantage of it and go.

(It didn’t. Could he be surprised?)

So on came the next death and next pleas from him. 

Cut down the front terribly, yet listening to him with murder in its eyes as if the pain of that wound wasn’t enough to make most far too distracted for anything but sensations. 

Kallamar hovered over it. Attempt by attempt, he drew closer while it died. It couldn’t kill him in that state and he simply must insist it leave him be. 

“Your trade routes are open!” he beseeched. These black arms from the ritual could do little, but his proper tentacles below rolled and wound around like one might wring their hands. It listened in silence, laying there, not even attempting to press on the wound and seek any relief. Kallamar could see its beating heart. “Your resources are flourishing! I can tell the- I- The Old Faith can recognize your cult as legitimate, with Leshy and Heket gone, and Shamura in no state to argue with my words. All you must do is forget about me, about this foolishness.”

He thought he saw something in its expression, some…spark, some change.

It was back before him with a different weapon and fleece no less than an hour later. 

He healed after every battle, but it was wearing on him. If only he would have run before, if only- 

If only the rest had listened and seen that exiling the Red Crown only turned its sickening, blasphemous designs onto them. 

“Stop this,” he whined, “Stop it.”

It’d always been pointless to argue against the bearer of the Red Crown. Narinder was dangerously patient, and he would wait a near eternity to get what he wanted, rather than ever giving the idea up to accept that another’s was better. 

Kallamar was asking for rationality from the wrong source.

There was always the chance that Narinder could puppet his vessels more than they’d assumed. It could have been that no matter if the tool itself might have changed its mind, agreed with Kallamar, it couldn’t stop from acting on his whims. 

He knew he only had to kill each Bishop once and he was willing to send this vessel back from death however many times it took. 

And there was always the chance that the vessel didn’t need any puppet strings at all. 

He and his kin had killed it and its kin. It might just be so vindictive that it would see them all killed no matter what grief it put them through, no matter how destroyed by Narinder they already were, no matter what they said to deter it. 

Leshy, dead. Heket, dead. Kallamar…

He only had to slip up once.

Chapter Text

It did better each time. It brought curses that could hit him from across the room, and it played with new tactics when it threw its blades.

It leapt over fire, to his chagrin. Its body became a haze of light when it rolled, too fast to be burned by the heat it was moving through. While it dashed like a thing invincible, he could have sworn he saw pale wings wrap around it as though a transparent shield. And maybe he did. Because it wasn’t dying, this time. Its wool went unsinged. It grew drenched in blood and ichor, but more than half of that-...was coming from him.

None of it covered the eye on that crown. Its red stared with all its full intensity no matter how much ichor fell upon it. This was not the first time it was actively involved in shedding the blood of gods, after all.

Lost faiths. Forgotten gods. Family.

They may have delayed the end, but the traitor was here in spirit finishing what he’d started. 

Kallamar summoned wave after wave of chargers to his aid. He knew he was growing sloppy, he knew, but he couldn’t stop. This was a fight of desperation. He wasn’t thinking enough anymore. 

Let muscle memory carry him to the next victory. He could hope that it was, and that he wasn’t actually just swinging wildly.

The crown’s arms didn’t have proper nerves. He didn’t feel it when one of the vibrant red tentacles which suddenly shot out from the earth caught one’s wrist. His dagger. It fell, useless, when the bones were crushed and chopped through by the vicious creature’s ax. Kallamar swung at it and it leapt upon the blunt flat of his sword, propelling to slam its blade into his head.

Though it wore the same crown, the vessel was no Narinder. Only that kept this from being an instantly permanent injury. Still, it hurt, and ichor was in his eyes and mouth, and he could only see Shamura with their own brains exposed. Soon, they’d lose their own disciples. Soon, they’d have no one standing between them and death. Alone, they may not dress their skull well enough. He saw that damaged brain through the areas where soggy bandages slipped and drooped. He could envision his own and it made him scream. More.

His staff bashed the lamb off his sword at some point and he’d gotten multiple painful looking hits in while it was down, but he didn’t even remember doing any of it. Sloppy. He was going to die if he lagged behind its movements like this. He.

He lost another arm by the elbow. 

He felt ichor pouring out underneath him where multiple tentacles were cut or ripped out by its curse. 

He felt it- death- the moment before it tried to arrive. It came in the burn of his power inside him. In the bursting in his chest. Too much, all of it too much, and if he did not release the ritual now, that straining would savage him open from the inside out. 

For an instant, he almost let it. 

Surely, all he needed was to lop off its dirty head. Surely, surely- then he could stop straining his crown and the rushing incoming death would back away. 

It was better that than lose all chances of winning and surviving, right?

Kallamar heard his cruciger and sword hit the ground. He could not see it happen, because his head was busy bulging, his mouth gaping, and his overworn power filling his head in all the space it could while it tried to carve him in half.

He heard a wet splat hit the floor next, but that one was easy to identify. It was him. When the last waves of the avoided explosion faded back into the graying ritual below, he could even open his eyes again and confirm it. 

There was no time to mull over this low place.

He used his limbs to carry him backwards while black boney extensions of the crown dragged as dead weight. No time too soon, either. The thrown ax nearly hit his face while he crawled away.

Kallamar looked up from his own trailing ichor and pieces to see the lamb. The vessel. Heretic. A dead sacrifice. A mere mortal. The traitor’s chosen. The bearer of the Red Crown, ready to send the Bishop to the third in their terrible trinity. Vessel, Crown, Master.

Him.

It was so ready to kill him. So much for it ever learning its place. No, even now with as intent as it was to kill, to brutalize, he could see through to its insolence. 

It thought itself so powerful, to win a rigged fight that was impossible for it to lose.

A plague upon it! A thousand curses! Damned lamb, accursed creature, graceless, baseless vessel. It was a tool. It was nothing majestic. It was an undead member of a dead race meant only for sacrifice and dumb devotion. To die for the faith, a (ha!) honor. (He did not have to believe it; only the gullible cattle.) So that was what it was, his monstrous executioner.

Pest.

Foul beast.

Foul, foul, he did not even know if he meant the dead sheep or the crown at this point. He saw the same vast bloody red in both’s eyes, the color of the heretic’s as well. 

The traitor’s.

And suddenly, it was impossible to even bear a moment of this. 

All of his creative, terrible imaginations would not be worse than whatever Narinder would actually do to him. Nothing would be. Kallamar would not mind death, if death was not his brother, if a traitor did not have full power over the little travelers that arrived at his gate.

“Stay back!” Kallamar shouted. 

He scrambled, he slipped. That wet thud (his shoulder against the slippery tiles) was felt more than heard. His ears were a high whine, his crown nearly depleted. Kallamar rolled up to scramble once again. Oh, he wished he could kick out at it. It was too close, followed him too well, and he-

The blockade behind him was a terrible thing. It was a simple ledge, leading up to where the seal on the chains were, but right now it was as good as a mountain for how much he could hope to climb it. 

He felt his life being strangled away in those eyes and shrieked.

“Back!” 

Three blood red eyes in the dark. Three, three, three.

Don’t send me to him, do not send me to him!

“Stay away- stay away -!” It lifted its ax. This was an impossible chance and he’d meant to die fighting, not… (They all had thought him a coward anyway. And now two were far too dead to see him prove it.) “Back-” Kallamar whined regardless, hopeless as it was. “Please.”

And the ax did not come down. But it pointed at his face, and no matter if the lamb still had to look up to see him where he was half propped on this ledge, it seemed as tall as Narinder himself. The true Narinder. The monster the others hadn’t believed was real. Silly old Kallamar. Believing in bad dreams. Silly cowardly Kallamar. Thinking the Red Crown had made its host a terror of eyes and teeth and raw, skinless, bloody muscle. Seeing Narinder was a demon, not a divinely blessed being like the rest of them, not some upraised, exalted cat. A demon, never mortal, and with that crown to distort the exterior of his body until it no longer hid what he knew was within. It wasn’t real, or it didn’t matter, until that abomination was tearing out their eyes or throat or the mind that made them who they were. They'd never bothered apologizing to Kallamar afterwards either.

Panic let him climb mountains after all. Or prop himself higher and nearly slide onto the taller pavillion in order to continue this too-slow attempt to flee. He towered over the small creature by unbiased measures, but still it felt far, far too close to his neck.

The beast glared on the other end of its weapon.

“...Why should I?” it asked.

Kallamar hadn’t expected it to speak at all. It was just a visage of a nightmare. There was no lucidity to either of the players in this dreadful dream. 

“You couldn't follow a single request before,” it went on coldly. “You won't actually obey when told to stand down.” 

What? 

What he was- oh. It felt like a century ago. His racing mind knew only the endless fight. It struggled to catch a grip on anything outside tracking movements while fumbling through bombs and poisons. 

His own voice filled the grand majority of the speech shared between them. Other than its snide comments upon first finding his Temple, there was but one time it deigned to speak.

One word, too. It really should be simple to recall. It should not require nearly so much fighting and scrambling of his own thoughts. Dread was a terrible weakness. It did not help to have a time limit unknown bearing down on him, and he knew he did. 

At least he figured out what it was talking about before that mystery time ran out and it ran its blade through his heart. 

He still simply gaped at it because it nearly seemed too ludicrous for his assumption of its orders to be accurate.

What right did it think it had? 

Beast, and vessel- tool to its master-

Such spite and stubborn pride it appeared to hold, despite being a reanimated corpse of a dumb animal. 

The lamb refused to listen to Heket even as she sent famine upon its heretical followers. 

It died to her servants, it died to her realm, it died to her, the first time. It was hardly so untouchable as such a refusal might make it appear it thought it was. 

It might have been slain multiple times, but it ultimately was the one to still stand. Heket was left as undignified and unrecognizable, spread all over the floor, brought beneath its height. In a sense, she bowed first. 

It got away with its irreverence.

Surely he was cowed enough! It'd witnessed him crawl and cry out, what need had it for him to debase himself by kneeling?

Its blood eyes offered no leniency.

Wretch!

A thousand curses upon it and the monster undoubtedly watching with glee. A thousand curses upon the blasphemous crown which enabled either beasts to exist!! 

Kallamar had every reason to deny it. Dying upright and tall, for one thing, as if that would be enough to cancel out how he'd offered over Shamura’s life to the murderer. 

(And? And?? Shamura did not prevent this. Shamura caused this. Shamura was doomed anyways, just like he was, so any hard feelings around wouldn't matter once they all were dead soon.)

Wouldn't they be happier if at least one of them- one of their family- survived this slaughter? Escaped being butchered? Were they so selfish that they wouldn't be relieved at his life even as they lost their own?

Heket would rip out his guts herself if she saw him now. She and he had been their caretakers for a thousand years. 

Heket was dead. And calling her death a butchering was correct. This said nothing of what endless torments the heretic must have been inflicting upon her and Leshy. 

It awaited him, too, unless he avoided the impossible.

To avoid being sent to him …what wouldn't he do?

The lamb refused Heket and here it stood with a heart of steel. Wretched beast indeed.

