The consequences of being called everything but your own name for a couple centuries.
Stupid little quick doodle cause this interaction has been haunting me for the past month. Ignore the fact that I obviously drew the last panel on a different tablet, I’m impatient.
Art Fight attack #2! This stylish Lamb belongs to @ghosts-and-glory and is part of their No Devotion AU! You should totally check 'em out if you haven't :D
I adore the way you draw the bishops pre-everything. Can I politely beg to see some more Leshy?
I thank thou, for your words, I bring chaos worm.
I think we need to acknowledge more how objectively funny it is that the god of chaos is also the youngest sibling. I know in my heart this mf weaponizes his youngest child privileges.
I design Leshy off kudzu plants for how incredibly fast growing and invasive they are. Honestly never occurred to me to pick a type of worm to base him off of, I was too busy in the plant section.
I wanted to do a quick valentines doodle and I lost the plot, this is part one of at least 2.
One, I think I got possessed cause this is not my usual colour palette. Two, I’m very aro, romance repulsed, my only exception for some reason being Narilamb???? And three, I need to be heard out on one sided pining from Narinder.
Next time I do a limited pallet I gotta start with black and white and use a gradient map cause I wanted to change the colours at one point and it was a nightmare. Added like 3 hours onto colouring this.
I swear to god I drew this like 90% cause @panoffrying gave me the brain worms. Just drawing Shamura being threatening is my passion.
This is supposed to be Heket’s temple but the colour scheme makes it look like the anchordeep. I really wanted a cold threatening tone with red highlights and damn it I’ll have them.
Is Shamura training martial arts after being taken into Lamb's cult? If they enjoyed complexity and bloodshed of war than it'd be probably dissapointing for them if they had to... drop it all
Full under the cut because this turned out really long
Upon joining the cult Shamura was a shell of their former self. They join the cult dissenting, the long term effects of the crown still clawing at the edges of their mind, but after a few days they’re mortal, just themself. Without the crown to hold them together they suffer like their injury was yesterday.
The Lamb has the doctor, Puar, perform their usual tests on them. Shamura is hardly there. They don’t know their own name, can hardly speak, can’t stand or track movement.
There was no wisdom in their slurred words. No power in the way their hands shook.
The outlook is bad.
The Lamb doesn’t really want to help them, after everything, why should they. Shamura who had The Lamb’s entire race and family killed, who killed them aswell and countless of their followers. It would cost them so much, to try and help someone who spent so long just trying to destroy them and everything they had. The time, energy, resources it would cost and they didn’t even know if they could get better.
Deciding it wasn’t worth it was one thing, but getting the other ex bishops to understand was a whole other, even the doctor disagreed with them.
Dr Puar took on being their primary caregiver. They’d been a doctor for the past hundred years and seen concussions and dementia but nothing nearly as severe as this. They wanted to help Shamura but didn’t know how.
It wasn’t until Narinder joined the cult that The Lamb saw any reason to help Shamura. But there was something wrong with him and Shamura knew something, they just had to get to it.
Kallamar was the ex bishop Puar wanted the help from the most. He was scared of the lamb and red crown but he loved Shamura more.
The Lamb took Puar and Kallamar to the ruins of the temples in Anchordeep and Silk Cradle. They spent days digging through the decimated remains of the libraries for something, anything on this type of injury.
It seemed that they where looking down possible years of intense recovery. Needed herbs and medicines that may no longer exist, techniques Puar had never heard of. But they would try.
Puar took careful and detailed notes. Timed Shamura’s responses, wrote down everything they said, tracked eating, drinking, sleeping and every symptom they displayed. Improvements where slow and sometimes nonexistent at first. They took full minutes to respond and only in single words, barley moved, couldn’t feed themselves and suffered constant migraines.
The one thing that seemed to help them the most was their siblings. They didn’t remember them most days but every time one of they came to check in it raised their spirits. One of their faces was the only thing they could focus on sometimes.
Kallamar insisted he wasn’t a doctor but still worked around the infirmary, helping Shamura was the only thing he’d do without complaining. Heket spent hours sitting in silence with them, brought them food and flowers and changed their bandages. Leshy was the only thing that could get them to smile and they where the only person he would ever lower his voice for, he told them stories even though they hardly listened.
Improvements brought new challenges. They got better at speaking full sentences and following conversations but it revealed how fractured their memory was. Forgetting names, places and important events, how often they forgot where they where, they asked the same questions over and over again.
They complained of seeing and hearing things, phantom pains with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The sun hurt their eyes, rain gave them headaches, always sleeping but always tired. They would suddenly backslide constantly. One day could walk with minimal help and the next, couldn’t even hold a pen in their hand. Have a full conversation one day and hardly spit out their name tomorrow.
Until the day Puar looked Shamura in the eye and for once they saw him. Didn’t look past them with their blank stare but looked at them. They would ask to sit outside at night in the fresh air. They seemed to know now who they are, what they where, what they lost. A tinge of grief in their words.
Improvements brought frustration. On days they remembered who they where they were overcome with a mix of anger, guilt and despair. They where a god. They had bore down on armies, killed men with a twitch of a finger, brought other gods to their knees, and now they could hardly bring a cup to their mouth.
Emotionally, their siblings said they’d never seen them like this before. Before Shamura could be frustrated but their temper was cold and quiet. Now they wore a short fuse and suffered constant mood swings. It angered them that they couldn’t read, that their hands were numb, that they couldn’t walk without a cane, couldn’t go out in the sun, couldn’t string a full sentence together, couldn’t recognize their siblings faces, couldn’t feed themselves, couldn’t sleep without drugs, everything they lacked and lost wore them down.
Regardless, they where unusually steadfast. They would always pick back up. If they got frustrated they would try again in a few days. They tried anything Puar asked of them, anything for the smallest iota of improvement.
The outlook was better.
—————
This got out of control and took me like three days between the art and write up. I got really excited when I saw this ask cause the answer is so devastating. If I was taking Narinder’s trauma seriously I’