He knelt, like a coward. Its weapon was even closer to his eyes now, parallel to his neck, easily positioned at access to his heart. Humility was one thing. It hurt far worse to do this, moreso because of the danger and how he had no promise he was in any less. It could just want him to die on the ground. 

A metaphorical block before him for him to rest his head upon. 

An ax waiting for the onlooking gods to finish speaking, before it swung. 

Somehow, he doubted fervently apologizing to this creature for its execution would convince it of much. But oh did he regret it. He could not bear being in that position. 

His lips quivered and his body twitched unpredictably in its pain, but no words made it out. Somehow, he held himself in the general position without the terror of it making him break and dash away or shove into it. How was he supposed to keep such instincts down when it was making him wait an eternity? 

It was the unequivocal worst moment in time since Narinder was tearing into them all and the world was slick with godly blood and screams of unbridled hatred. It felt like it was lasting the same length of time. 

(He was better at patience than the younger Bishops, but this whole ordeal was long enough. He was worn down of it. Even Shamura, they who won wars through patience as much as through might, must understand. This unstoppable juggernaut of a monster had been haunting his realm, not theirs, shaking off everything he did to it.)

It was still for far too long. That crown, though. It stared at him intensely. Kallamar hated that abomination. 

He was one thing. His crown was another. If not for it, the one that Kallamar feared reuniting with would have been a kit without ambitions, would have been that brother Shamura once brought home without the rot, the exposed bones, and eyes growing beneath his face like extensions of the one on the crown above him. 

It let its arm go to its side.

He could breathe. He could breathe again.

He didn't even need such a function, not with the crown, but he was whittled down to such a bared nerve that such base reactions were terribly potent.

There was such an elation at surviving for all of a single moment. 

Unfortunately, the monster of this tale had hardly vacated the room while he enjoyed his split second of life. 

If he spoke at all, would it ruin everything? Shake the vessel out of this stillness? Would it change its mind? He hated to stay quiet, but, really he'd done enough damage with words lately.

Instead, it spoke first and startled him terribly. At least it no longer was holding an ax so close to him that his jumping reaction led to him stabbing himself.

“Your ears got damaged a long time ago.” It said it like a question, but still self assured. He wondered how much its master was telling it. Did Narinder brag? Maybe he never spoke about the betrayal at all, since it ended in him losing and he was as prideful a creature as he was sadistic.

“Those wounds don't heal, but you do not die from them.” It looked at his body, rather than where the remains of his ears were. He didn't know why- he didn't want to know why. The Red Crown’s eye darted from the one on his head down to the same sight that the beast was so intrigued by, back and forth with a mania he thought he might be hallucinating. 

“Because of the crown?”

Oh. That time was a question. 

Kallamar knew perhaps more about the subject of godhood- or really anything- than his family, aside from Shamura. Yes.. yes! He may not have their (lost) wisdom, but he boasted an intellect which went unhumbled even when they hadn't lost their mind! He was educated by experience and observation, and he could be an asset, see- it would be a waste to kill him and lose all there was to know on the topics of crowns, power, the ancients, plagues, disciples, science, poisons, combat- little good it all did him, if he was on the ground; if he was on the ground despite it all, what exactly did they have to learn from him?It would be a waste-. It would.

…he'd already begged it to kill Shamura and leave him in exchange. If it would spare him, then offering to hand over all the knowledge he'd accumulated to their killer would hardly be a worse treason than that which he'd already done. 

His head was full of blood that shouldn't be there. His mouth could not shut and seal. 

He went to answer and couldn't make the sounds pass his clogged throat.

Here was the worst of it, though: Kallamar realized it'd never been waiting for his input to start with.  

Its hand no longer held an ax, but the Red Crown was like a snake, slipping down their arm to leave a simple knife behind before appearing above its head to stare down at him some more. 

The lamb was set on his trunk. Chest. “The crowns kept the others' hearts beating even after they died.” Heart. That was what it was so focused on. “Go ahead and do the same.”

Kallamar had time to realize what it meant. “What-”

Then his time for thinking was up, because language left when his flesh was lacerated. Every strike in the battle hurt, some as badly as this. But at least for those he still had the strength to move away from whatever was causing the pain.

He was dying. Kallamar was certain of it. This was a grievous wound. 

But while he was unable to think clearly through the shock, his crown worked away on automatic, and what a lucky thing that was. Some wouldn’t have nearly so clear a connection with their crown for it to act without conscious efforts, but ‘some’ were not him: Kallamar was a god and an old one at that. He and the Blue Crown were as one in divinity. 

Not that he was thinking any of this at the moment, but hindsight left him grateful for that clear godhood. It was all that could be used to explain his continued survival.

Blackened vision started intermixing with blinding bright spots. He couldn’t breathe through the blood, in his throat and gills alike. He couldn’t think. See no, say no, think no- and hearing?

It came in a slow, sludging mixture.

Words. Warbles. He wasn't meant to hear things in air to start with. Narinder certainly hadn't helped much, no matter if most of his damage was ornamental. Agony did the rest of the work left over to make hearing comprehensively an impossibility for the moment. 

The bishop clawed at his own power by instinct more than anything. 

His crown was weakened by the fight. Its divinity was diminishing, faith practically depleted, and the other contributions to its mysterious power weren't in any position to be helpful. He couldn't make anything cut by that foul crown grow back when it was held by a god rather than a tool, or he'd have never been seen in ugly bandages for the last millenia. That made his painfully panicking heart- not panicking at all? Not beating at all? A phantom? He felt its frantic efforts, but it was severed in all ways from him. 

A god’s body didn't need the same circulation as a mortal’s. Their blood could stay fresh without needing to go through a pump. Ichor didn't require a logical body, or ugly things like Narinder in all his skeletal glory never could've lived or ate or walked at all. 

But their hearts were important.

Only slightly less than their crowns.

Crown.

It.

That.

Yes, it.

Reach, grasp, claw. He took in the first new breath. On the second, the warbling sharpened into something a little more meaningful. By the third, his vision was clear enough to look at where he fully expected to see the hilt of a sword sticking out of his skin, or all of his internals draped out of himself if the blade were gone. 

There was blood. There was a gruesome set of cuts. Ichor seeped and seeped from them, no matter how closed they appeared. He needed-

Huh.

He needed more bandages now.

At least they could be hidden under clothes, so long as he swore off low necks.

To his horror, there was more black than just ichor. He recognized the tell-tale signs of the Red Crown’s interference. For too long now, it'd been making abominations, rotting what it touched, reviving what should be rotted. 

Kallamar’s vision shot up to see where it was watching and regretted it instantly. Not for the Red Crown’s terrible glare this time. Instead, because it involved going past the sight of the vessel calmly hiding away his heart in its fleece. 

It appeared occupied with the beating thing.

He took the chance to move through the pain, inch by floppy, messy inch, while his wounds bled and the core of his divinity was a cold absence inside him. 

A hollow in his chest. He was preoccupied by the feeling, terrible as it was. If he was to press a limb against where the black touch of the Red Crown was acting as a ugly stain on his front, he feared it would leave an indent and the cave inside him would be all the more noticeable. 

By the crowns, that was agony. He'd not experienced pain like that since his blood was first drawn, spilled, ruthlessly, outside the sealed gateway to the veil.

Sealed…the chains! Him!

Kallamar coughed and looked to the lock up at the end of the room. It remained. He was not sure he could break it. Their pact had been a thorough thing. The four of them knew on that very day that the heretic could never be freed. It was not so easy as perhaps the beast assumed. How long it let Kallamar live now directly correlated to his inability to simply will the lock open, in a purely negative way. Its master would insist on freedom and those chains were meant to last so long as the Old Faith did. 

He tried halfheartedly and found that he couldn’t will the chains to break. 

That demon should stay trapped under the world. How was he supposed to will him freedom when he knew it would spell the end of him and reality as they knew it?

Kallamar wasn’t sure what state his body was in. Even now, it nauseated him to look anywhere. Besides, if he checked to see what parts were still connected to him and which weren’t, he might catch sight of that monster fondling his beating heart again, and Kallamar couldn’t handle that right now. He didn’t want to think about what it intended to do with that. Knowing it and its master, it probably planned to eat it raw. AHhh and now he’d thought about it anyway.

Repulsive.

He needed to get out of here before it tried to eat him too.

But crawling took a great deal of effort that he was slightly strong enough for right now. He could barely lift any part of him off the bloody ground. The warbling went on, clearing up slowly, and he realized that the origin was the damned lamb itself.

“-the crown now.”

“What?” Kallamar asked. Even his voice sounded like it came out of a mouth of fuzz by the time he could hear it. 

Really, if it had been expecting he could hear it this whole time, it was even more mindless than he thought it was before. 

The vessel came up near his head, not that it helped him hear it through the blood any clearer.

“Take off the crown.”

He growled at it, pulling limbs under himself and dragging his body up towards the upraised floor once again. It seemed a more pointless effort this time. The Red Crown shifted, black like ichor flowing wider, taller, a quartet of points flexing larger and larger. While its vessel hadn’t started bleeding from the eyes again, it was evident both were preparing to do something. By virtue of what ‘both’ were, it would be distasteful.

The lamb bent its head upwards and showed off teeth that matched its master’s terrible fangs. 

Fangs that ran down his skull, down his throat, face a disguise of a cat that failed to hide from him what a demon he actually was, and no one listened-

“-listening?” Eager beast. It had just ripped his heart out and it expected him to be coherent immediately? Not only that, but it expected him to hand over the sole reason that the aforementioned heart theft wasn’t incurring fatal results?

“If you want to avoid being killed, take off the crown.”

It was keeping him alive, fool! If he wanted to avoid dying, he couldn’t just…just…cast it off, reject it forever, like it was Narinder. Wretched beast!

Wretched, prideful creature, a mere speck compared to the puppetmaster behind it. How Kallamar loathed its impatience, its victory here.

But it was its victory.

Before hesitation could cost him more, he forced himself to grab his crown- his godhood, his divinity, his right- and throw it at the floor to make the lamb go fetch.

It was as if his chest was being carved open again.

Everything went black. Everything was blinding, searing white. Things settled into black again and he could see nothing.

There was a silent scream, from the crown or from him or from them both, so used to intertwining, so used to being one. It was a lifesaver, once. It gave him the means to come into his own power as a god. He was its Bishop for a long, long time. And he insulted it so badly now that there was no chance in any eternity that it would accept him back.

Truly, this severance was more painful than the other wounds combined. 

A piece of him wondered if this was how he’d felt when cut off from the rest of them, but the bastard had his crown still the whole time, and all the company of the dead. This was emptiness. This was silence. This was silence. The Red Crown finally achieved what he had started long ago and cursed Kallamar to hear the vast, aching abyss that stretched between sound. The Blue Crown did not have a voice, but he almost felt like it was thinking and whispering to him all along, because in its absence, he was so much less…

And at the dissolution of another domain which fed death, that heretical crown seemed to glow. Its heresies turned death inside out, put life back into those killed by plague and hunger and blade, reused sacrifices, and a multitude of other horrors they’d foreseen from his preachings and turned on him (rightly) for. It took the chance out of potential fatalities, the power out of famine, and now could simply ignore pestilent ailments. 

Was that monster happy yet? Was this enough?

Nothing was.

And no one was.

Through the soul-searing pain of the severance, Kallamar was vaguely aware of how much closer to being free the traitor now was.

He couldn't feel the seal anymore. It was cut from him. Like- don't go there yet. The chains could not bear to hold against the One Who Waits below, not without the lock there, and they began to snap. 

Terribly loud, really, when the blood and gauze in his ears was muffling all things.

He couldn't even feel the seal break, but those who had their crowns and godhood still would. Like a cut on their wounds. Reeking of the Red Crown, and him. 

Unless Shamura was witnessing, they would not know Kallamar had let the vessel break the chains. 

They were strong. They were the strongest. They were wounded in ways that took so much of their prowess and allowed the likes of Kallamar to compete with them as battlemasters. 

Alone, alone. 

By the first gods, he hoped they weren’t witnessing.

Though he heard them snap, he didn’t see it happen. He could barely see the floor. It looked surreally incorrect. Tiles were large. Blood was everywhere. The wasted arms from the ritual weren’t laying uselessly on the ground. He didn’t want to look for them either. All he did was lay crunched up, bent over, while everything felt wrong and he refused to see why. 

Something began to beat, like a rhythmic punch to his bones. 

Kallamar stayed curled around it as if it would in any way minimize the sensation to have his limbs pressed against it. 

He couldn't take his eyes off the ground.

Somewhere, Shamura was alone. Somewhere, Shamura would be preparing for their own death. In a way, they would have felt Kallamar’s. The death of a god was notable for most. It was just semantics if the soul in question remained in this plane in mortal flesh. 

Because that was undoubtedly (no matter how he avoided looking, avoided confirming) what he’d become: a diminished little mortal, only alive because of the crude and rudimentary machinations of the crown that ghastly vessel wielded. 

And he still thought the outcome was somewhat worth it.

Out of all of them, he was the first to see what that demon was. He hoped to be the last to have to see him again.

Chapter Text

Going anywhere through the Red Crown’s power was appropriately terrible. Kallamar and his kin were used to slipping in and out of domains with ease. The current vessel only knew how to open holes beneath people and let them drop and crash land. The only decent thing he could say for it was that the time it took to teleport was not long. 

And that was a small blessing, considering the abrupt feeling of being dragged into an abyss of red and rot left him more than simply disoriented. He’d been holding very still and minimizing sensation for a reason, stupid beast. All the changes to his perceptions and the pain was sickening and he wasn’t nearly recovered enough to then experience the stomach-dropping crude transportation to the squalor it was calling a cult.

Kallamar’s hearing had at least recovered somewhat from the initial panicked haze of utter agony and racing bloodflow. It let him hear his own body splat again, for what seemed like the thousandth time that day.

He fought his way into a crouch and coughed blood. There were instantly two alarming results from that action. 

First, it landed upon a stone that he recognized well, though he had not seen one like this in a millenia. The One Who Waits used to be more active instead of passive, after all, and he had these set around the world and the realm of the dead alike. When they would visit the threshold with him, that stone would always be the only seemingly physical thing in sight amidst a peaceful haze of nothingness. 

(Kallamar used to consider it like a beach at its most calming state: sand and fog that matched the former, to extend into limbo, to enjoy the silence of and wash a mind clean before returning to the chaotic colors and sounds of the sea. He expected it was very ugly now. Even chained, Narinder would be able to influence the landscape, and he probably had it a garish mess of skeletons. In fact, the former sands were likely covered in bone and chain replications of all four of them in various states of agony. It would be humorously, stupidly vindictive and a blatant display of how ugly the demon made everything he touched because he believed that to be real style, except Kallamar also knew he would not hesitate to make each Bishop scream in ways that put his shitty crafted statues to shame and he was all too close to having the freed power for that.)

It was not just a summoning stone imbued with the power of the Red Crown. No, this was an indoctrination stone. This was a cage and it was utterly drowned in the foul energy of that wretched trinity which dethroned him so. It wanted to overstimulate his mind until he would be happy to be released into the air after agreeing to whatever nonsense the ‘god’ here declared to be doctrine. 

That likely worked on normal mortals, but Kallamar may have traded his respect and loyalty and everything, really, to avoid going straight to Narinder, yet it was a trade. He knew exactly what led him here, he knew exactly what the zombie wearing the crown here was, and he knew that he would be giving it assets in exchange for life. He would not be blinded into thinking it was a god, because it wasn’t, simply put. Kallamar still had that on it.

Well.

Actually, that led to the second thing.

He coughed up red. And bile, which, ugh. But what was most gut dropping was the red.

Not ichor. Not the black blood of gods.

Hell, not even the bile was the usual kind, purple and rich and belonging to the type of creature his origins came from.

It was just a small little stain, but he crawled away from it urgently to sit elsewhere. He crawled on bastardized mammal hands and, worse still, true knees in the tentacles below him. Maybe he could call his arms such, but those were legs. They were wobbly, knobbly little legs. 

It really made him hesitant to try exploring what else was new. 

So he just leaned against the blood red barrier and simply did not. 

He couldn't leave the stone. No, of course not. It wouldn't do for any half decent fledgling cult leader to be able to transport their kidnapped new members to a stone that they could just walk off of and flee the cult before said fledgling cult leader came back. 

Everything was so oversaturated with the taint of the Red Crown. It flowed through the stone and wrapped around it in invisible walls, too tight. Kallamar wanted nothing more than to be off of it and away from the horrible greedy stranglehold of death. 

And away from any mirrors for good.

It was bad enough that he’d seen those parts of his limbs and noted how small his entire self was compared to Narinder’s usual transportation pad.

It was noisy, muffled as it might have been since now he was dealing with a strange dizziness that he couldn’t place. The sun was harsh. Any reasonable place had mists and plants to dilute that nonsense. The closest structures around him weren’t much to look at. There was untrimmed grass that was dying in some spots instead of being the type of beautiful deep green that Darkwood boasted. The roads cutting off those lawns were packed dirt or cobblestone. He did catch sight of something far away that he thought might have been made of his crystals, but it did not belong here, they did not belong in the lamb’s hands, and there wasn’t nearly enough of them to redeem the blase decor here.

He still could’ve sung its praises because at least it looked nothing like what Narinder would do for temple grounds, and that was a much-needed reminder that at least he wasn’t here. Yet. Yet. 

(How much could Shamura do that Kallamar hadn't? Even if they did somehow lead to the permanent end of this accursed vessel, would Kallamar be able to salvage anything outside a general relief that Narinder wouldn't be free? Forgetful thought they were, was there any world where he could waltz back into their lands and face no changes?)

(Forget Shamura. They were hardly here to save him and he had immediate panic to be getting on.)

As he waited in his uncomfortable position, fighting to hold so still that he couldn’t feel a part of his terribly mutilated and ruined body, he saw tiny heretics running to make their way to a spot higher than his position. 

Curious.

Up past grass and a shrine, past buildings and overall a pathetically small temple, he could just make out stairs. The heretics were crowded around up there. If he- Kallamar pushed up and pressed against the repulsive energy in order to stay balanced and make out the sight better. Really? This was the whole cult? It was thirty or forty members at most. The Old Faith had thousands at any time. Even Narinder, back whe- No. Cast off thoughts of the heretic too. He made for a worse subject than Shamura did.

The mortals were small enough that he could see the beast's arm when it rose above the sea of heads. The Lamb itself was hidden in the masses, but what it flaunted u-

Kallamar decided that he didn't feel like peeking, actually. And he'd be doing better if he faced the opposite direction while sitting down. All this stress and the body he was widdled down to was making him nauseous enough, he didn't need to be standing and seeing the beating pink flesh being cheered over getting even more dizzy.

The stone beneath him was a more palatable sight but it was swimming in a way it hadn't been before. Perhaps he was bleeding to death. He certainly felt like his insides were in a horrid state, doubly so now as they had been before witnessing the cheering of vicious, callous cattle and the much closer presence of the Red Crown with its vessel. 

As the winner of most competitions, Kallamar found defeat absolutely sickening to have to visualize like that. And that said nothing of the piece of who he should be, and how it still pulsed, as frantic as he felt helpless and surrounded by enemies.

It was a terrible reminder of how impossible it would be for his body to live on, now, and all his ability to resist checking what he'd become shot away at the sight of his soon-to-be-consumed heart. He knew he was small, he knew he was wrong, but he didn't feel mortal either- except how would he know? He really couldn't remember what he looked like, before his ascension. It had been thousands and thousands of years, all compared to a forgotten few spent as a simple creature. A squid, he assumed, but that clearly was not what he was now. So having godhood ripped away from him did not revert him to what he (as impossible as it was to actually feel like it were true) once was. 

And his mind hadn't shrunk down into that of stupid short lived animals, which made him wonder if he retained divinity, if he could foster such again even without the collaboration to the Blue Crown. 

His hands went to his ears first. They shot up there with half permission, the dam of disgusted curiosity broken as they did. And a pity that was, because while they found the familiar at the sight of those two injuries, their continued exploration helped nothing at all.

The bandages were too large, now, but also must have been the same ones, since it wasn't like the lamb had wrapped new ones on his head. He would've taken note of that. So the old shrank with whatever treacherous magics the beast used to shrink him after he lost the Blue Crown? They were soggy and uncomfortable and needed to be changed, and that was all very low on possible priorities for him right now. He couldn't get off the damn rock. 

The weird pseudo-hands went to his front next and clenched new jointed pieces around the fabric there. It was absolutely ragged. He looked at the robes. Appalling. But were they more disgusting than what they hid?

Kallamar eased up his grip before pulling the clothes out away from him. With its ripped up, saggy, sorry excuse for a neckline, he was given a roomy view down his front. 

There were stains hiding a new scar, he suspected, and by reaching down the shirt and feeling where blood (and the black touch of the Red Crown but he really, really couldn't think about that right now) obscured, he confirmed it. The wounds were sealed over prematurely and left ridges with tiny lumpy knots of thread around and about. How kind of that murder machine to decide to apply some medical flair to him when ripping his soul from life and death to life in a new form born from the old. 

Kallamar rather wished he never had to see that lamb again. The thought of its face was making his stomach churn, and that didn't help all the internal pain that he worried might be killing him invisibly.

For now, he released the wretched, scratchy wool fabric and freed his hands to the cool air again. He'd worry about the new scars later. It didn't seem to be bleeding, and that was a relief anyway. He didn't have ichor to constantly bleed. If there was to be any positive about that, it was in how he wouldn't soggy up the front of every robe he ever wore from now into eternity with always-leaking god blood.

(Even a thousand years later, Kallamar hated how the ruined parts of his ears did that. It was a terrible sensation to constantly feel cloth after cloth grow gross and clingy to the sides of his head no matter what he tried.)

He reached for his face and ran his touch up from his chin to the bottom of his mouth to face, solid, nigh-flat, that wasn't supposed to be there, that wasn't, what was -

Dexterous and educated as he was, he didn't need vision to help him. Just moving his touch along the strange, small obstructions that climbed up skin until a little above his eye level where it smoothed out into his forehead again let him identify what was new.

Stitches. His mouth was stitched up. So tightly that he could barely try getting the lips there to separate, a blessing, really, since pulling on the bindings only made the sensation more real. His face was stitched up like he was a common creature with a little common mouth meant for the gravity of land instead of sea at all. That. That was, um.

Egh.

Kallamar bent and puked. 

It occurred to him all at once, after he'd skittered to yet another part of the stone to get away (even though the vomit, luckier than he was, went past the Red Crown’s prison walls and polluted the grass rather than actually landing on the stone’s surface), that he probably wasn't dying of internal bleeding after all. For better or worse, he was ill.

Yes. There was an irony. No, he didn't want to talk about it.

Kallamar used the stupid scraps of clothing to wipe himself down and noticed all the signs he should've caught before. The condensation, the affected skin tone, and all those lovely internal symptoms he'd pinned to nausea from being a captive in an unpredictable situation and injuries alike. 

He didn't even have the opportunity to curl up on himself, shut the lights and sounds off with his hands and legs, and try to recover. Because that was about when the creature responsible for sticking him here finally decided to show up.

Oh, Kallamar would've been fine if it waited. Or if it forgot about him altogether, that'd have been just lovely. So long as it lowered the barrier, he would consider that the best case scenario. It would let him run and be far away from its reach. 

More than anything, it was the sense of impending death that let him know it was nearby. Its steps were on grass and its little bell made a whole lot less noise now compared to when he had all his godly senses. The thing could sneak up on him and stick a blade through his back- how unpleasant a downgrade on his part. 

If he was to give the Red Crown anything, though, it was that he was well familiar with it. The day when he couldn’t feel its terrifying presence was the day it’d succeeded in killing him. 

Kallamar shot back upright. Or. No, he didn’t, but he made it back to his knees to sit anyway. The lamb was horribly bloated in size now and so was the crown and they made for an appalling vision, but at least it wasn’t completely looming over him like this. With the foot that the summoning stone gave Kallamar on height, and with him on his knees instead of laying on his stomach, he was somewhere at eye level or above from it. It still was entirely disconcerting to see it so big. It should’ve been tiny and forced him to crane his vision down just to see its pathetic little stature. For that matter, all lambs ought to never be seen with this close of detail, this large. 

Everything would be the wrong size now. The whole world would throw him off. No matter how mundane the item or activity or scene, he wouldn’t get to fall into a sense of security because that damned wrongness would show itself and make everything feel alien and fake and dangerous. 

Damn it.

Damned lamb.

Covered in his old blood, bruised and ugly, altogether too smug because despite every death, it still won a game rigged to be unloseable for it.

And Kallamar could still only see the thing on its head and recall the red streams of its eyes, see the nightmare behind it all, fear the nightmare behind it all. 

At least a certain organ was nowhere in sight now. Granted, Kallamar’s sight was all wrong on scale and wavered in an entirely sickening manner that he knew to blame on dizziness. He could still say with confidence that the lamb had nothing in its hands when it was walking closer. (Far too close. Any proximity to it would be too close.)

It stopped near the stone to glower at the vomit.

“Lovely.”

Yes. Just slightly moreso than its face.

Kallamar sneered at it and didn't move otherwise. He really was not feeling well. In this diminutive state, he had so few senses and so everything just ‘felt bad’ rather than having pinpointable causes and developments that his crown could get to work repairing. While he was certain now that he must be ill with something, that ‘something’ could be anything. He was just growing worse with every new minute. For all he knew, he was contracting every plague there was to suffer. That would be a pathetically ironic way to be sent to the heretic. He’d rather have died to the traitor’s vessel. Absolutely not.

“Surely,” he said and regretted talking. It was just more moving around. It was weird and garbled and his throat felt like it was barely open to breathe through. As he’d not found his gills (and dared not really search after discovering his mouth stitched shut), that was very inopportune. Heket was right to be angry so often. Suffocating induced constant panic and overall misery. 

The vessel narrowed its eyes and looked him over, but didn’t bother speaking this time. He loathed all this suspense. It had a tongue and working voice, one that worked even better than Heket’s when it had its throat clean cut through, out the other side, and she'd just had the front ruined. The least it could bother doing was saying more than little one word remarks or else threatening him. 

(Well. Preferably, it wouldn’t say anything, it would release the barrier, and forget about him while he ran off. But he had to account for second best options.)

Whatever it said, the beast did drop the wall of energy encircling him. It even walked off (towards a shed not at all far away, but still.) Kallamar used the chance to rise to these strange legs and lost thoughts about running anywhere. The world squeezed. So did every piece of his anatomy. Things were chewing their way out of him from the inside, other things were boiling, others still were freezing cold, and he could taste illness with no better way to describe it. Taste and smell. And it was miserable. 

He knew why illnesses were so good at humbling even prideful brats. They were agonizing. 

By the time it trotted back to be near the stone, all he’d accomplished was avoiding falling over and moving (which he’d never discount the difficulty of again for those that were ill, because it was hard to do through the squeezing sensations that accompanied any attempt to shift around, especially without falling) one more time- namely, getting his arms around his stomach. Truly a dramatic feat. 

Well, if it was, then the lamb was here to demand more. It came up to glare at him with the distaste it hadn’t wiped from its face yet. There was something in its arms. Before he could start to guess what, it threw the things at him. 

It spoke at the same time (“Change into this.”), admittingly, but he didn’t register the connection for a few more seconds. 

For a moment, he flinched back from what he registered as an attack. Unfortunately, in his state, he couldn’t make it far and the ‘attack’ landed on his face, before flopping to his shoulders and sticking draped down them, his chest, and arms. Or it was fortunate, because if it had landed on the stone, he’d probably be expected to lean over and pick it up again. 

The lamb folded its arms and lifted one eyebrow higher, like it was appalled by how slow he was going. Its hoof was tapping, just to get the already-blatant point across.

Yes, yes, yes. He scrambled with the red thing and peeled it off, figuring out what it was as he went. The context of its abrupt speech gave the answer. It was clothes of some kind. A shirt. Dress. Thing.

Kallamar held the shirt up by its shoulders and turned it around to inspect with a grimace. First of all, it was garish. There was enough red around. The beast and its master should understand its little cultists didn't need to constantly wear the colors of their crown. This lamb ought to have a variety of colors for their boring standard camp clothes, because anyone with Kallamar’s tones would be an absolute eyesore in this shade of red. Ugh. And, right, ‘boring’. This was just a long shirt. There were white decorations that might have made the robe work on children, but for the likes of him, they were inelegant and meaningless. They were made of cloth alone, not a single jewel in sight! This beast had formed a terribly prevalent group of heretics out here in the last decades, yet it was failing to present them as a legitimate faith at all because they looked instead like a bunch of hoodlum rejects! The bottom of it was jagged in a way that he'd noticed the ones worn by the other mortals also were, which meant they were an intended fashion statement and he was not impressed with the argument they were attempting to state. The hems weren't worth a thing. He couldn't care less about if they may have been eye-catching once, because by oversaturating the style, having so many cultists use it, they'd lost all intrigue or value. They were just cheap robes only slightly better looking than these scraps he had on him. There were small pants to use if he had the legs for such, but really, he was a squid, what was it expecting…

Hm.

This piece of clothing was accommodating of his shape on account of its purely vague bag-like qualities. That could hang loose on some skinny mammal and flow alright over a more aquatic creature’s lower parts. He didn't have the tentacles he should, granted. He had weird puffy awful legs. The shirt hung down without needing to stretch around the ever writhing mass. 

Damn the Red Crown. By giving him a living body, weakened and stripped of a god’s heart, it'd decided on all these unwanted changes. 

The effort of getting it over his head and then wiggling out of the old, ruined clothes should’ve been nothing. Kallamar wavered in place instead while the world squeezed and wavered. He was fairly certain that he needed to use one of those mortal outhouses, although it was hard to be completely sure considering he didn’t really know what feelings accompanied that need and was basing this only off of the abstract, conceptual definitions in his mind and how they compared to what he basically registered for sensations as “misery and pain”. Very precise, he knew, but he had no experience with these stupid bodies! None for millenias. 

Kallamar decided now was the time to get off this far too exposed rock. The heretics ogled him longer than they deserved to already. And standing upon it was like standing in the hand of the One Who Waits- should it ever come to that, Narinder would be doing no waiting before closing it into a fist. 

He wobbled over to the side, stepped down gracefully, and fell into the grass. 

That hurt. That had no right to hurt him. It was just dirt and he was a god. 

The fact that the lamb was far too close was incentive enough to ignore his wailing stomach and get up again. But maybe he would take this moment to breathe and wait, since he had nowhere particular to go anyway. 

“Great.” It sure did not sound like it believed its own sentiment. “Okay,” it said after a second. Then it was moving next to him directly and reaching around him to smash its body against his.

Every part of his flesh tried to crawl off and away from his bones to get distance from the animal. This effort failed about as badly as his other automatic bodily effort to keep his legs flexed while stepping one foot by second foot (and he wasn’t supposed to have feet-). 

He understood that it wasn’t trying to kill him at this moment, really. He wasn’t stupid, it took him only a second to realize it was propping him up like this and plodding along so that he would walk instead of fall over to vomit more. All in all, this was reasonable.

It just was hard to convince himself that he wasn’t in danger when he’d fought it again and again and only, what, an hour ago been panicking and desperately dying at its terrible hooves? 

Even though his legs did drag along and tried to kick and find footing to walk on his own, he was still appalled by the sheer proximity of his nightmare. He could feel its weird, undead skin. Mostly he felt the cloth it wore and wool, but still, those occasional rubs were awful awful nasty undesirable touches of death and Death’s vessel.

Kallamar was hardly in the state to allow this- he was particular about who got the honor of coming even close enough to touch him. That was an honor, see. A blessing handed to the lucky few at a time, that the rest of the people in these lands would be jealous of at a distance. The thing that had slaughtered Leshy and Heket and tried to do the same to him, only to make him grovel instead, was not on that list of those who were welcome to come near his grandeur. It was too prideful already and didn’t need encouragement. 

“I can always carry you there like I carry people to prison,” the lamb said (abruptly and unprompted and Kallamar lost precious seconds of thought to trying to figure out what happened directly before it opened its foul mouth that might have inspired it to start a conversation), sounding mellow and casual enough. He followed its free arm as it waved up to its wooly head. The crown distorted. In a flash, it went from its tiny malicious self to a vast mass of darkness, which then stretched down like an ugly arm bent overhead. The end of it twisted into a large, hooking hand, hovering at eye level far too close for comfort. 

The claws there clacked together eagerly.

He would not be picked up by that, no thank you. It could stay eager and be disappointed, hateful, loathsome crown. (Oh, what had Kallamar done to it to earn its particular ire? He wondered such many times before it was even cast out and its bearer was chained. It needed no reason, since it was a hungry thing that just wanted to consume all its rivals in strength and twisted its wearers to wish to do the same.)

“Uohgh,” he said eloquently. He’d meant to just insist that the threat was very unnecessary. Words did not come out so well when his guts were trying their best to do that instead. 

He keeled over a little (and dragged the vessel with him, since it was hooked to him and didn’t let go the moment he bent), coughed, puked, and coughed some more before he could even dare to try speaking again. 

Well, it succeeded in allowing him a few words, at least. 

“Carry where to?” he muttered at the beast. The moment he’d stopped hacking, it was back to dragging his legs along over the grass like dead weight. It clearly did not care about the bruises he was collecting from every misstep and impact against the hard packed ground or its rocks.

“The shrine square so everyone can throw our rotten pumpkins at you,” it drawled. 

Oh, that would also be quite unnecessary.

He had no idea what future was in store for him, no, and he had no real control or involvement in picking a fate. Still, chains, stocks, humiliation, torture, were all rather important to him to avoid. He couldn’t spend years suffering in its pathetic cult, just for this beast to free Narinder who he was sure would proceed to massacre Kallamar without pause.

The lamb paused to reposition its grip and tug him on again. Even though it had cut him down, raised flesh that should be dying to life into a mutated diminutive shape, stolen his crown, it still wasn’t large. It just made him small like it was. And he was still larger than it, so this entire venture was full of so much jostling. Really, too much.

And he wasn’t the type to walk, to begin with. He vastly preferred to swim and float. If the little murderer did let go and step back too far for him to be crumpled on top of (ahem, ‘leaning’ on it) like this, the only outcome with these puny legs would likely be flopping to the dirt like a grounded fish.

Lovely indeed.

Apparently, he had to be grateful that after getting a better grip on him, the beast continued to drag him along instead of dropping him.

(Well. It’d seen him crawling around, bowing and scraping, enough already to satisfy the fun, now hadn’t it?)

It was too much work to keep talking and breathing at the same time. The actions had decided to become mutually exclusive. 

Kallamar let his mind wander through dreadful things (because what wasn’t??) that might lay in store for him. Daydreaming about any distraction just led to equally awful anxieties, like memories of a certain traitor and the seeming choking inevitability of his victory, so there was no winning whether he thought about past, present or future.

It started talking from his left, where it was dragging him around with a terribly comparative strength to this new form. 

“Fun, isn't it?”

His reply- a question of what?- came out in a sophisticatedly linguistic moan.

“Being all sick.” It said. “Having aches and cramps. Or whiny ears and heads that make the world all spinny. The nausea and diarrhea and dehydration especially and you're not even there yet, so much fun.” Its sarcasm was truly an inspiration to all other undead, half-mindless cattle. He wanted to smother it, but unfortunately it was the only thing keeping his arm up on it very well. 

“You give all that to people and stuff,” the lamb kept going. “I should let you keep the returned gift.”

He begged to differ. No, it should not. 

Not for another hour of this, let alone for the natural longevity of illnesses, which could be…oh, days, weeks, unless it became something even worse. 

He’d be a bedridden, miserable mess and would surely die if not helped with everything. How cruel, lamb. But it must realize that would be an annoyance to it as well, so surely it was not the route of preference for dealing with him. 

Surely. 

Illness made it too hard to put up a good argument. 

They came up to a small, round…building, he supposed it could be called. It could’ve fit with Darkwood’s nonuniform styles. Bushes went all over the dome. If not for the door (and window visible from their walk over) that the lamb dragged him through, he would’ve thought it some kind of bulbous, flowering hedge decoration.

Inside was a septic smell that battled with the scent of sterility. It was overwhelming alongside all the other odors currently trying to kill him. 

The interior was a mess that matched its potent smells. He saw trinkets of crystals around, potted flowers, and just too much clutter made out of decorations and tools alike. The window had a tiny shelf just covered in the things. One could barely appreciate having a view of the world outside when that view was visible through the cracks and spots between junk. 

And the wall opposite the window had too many shelves, and counters and boxes trying to share one space. How did anyone even reach the stuff on the shelves or in those higher cabinets when that rolling table (covered in towels, bowls, and more junk) was squashed between it and the bed?

Yes, Kallamar could recognize that the purpose here seemed to be some form of medicine house that would benefit his current misery, but he could also say it was an ugly wreck. 

In Anchordeep, he’d hardly need to oversee the construction of adequately organized and beautified hospitals. Its denizens only needed temples. Their god cured the plagued with a blessing if the recipient deserved it, not with grueling, messy medical procedures. 

In fact, with how messy it was in here, it wouldn’t surprise him if the bed itself was covered in diseases. 

He was shoved onto it anyway. 

Ugh. The world constricted. The texture of the single sheet on the mattress felt like crawling bugs and loose webs against his skin. He had to twist around until the shirt was making the most contact with the terrible stuff. Two pillows were also covered in something similar. The absolute misery of existence let him decide it was an acceptable irritant, as opposed to trying to sit upright. Kallamar’s back sunk into them and he woefully watched the lamb make a further mess of the clutter. It was going to do something to him, so he should see what sorts of concoctions it decided on first. He had no faith at all that a false god’s monstrous vessel knew anything about medicine. 

…It knew about medicine. 

Damn it! Even if this was good news for him, it was still just one more way this thing pranced around and justified its own haughty pride. It would think too highly of itself until the end. Knowing his brother, that end would be the moment it opened its stupid mouth to mouth off. Narinder was in love with himself. His sheer ego would never stand for anyone or anything else having any tiny level of pride in their hard work. 

This beast was smart enough and it was playing a rigged game that it simply couldn’t lose, so it was strong by now. It only got stronger with defeats. Shamura would fall, just as Kallamar. Silk Cradle would only hold it back so long before it adapted and surpassed its warring lands. 

(Then there would be no more chains and he really couldn’t think about this right now.)

Clearly, a part of its evolution in cult-running, it had come across what it needed to manage ailments. No wonder it shook off his curses. It just returned to its heretics and cured them all before a single one could die! Damned little beast. Kallamar did not like to be so ineffective. It left him feeling like he’d been a joke of some kind. 

It ground up bottled red blooms in a mortar. The scent was lost among all the other clouding, toxic odors, but Kallamar didn’t need it to know what those were. Under Leshy’s ownership, Darkwood had a wondrous affinity for camellias that no land could replicate. 

(He didn’t have time to really think about Leshy often, since his death. He was busy, he had other worries, he was not incredibly close with the youngest Bishop. After Narinder, he couldn’t say he was very interested in trying to get close with another younger sibling. 

The red petals made him ache. Somehow, it was still better to look at them, know what they were, know what they represented in his memories, than to not. They were a fleeting, temporary sight, but it wasn’t like he would ever get even that brief a time with Leshy again.)

The stems and leaves were dealt with separately, for purposes Kallamar wasn’t sure of. He couldn’t see everything it did from this angle. Its ugly body blocked much of that vision. While he knew camellias from Darkwood were imbued with luck (a favorite feature of someone chaotic) and had some medicinal property potential, the Bishop didn’t know how to use them. The lamb did.

The lamb also knew he was doing nothing but staring at it. The Red Crown’s eye was on Kallamar. 

“I do all the healing,” it said and confirmed his suspicions, although he was just impatient to get to the ‘healing’ part and didn’t want to hear it. 

“It'd be more convenient if it didn't need me around, so when I'm crusading and people get sick, I don't have to abandon the crusade. It’s annoying.” It turned and gave him a flat stare. “Thanks for doing that twice, by the way.”

Hah, yes, well, that was all in the past. Water under the bridge. Eh…

The pestle moved violently under its grasp. It crushed delicate things with a passion. 

He imagined that occurring to his very weak-feeling organs and nearly rolled off the pathetic bed with sickness. 

“Can’t say I know what you have or why, but you have no room to complain about it.”

A few moments later, and it stepped back from its work, holding a new bowl where it’d mixed wet sludge with dust-smooth powders. The lamb turned around so that it and its concoctions were facing him now.

“I should leave you sick for a few days,” it said again.

No, no, it didn’t need to. That wasn’t a factual statement at all, just a little opinion, a subjective thing that was no absolute and thus needed no ‘should’ attached. 

What it should do was give him some help, then let him leave the borders of its cult so he could run off and they’d happily never see one another again.

There was a sharpness in its eyes that matched those of its teeth, visible in flashes when its lips curled to smirk. Though they were not bleeding red, the simple sheep eyes were just lies; lies like the face that the traitor wore to gather followers and family, to hide his true nature underneath so he could devour them in the shadows as he pleased. Kallamar wanted to get distance from them, but the pillows offered little leeway before they became the unstoppable barrier of a wall.

“I really ought to make you say please first.”

Prideful– 

First it was to kneel, now it was to simper about and beg some more. It must be enjoying itself so very much. Nothing but a simple animal, given a taste for power that was going to be temporary and useless for it. 

He loathed doing it, but he opened his mouth to ask pretty please to be healed like it was oh-so-non subtly telling him to.

It shoved a handful of the paste in.

Kallamar’s eyes widened. He was too stunned to pull away or bite. Its dirty skin grazed his teeth and contaminated them. The potions it had been making were somewhere in his altered, stitched up, mess of a maw. Even after the monster pulled back, it took him a moment to realize he needed to either spit the mixture out or eat it. 

He ate it. 

Getting rid of these horrid symptoms was a higher priority than anything else, right now. The effects of illness felt as if they were going to kill him. Even though they likely weren’t, he would continue to feel that dramatic danger sense to his life for days or more. 

He thought he saw it looking on hungrily, but he couldn’t check. He was busy coughing and leaning into his new legs, and that was not exactly the easiest set of activities to notice the environment clearly during. Hopefully, it was not leaning too close itself.

Sadist. 

This day was so very overwhelming, he couldn’t bear it. Kallamar coughed until his eyes were wet, before shaking off the response to a frankly foul tasting mush. 

The lamb was not nearby looming. In actuality, he realized it was at the door. Its empty hands suggested it’d put away its tools while he was too busy to see. 

“Get up,” it said and its voice and eyes were so much flatter than he predicted, expecting glee that would match its recent toying with him. Where’d the hungry excitement gone? Not that Kallamar was complaining, but…

He didn’t know what to expect. It didn’t look interested in waiting for him to sit around and collect his thoughts. 

“We’re leaving.”

So he did. 

The world wasn’t spinning and squeezing constantly now. His head felt light, his body was all wrong, and he wouldn’t be surprised if he tripped and fell, but the more all-consuming miseries were muted.

At least wherever they were going, it wasn’t a path crowded with tiny (too-large, now that he was tiny) heretics that may or may not recognize him. Those that would, he’d hope to never run across. It would be so embarrassing that thinking about the scenario made him feel like he’d die should it occur. 

As for the rest, he didn’t care to see any of those creatures either. It was insulting and depressing that anyone could simply not know of the Old Faith and its quite iconic, recognizable Bishops. Through its indomitable charges, the lamb was destroying swathes of those still loyal to Leshy and Heket’s memory, and Anchordeep would fall into ruins too, now. The only land left to have evidence and sight of their god would be Silk Cradle, and once Shamura was gone…

The heretic below would wait no longer, but he would be too late in really defeating them and their existence would be crumbling into dust and moss before he had the chance to truly spit on them by making the world forget they were there at all. The Old Faith was called such for a reason. It was a terrible thing, to think that such a long-standing power, one which lasted so many thousands of years that none even remembered the gods and faiths to come before their time, could wind up just as erased by history as their precursors. 

Kallamar could not collapse under despair just yet. He planned to survive, and he needed his wits to do so. Besides, the accursed little monster was talking to him again.

“You're not getting a shared house.” Hm? He’d missed whatever came before that. They were out in a random, ugly patch of grass, not near any houses. “The singles are…hm, ok, I'll have one moved.”

It had been considering sticking him with its foolish followers? Of course that was unacceptable! At least it knew that! It knew to give him a house at all, rather than leave him, a god vastly older than it or any of its dead descendants, on a blanket in the dirt. No, he did not want to stay, and a hut was a prison, making him forget hopes that he could simply disappear into the woods. But- despair would not take him now, and houses meant comforts that he would consider the bare minimum. 

“You're not getting a shared neighborhood either. Nobody needs that.” The lamb tapped its chin. Its foul bell jingled quietly. “I could always give you a moon necklace. But it's not like you're built to do any work-” Right. Which was why he could fight with four weapons at once. Which was why he, not Heket and her visible strength, was second in battlecraft only to Shamura. Which was why, they'd remember, he'd killed it plenty. 

It was trying to downplay that already and he was aware. It would take it more than that to break him into something convinced it was always weak and worth nothing outside being livestock.

“-and you'll probably manage to give more devotion while sleeping than some lousy attempts to pray.”

While he fought the desire to fight back against its commentary, it started to stare off into space. 

He was no ordinary mortal. The unique features of his form alone (horrifying though they might be) were a comforting reminder that he must be something else altogether. Without the Blue Crown, he was very, very limited, and his body was a quiltwork patched together by the Red Crown with its taints ingrained into his very nerves, but he knew when a crown was being used. 

After a moment, it stopped its undoubtable telepathy, and started blabbing again. 

“They’re getting a shelter ready. It’ll go here,” it said.

How very cut off from all the other shelters and ugly buildings of this ‘cult’. He wanted nothing to do with it, but it still was just another humiliation to make him stick out and risk recognition. 

All those dull, artless cultists out there would be whispering about him without his control, should any see him and go tell the rest who he was. 

The distant red blobs were distasteful to his eyes. He could not help but grimace. “And these rabble?”

The lamb had enough basic intelligence to know what he was talking about.

“What about them?”

“It is inevitable they'll insert themselves into my way at some point, unless this hut is to be my cell.”

“Oh, no worries about that,” it flashed fangs in a grin. “We have stocks, not prisons. Cells are comfy. I like to expose them to the elements and everyone's eyes.”

Narinder was chained, but it wasn’t like they’d decided to do that to him somewhere public. He really should’ve been grateful for the privacy and dignity they afforded him in his disgrace.

Kallamar couldn’t stand the idea of receiving less than the traitor.

He spoke slowly while his mind raced much faster, being careful to navigate this dangerous, unknown ground. How did one pacify a zombie? The reanimated corpse of a dead sacrifice couldn’t have enough to it for him to really start guessing about angles to take.

“...I just. Suspect. You will not let me keep- Ugh.” He restarted. “Your rabble aren't to know who I am, what I a- was-, all the better to rewrite my history and break me into little pieces, yes?”

“That would put a damper on your missionaries,” the lamb interrupted casually. Its eyes really were equally frightening without resembling its master; like this, shiny and alive, they were uncomfortably, horribly soulless. It felt like it was sucking his own out too. Horror rose while he simply gaped. “Former Bishops, preaching someone else's faith, it's a memorable shtick for those lost souls in the lands of the Old Faith, wouldn't you say?”

He what.

He-

What?

Wait.

Missionaries. Bishop. Former. Lands of the Old Faith. Oh. Oh, no.

No thank you.

Haha! Very much no thank you!

Did it really keep him alive for this?? He'd asked to be spared, not tortured! 

“But-”

It lifted up a hand. “Actually, hold that thought,” it said. “I have a headache from how much I’ve heard you talking today.”

But-!

“Sit here until the shelter is done. Go to bed after. Just don’t go anywhere else.”

But-!!

He still did not have the time, privacy, or opportunity to despair right now. The way its preludes kept coming as a promise for what would happen when full comprehension hit was all unpleasant enough. Kallamar really thought he’d run out of energy today for more panicking. 

The lamb started walking away and left him unsteady on the dry yellow grass. He cast a glance at the treeline, but the amount of visible, too-bright sky hanging over this cult’s grounds felt like an inverted orb crushing down to make the distance to that dark barrier impossibly large. 

Anything and anyone could descend on him while he tried to cross that space. The idea of arrows to the back was worse than those same stabs coming from the front. 

Everything was weightless and everything was weighed down and it was spinning, it was white noise, it was horror, it was grief, it was-

Kallamar startled back to the present and his focus returned to the voice of the lamb.

“Oh, and.” It paused to glance back at him and smile with thin dead lips alone. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

He didn’t give it its thanks in the time it took for the beast to walk away. 

Yes, he lived, he needed to live, he was desperate to avoid someone worse than this one vessel, but nothing that occurred since his plea was granted and that would follow was at all something he wanted to heap gratitude on it for. 

The new thing in his chest beat far too hard against bones that shouldn’t be there. 

Kallamar had a hunch that the bearer of that foul crown didn’t think he was feeling very thankful either. Its final comment stung with too much irony.

Chapter Text

It took him forever to fall asleep already, between all the general distress and discomfort, and how, well, he hadn’t needed to sleep in millennia. It could feel nice to, sure, but after a few centuries of godhood, the dreamless, time-skip state of intentional beauty sleep grew less and less appealing. There were better things to do in those hours. So laying down and thinking “fall asleep” led to nothing and he was left to try to remember how this process worked before his crown.

Not to mention, he was in enemy territory, his body was all wrong, there was something missing from his chest, and this mortal form still wanted to be sick. What sort of environment was that for reconnecting to the instructions for sleep?

He lay around, tangled and turned, got too-hot then too-cold, and so forth went the horrors of night in this dark, tiny prison. 

So he’d wasted enough time not sleeping. 

Now that he’d finally made it into slumber, the bell ringing incessantly was really aggravating.

It was so loud. So were all those nearby, practically yelling (because gods forbid heretics have any idea how to just talk to their neighbors) voices. Kallamar threw the sheet over his head. Please. If his handsome ears had to be ruined to start with, then he might as well actually get to be deaf. 

The bell was too clear.

It was repeating in his mind, he thought. Not his hearing at all. In the heart of the vessel’s territory, the Red Crown could stick its fingers into every brain.

Kallamar certainly hated that. He’d run out of energy yesterday, however, so the horrid crown’s touch now couldn’t put him in any more of a tizzy than before. 

Sleep was thick and foggy and disconcerting, but he wasn’t nearly done with it.

Dreams took over real senses easily, and back to that he went.

The next time Kallamar was woken up came because of a slamming knock that brought his missing metaphorical heart into his throat.

Gyah-!

Sheets tangled, incorrect legs did too, and his efforts to jump upright materialized instead as him jerkily falling off the bed itself. His back hit the ground. Part of a blanket came down on his head, from up where most was caught around his upright legs.

Ow. 

The knocking on the wall outside throbbed in time with his bruising skull.

There was no more time given. The curtain doors tore open loudly and as violently as the grin on the trespasser’s face.

Kallamar’s legs finally joined the rest of him on the floor with an eep.

Big, sharp teeth stayed in their too-pleased position while the short little monster strode right in.

“Gooood morning, Kallamar!” the horrid vessel cheered. Because- right. This thing. He was on its land now. It would be around all the time. Yes, he managed to escape the jaws of death, those teeth waiting at the bottom of the cliff, (two becomes one), he avoided having to come face to face with him, but the consequences to all of that was having to see it now. With diminished heretic-size eyes seeing it as something more impressive than it was. 

‘Leader’, his mind supplied, and he promptly ignored that.

He’d like to get up, but everything sure did hurt. That meant he stayed too-dazed, while the beast moved with the type of speed of a god. 

“You know this sound?” it asked, from on top of the bed, leaning its head over this time. Kallamar tore the sheet completely off the frame when he wiggled away from its suddenly-close face.

There was a ringing in his ears.

Wait.

No.

In his head. And it wasn’t from panic, it was that bell again.

Kallamar disentangled these clunky limbs and made it up the wall, even if his head ached and wanted him to fall over or throw up, or both, likely. The lamb stayed where it was, uncaring of how he pressed himself against a surface in an effort to be far away from it. It simply put its head on its arms instead of leaning it over the side of the mattress anymore.

Its legs kicked behind it innocently. They were on full ugly display, since its fleece couldn’t exactly keep covering them when they were being waved around vertically in the air.

“What?” Kallamar- …accused, maybe? He was shaken, offended, and most of all confused through a groggy haze.

It kept on kicking its legs, but its smile sharpened.

“You missed breakfast. And the day’s sermon. If you don’t want to eat my food, fine by me,” it said cheerfully (liar). “But I want you at Temple. And I don’t, sure, since I hardly actually want to have to see your ugly face in the crowd, but. You’re going to be useful.”

Kallamar had many things to say and managed none. He was not awake, even though such cognition should be instant after sleep ended- or it was when sleep was an optional trick a god could just give the internal command for and then shake off instantly. Its words were reading like a threat that he was too groggy to fully understand, and that was an uneasy thing to realize. It was lying, because even as much as the Red Crown’s vessel tried to ruin his face, he still was hardly ugly. 

He just kept staring. 

It rolled over to its back and then suddenly was standing before him, uncomfortably close, and far too fast. He should be able to keep up with the speed of a crown bearer, but he just could not seem to. Maybe it was sleep. Maybe in an hour, he would be able to again, as he should.

Teeth like that could really hurt when he was this small, he thought vaguely while looking trapped looking at its upturned face.

“Got it?” it was asking.

Pay attention. Come now, focus.

“The bell,” he repeated for it. “It’s a summoning. I’ll be there next time.”

His lungs were not so inflamed and polluted to count as sickness anymore, so why did they feel so nonfunctional that the thin breaths he took in were hurting his chest?

(Pain there made him think of a blade and deadly agony and –)

He shouldn’t be needing breaths of this kind anyway, but his mouth was sewn mostly shut, his gills were little more than braised scars sealed together; this damned lamb had used the foul crown to rot his flesh and reshape it in an act of death reversed (blasphemy done casually, death flowed only one way, Narinder must be so- …he’d no desire to think about that monster right now, so he ceased), to be a two-legged land beast as if he were nothing more than a putty doll.

The tightness in his chest was hurting him and he wasn’t even familiar enough with being a terrestrial animal to know why.

The lamb smiled grimly at him.

Kallamar was left to wait until it was gone before he could throw himself across the bed and seethe.

This time, when the bell rang far across land and minds alike, he left the privacy of a small hut of humiliating defeats to stalk over to the stupid little temple.

He judged it all shamelessly (in his mind’s silence). There was only one temple for this whole cult. The heretical faith had not even spread to more locations, and still just sat in forgotten temple grounds which reeked of historical failures. Vessel after vessel cleared these grounds of overgrowth, then wilted and died alongside the pathetic cult attempts. Really, the latest vessel was a monster that’d slain Leshy and Heket and could’ve been trying to plant new temples in the bloodstained properties of Darkwood and Anura. This singular tent was not enough. Kallamar’s horrid brother wouldn’t be satisfied at all with the cult his vessel was building for him. And if he were, then Narinder had truly fallen off and was unrecognizable, which should have been a nice thought for a possibility but there was only shallow comforts ever involved when it came to him. He still wanted the Bishops dead and tortured. He hardly sounded like he’d mellowed. 

So, as Kallamar first predicted, the ghastly traitor would find this tiny cult pathetic and be angry with his vessel for not doing enough.

Really, it could have at least tried poisoning Darkwood and Anura. It’d had plenty of years to do so with no Bishops there to stop it. 

The inside of this singular temple for the One Who Waits was no more impressive. Its floors were cleaned, it had a pleasant smell unlike the stink of the cult outside, and although it was plain, it was at least not ugly. He could still think of a hundred things to improve it within just the first minute inside, but he supposed he’d focus more on trying to melt into the darkness of this dimly lit place.

Oh, unfortunately he was still getting noticed, but the lamb’s livestock were not too much of a fear for him unless they all decided to ignore his amnesty and act upon mob justice anyway. There were a good amount here who would probably remember their recent brush with the plague.

Truth be told, Kallamar mostly tuned out the mortals and the lamb. He clearly still hadn’t slept enough and his stress was making him distractible. It wasn’t his fault if he gave absolutely no damns about the awful doctrines of his brother’s delusional cult, or all the speeches the vessel probably gave about how ‘bad’ the Old Faith was.

It had lasted as long as it had for a reason. They were the world’s ruling power for thousands of years. But sure. This group of maybe forty and their chained, defeated, and frankly insane god were so much more impressive. 

This temple was oversaturated with the Red Crown’s power. It was disgusting. He could feel it trying to crawl beneath his skin. There were hundreds of that same identical red eye peering at him from the walls, he’d swear, though the only actual eye’s gaze came from the thing on the lamb’s head.

He tuned out and tuned out and lasted that long because of it- all until his name was spoken. The lamb’s call had all the instant effects of ice thrown on him. 

It was up there smiling but even with all the sudden shock, he could see through that ‘warmth’ (liar) to the impatience beyond.

“Kallamar, please come up here a moment,” it repeated.

Hells no. Not looking like this. Not in such sad clothes. Not by his famous name rather than a safe alias, amidst a crowd of his enemies!

There was no chance that it wanted to have to call him a third time.

So he moved leaden limbs and pushed through a murmuring crowd. Looking at any was a mistake. He was certain he caught some bird snickering.

What a surprise! The insolent wretch had attracted itself a following of insolent wretches!

(He knew very well that having the commoners laugh at the death-parade of a dirty defeated would-be usurper was natural, raised devotion, and lowered any faith left over in the fool who’d lost the war for godhood. But it wasn’t very fun to think about the truth of what was happening.)

This was far from the first podium he’d stood before, but it was the most humble in his recollection. The crowd was pathetically small. A real faith would be far more populated. The Old Faith had millions. Not that it was so crowded that he didn’t know the faces of its major disciples, especially those of his own.

An unintended glance to his left revealed mossy wooden blades making for a bloody crown piercing out of a head and there was only one fool who’d declare that a fashion choice.

Kallamar refused to look at the tiny, traitorous form which had become of Saleos.

In front of him, the lamb stepped to its own side as if to hand the altar off to the Bishop. Oh. No, that was exactly what it was doing. 

It grinned at him alone while his guts tried their best to beat one another to first get into the depths of his legs. 

“Tell them who you are, Kallamar,” the lamb demanded, “And why you are here.”

Who he was? Let it tell. It wasn’t like the name ‘Kallamar’ was hidden knowledge. And it’d said it loudly and blatantly, what, a good three times now? 

As for why: because he didn’t want to be in Narinder’s hands, and if any of them knew the god they were worshiping here, they wouldn’t either. He was here to survive. Coward. Yes, coward. Shamura would be crushed. Shamura wouldn’t care, it wasn’t like Kallamar meant much to them. Shamura would disown his memory like they’d disowned the last wretch to betray them.

The lamb did nothing to stop the murmuring down below. Kallamar faced the podium in a daze, surely looking rather plain compared to the hovering and eye bleeding the lamb showed off up here with. He didn’t- he didn’t have to pay too much attention. Again, he threw up a smokescreen against the reality of his current, undesirable actions. 

“I am no one,” he said while pretending to look at the eyes of the crowd. “Not compared to any of you. For we all know who holds power here. But it is true. I was Bishop Kallamar.”

Horrified whispers moaned through the crowd. 

Better than giggles, at least. Those would be coming. He was resigned to that being a fact. It was better than hearing the laughter of death himself, better than being in his grasp.

He wasn’t entirely sure where to go from there. It almost had him glance back to the lamb, but that little monster would only do something to disturb him even more and then he’d really not be improvising smoothly. 

His mouth (what was accessible to open) hung loose and the crowd was waiting for him to say more about that.

His thoughts offered him an abrupt new style to continue with instead. 

Kallamar raised his volume and spread his incorrect little arms as grandly as their embarrassing size let them. “Are not most of you from the lands of the Old Faith?” He waved down now towards the vague little shapes he recognized by unique heads, even through the fuzzy vision he was still enforcing for himself. Meet any of their eyes? How about no? 

“How many of you hail from Darkwood? From Anura? From Anchordeep? Haborym, Saleous, Baalzebub, you are recent converts too. The lamb in its-” (the beast made a little coughing sound behind him but at least his vocal pacing didn't falter) “-great wisdom and mercy spared you. And you,” he was sure he gestured towards others he recognized as favorites of his younger siblings, blessed with longevity and conditional immortality that was undoubtedly gone once they turned their backs on the Bishops, “those most long-lived disciples of the old lands, you too are here. In all your centuries of service, you saw this lamb and put this cult higher in your favors than all the options you observed before. Is it surprising I saw what each of you saw?”

As if. Unless each of those traitors down there were terrified into compliance and came here to be pets in exchange for being spared the cruelty of the god of death, they were very different cases. He’d thought he chose his disciples better, but it appeared to him they had far weaker minds than previously believed. Influenceable cattle. Easily blinded by the shine, so much so that even after coming here and seeing the small, unpolished rubbish of a tiny, novice cult, they still did not see. They were little more than thralls, if that. The Red Crown was probably using its vessel to lobotomize each one until they were hollow dolls only capable of smiling and praising it. 

Kallamar was not yet ruined, thankfully. He was a god- or long-crowned now-ex god, anyway, and that sheer near eternity of ascended existence must be enough to keep him safe from that sort of damage for good, he hoped.

Well, he’d given his bullshit for who he was here. Now for the second part. Hidden, internally, he steeled himself and tasted the acid of disgust.

Outwardly, he was grand. If the lamb insisted on bringing him up here to show him off, he would take the opportunity to show he had thousands of years of experience on it. The vessel was the one far behind in this competition. He had no magic to help him now. It only captured as much attention as it did up here because it cheated with the little tricks of that crown. 

(It was some amount of spiteful satisfaction earned by doing this. He would still rather be under the sheets of that tiny hut’s bed than out here under the eyes of those who ought to be beneath him more than a few lousy feet.)

(He would rather be home, before the lamb came and destroyed its existence, and killed those who made a place a home to start with.)

“As for why…” Think, think. Kallamar settled for a burst of false enthusiasm, pulling on the reveal the beast gave him yesterday that had so ruined the rest of his night. “I am here to be a faithful missionary, of course! With the lands knowing who I am so well, they shall be unable to ignore the sense in my conversion! For its mercy, and yours,-” as if he should ever need to whine and butter up a bunch of heretical mortals so they favored instead of mocked him “-my deepest wish is to extend arms of a redeeming undeserved second chance to those still in the dark.” 

It was a good thing that he was experienced with speaking. He actually managed somewhat elegant words despite the awfulness of everything, and it probably didn't even sound half bad. His prior work with speeches let it spill out without too much hesitation or pauses of obvious, shameful thought put into something ad libbed and cuttingly unpleasant. The speaker believed none of it, but the speaking should be a good enough lie. Later, when he wasn't in the boiling pot like this, the horror could sink in and the dissonance of all the insults he was making to his faith and family and pride would hit him like a knife carved through the heart.

He hoped the vessel actually would forget about that plan. Kallamar could really not bear going back into the places that should be his and having the masses come down upon him for apostasy. He could not handle Silk Cradle, letting such lying words be spread to Shamura, heard by Shamura, even. He couldn’t, he couldn’t he couldn’t-

(If the lamb actually was anywhere near the ‘merciful’ leader that the brainwashed believed it to be, then it would not do that to the last Bishop. It was a twist of the knife, where it could just go in and kill them as it had tried with the rest of them. They were not even lucid half the time, they would relive the first experience hearing their last brother’s betrayal again and again.)

He heard it shift hooves around, altering its weight. The oppressive presence right behind him made him forget all about his poor elder sibling. 

“I was brought to be among you so that I could do this. I will be the most effective of missionaries for our blessed leader-” ugh, what effort it took not to gag, “And in this, may my repentance be accepted.”

Kallamar let his head fall in the most restrained, uncaring type of bow there was. It looked good to the audience, most likely. And it let him keep his eyes hooded while he stepped back. 

Be done. That was enough, wasn’t it? The lamb should take over and then close off, not tell him he wasn’t done talking yet. 

As if it could hear his mental hissing demands and pleas, it didn’t actually decide to have him go ruin his reputation and worth even more. 

He wanted to pay no attention to it or anything now that he could stand far back into the shadows of the stage. Surely, as consumed in feelings and unpleasant thoughts as he was now, there was no reason he should not be able to. Unfortunately, he still experienced that turmoil and was practically hyper aware of every single thing said. 

Once again, he cursed Narinder for not actually managing to take his hearing when he ruined his beauty forever. It would be a kindness now. 

Whatever tonic worked its blessings the day before, Kallamar was feeling mighty sick again. He was clammy, in an unnatural way compared to his previous sea-dwelling form. He felt just as nauseous, he wanted to say. Considering that he wasn’t keeling over on the ground to die, he was actually nowhere near the illness of yesterday. Psychosomatic, these things were called. Nerves. Or the sheer stress this sickly, diseased little body went through was not yet recovered from, would not ever be fully gone, and something in a day to upset that was this unpleasant could give way to its sicknesses again.

Hopefully not. He didn’t want to repeat that humiliating medical service by the murderer again.

Speaking of the beast, it was still only feet away. The rest of the small cult was leaving, dismissed. 

Kallamar wished it would go too. He was having an exceptional bad luck streak lately, though, so no can do. 

The last cultist left the curtain doors flapping. The temple was still diminutive and sad looking even now that it had some air to breathe. This was not adequate for any cult of worth. But unlike his spouted drivel, he didn't see the lamb as a cult leader of worth. He saw a monster’s tool, and a beast. And that thing saw him. It was staring.

Did it ever blink? He was fairly certain lambs were meant to. Just another way its disguise was flawed, the ghoul.

“That wasn't bad,” the vessel said. “Fine for on the fly. You almost didn't sound like you had a knife to your neck the whole time, but, eh, it's not like a threat doesn't get people over here.”

Casual, disinterested, cocky little beast-

A few dozen thoughts stormed through him at once. Half of them were visions of humbling the brat. The rest tasted a little too much like despair and rage together.

So it was a damned test? It already knew it planned to send him out to kill his own pride and reputation this way. It'd been the one to tell him he'd be its stepping stool to stand above the Old Faith and kick mud on the corpses. Praising it, detracting himself and the siblings he'd lost, he did not know that he would've come up with that angle on the spot if he hadn't been told already that he'd have to eventually. It sat primed in his mind. A worry that had kept him sick throughout the night before sleep finally happened. And the creature wanted him to repeat such drivel to the world?? So that it could expand an empire of willing beasts for the slaughter for its terrible devil of a god to kill on his own time, for his own amusement? Should the naive join it because of Kallamar’s words, he would have ‘succeeded’ in a way that would feel like defeat. And should they not, the fact that the lamb had a Bishop prisoner to speak such abominable words would still be very distressing, frightening. That could very well work to get them dragged here to fuel the Red Crown’s power anyway, since it wasn’t like a threat doesn’t get people over here.

Of course a servant of the traitor would be perfectly happy to intimidate and force victims through portals so it could brainwash them into worshiping it. 

All this.

All that on the spot panic and improvisation. 

A damned test.

A game to it, to see how well one of its killers would dance when it pulled the strings. It was nearly too much. 

“Yeah,” it said, abruptly unprompted. “It was a test.”

Kallamar’s expression twisted sourly. He couldn't complain about it. It wouldn't matter if he kept it quiet either. The beast could read minds. It had just flexed the power now. If the goal was to watch him squirm, he hoped it was enjoying the view. Little sadist. Lovely! What a wonderful discovery of just how many abilities the traitor was giving this vessel compared to past failures.

Stop thinking about it.

“Is that all?” Kallamar managed not to seethe too badly. His hands were clenched in withheld rage. “I ‘passed’, you enjoyed your games, are you quite done here or is there more I should have done unknowingly and unprepared?”

The lamb tilted its empty undead head.

“Hm. You could've bowed again. I wouldn't have minded that.”

Repulsive-

Haughty-

Bow- if you want to live-

Despite all the effort, his hands were shaking now. 

He would wind up dead swiftly at this rate. It would push him too far before he’d even recovered enough to be braced for the unbelievable commands. 

The lamb looked right on through him.

“Calm yourself,” it said through a smile of fangs. “You're not doing a great job convincing me you'll behave in exchange for living. You wouldn't want to go to the stocks so soon, would you now?”

And get rotten squashes thrown at him? Hardly. 

“Haa, as if I would bother much with you should that dissension start coming out of just your head.” It grinned yet its eyes were bloodthirsty voids. “I'd decide not to let the One Who Waits wait as long for you.”

He could hardly help his own thoughts!! They would be dissenting, because of course they would! He couldn’t control that from happening! 

Do not send me to him!

Kallamar scowled but said nothing of the sort. “Am I dismissed?” he asked in a growl, like each of the three words got separately dragged out by a fishing hook. 

It stared at him, plastic. Unchanging. Until he could’ve screamed at it.

Only at the height of that did it suddenly reply. 

“Sure.”

Kallamar needed no more encouragement. 

He walked as fast as he was able to without risking tripping and flopping over, unused to legs as he was. Hovering and swimming were very different states. 

One good thing amidst the hell of the last day was that he at least remembered the way he’d come to the temple. Another perk was that the heretics were all busy doing other things, so none were going to interrupt him along the way. They’d seen quite enough of him, thank you. He didn’t care to ever let them get any more glimpses. Their gossip had probably already started out there, and he burned. Stocks? He didn't need to be put in any physically. Spouting lies about how he now saw the wrong in his in-the-right family, faking sadness and asking that those in the Old Faith reconsider how they were in the right , the inevitability of doing that again with even more flourish out where only those who were losing and despairing and alone would hear it- if stocks were meant to keep people from being able to retreat and escape from the public shaming around them, if they were meant to embarrass so the one inside would be remembered for being a loser in a battle that now just propped up the victor, if it was all about word spreading and being public at all, then the lamb’s intentions were practically those prisons anyway. Just worse.

(Being tormented in the heart of an enemy's camp was expected, and those who lost close ones to that fate mourned them, felt pity for the pain they'd know their missing friend was going to go through, and they would be remembered and honored for remaining brave before their martyrdom. That was what Shamura could be doing for Kallamar now. 

It took a coward who no longer could be mourned or honored to actually agree and behave when the enemy took them outside to wage a smear campaign against all their former loved ones, their parents, and their culture and faith altogether.)

(He'd be hurting the memory of Heket and Leshy and Shamura less if he actually was kept in physical chains here, instead of appearing so free out there on missionaries.)

Kallamar rather wished to sleep some more. The day was a bust, his future sucked, but he'd come around completely to that activity again. 

Unfortunately, one heretic did follow him all the way and its oppressive presence almost made him speed up too much for his adjusting gross motor skills to handle. It wasn’t even talking! Why couldn’t it go away? Didn't have enough vindication for the day over depressing him already?

The ugly hut sat on its ugly grass in the middle of an ugly nowhere, just as he’d left it. It looked absolutely inviting compared to the temple back there. Kallamar reached the curtain door with relief and grabbed one to open the way.

The lamb decided to pipe up from behind him and let him experience that ice-dumping sensation again. Every nerve burned. His attention went entirely to the murderous predator that once again felt too close.

“Going to hide away all day again? You know you can starve now, right?” it said.

And? He didn’t know how long that took to start. He worried he’d get ill again if he tried eating what artless bowls of crap the pathetic cult had. He didn’t know where the kitchens of this place were! What did it expect him to do, go look around the grounds like a lost minnow? He’d humiliated himself in front of this crowd enough for the day, thank you.

(Well. Unless it thought otherwise. But surely even a deranged little monster could be reasonable?)

But he let the curtain go and turned around to face it. It didn’t wait for an answer. Not an outloud one.

“It would be ironic enough. You Bishops wanted to worship starving.” The lamb shrugged. “So it’s past time you actually know what your sister liked so much.”
Kallamar was an old god, not someone dumb. He knew what followers looked like during famines, and saw Heket’s dead often enough. 

(They looked hideous, to start with. Emancipated, bloated, ugly. Well, he already was a little ugly, to the degree that he didn’t look like he should with his true, magnificent body. He didn't want to get worse.)

“Well, since you’re not ‘dumb’, you can figure out when you want food yourself. But don’t come crying to me when you wait too long,” the lamb said. Its expression was currently flat again. He couldn’t read if it was amused or just vindictive at the moment. 

Playing along with its test, dancing for it, praising it with lies to the veil with its many-eyed entities above, apparently were short lived ways to get its approval. He needed it to want him alive. Preferably, even, (if he were to think very long term), he should need it to need him. For the moment, he just could not risk having it kill him. He’d put on a show for its followers to prop it up higher earlier. Had any good will from that already worn off? Then he just had to earn its favor again now. Surely he could play a sycophant long enough that it would lose interest in hovering constantly and terrorizing him.

This still was all a practical sabbatical compared to what the same amount of hours with Narinder would've been.

So instead of arguing anymore about his intelligence, or food, or how much of an awful little beast it was, he gave it a sickened, stilted smile. 

“Mind reading. An…impressive skill,” he praised. “None of the vessels before you were capable.” And Kallamar knew exactly who would've taught it how. 

Narinder thought this was the one.

He expected the prophecy, somehow, despite being banished during the whole time since the rest of them found out about it. 

He was wasting no chances in making this thing a promising weapon for his will to wield. 

And look how the Red Crown had already twisted it!

It was just a stunted, small, dirty, terrified sacrificial sheep beforehand. The last one they’d ever have the displeasure of witnessing. The last he’d ever have to watch weep or bargain, when it wasn’t as if the species was not all faith’s preferred object of sacrifice, or like the Bishops cared about killing it personally. They didn’t. It was one more of thousands of similar faces, and they hated none, so it was not as if it’d gotten toyed with or tortured to death. It died for the preservation of the world and it died very quickly. He knew for a fact that Narinder had always preferred a far more disturbing method for sacrificing his living offerings. And to this day, he didn’t even know what those tentacles were or where they came from! It looked nothing like the realm that they'd visited Narinder in before the betrayal, that silent, hazy, sandy white plane. And here the fifth's crown supposedly was simply tied to the domain of the dead. Just another hint. Just another sign that the Red Crown was not like the rest, and that the cat Shamura so attentively trained was no cat at all. Under his fur and flesh were writhing maggots, shadows with teeth, meat with minds of its own, eyes where no eyes should ever be expected to be- demon, abomination, as wrong on the inside as the glimpses through those crevices and the meaty monstrous tentacles that surged out of them-

If he cut open the lamb, would he find death between every bone and unworldly eyes staring back at him?

Not that it would matter, once it finished its vengeful crusade against the gods and freed the mad one. Narinder would drop it down one of those alien cracks and laugh at the meat that would be spat back out. The Red Crown would be back on the one it favored. This twisted, unnatural vessel would at least never have the time to get every abominable, horrifying power from the crown as its master had. And Narinder would hardly rush things along too much. Or would he? He’d undoubtedly shown it how to read minds, and he brought it back from every death stronger. Perhaps the traitor wouldn’t care how much of his own power he gave away, so long as it meant he watched his enemies get brutalized and murdered more messily, sent where he could torment them some more.

Kallamar remained in the doorway even when the distorted, once-normal abomination was nearly out of sight. It bought his praise, seemingly. It gave him too many opportunities to look at the fangs that resembled a different heretic’s, if limited to a tinier mouth. It could be oh so proud of its little mind invading borrowed powers and smile about that as much as it pleased. He’d smile with it, if that’s what it took! 

Thought spying beast. Kallamar wasn’t safe even if he outwardly acted to its demands perfectly. He could only have a sense of security if he escaped through the trees and made it far, far away. It would know if he was seriously thinking about escaping, and it would see all the plans, voiding their use. 

Yes, yes. What an impressive skill. How talented. Truly, a glorious leader worth bowing to as compared to the real gods it was destroying in some inane, unhelpful revenge quest.

The Bishop of the Blue Crown sneered, unwitnessed and honest, in its direction.

“Insolent wretch…” he mumbled after its shadow.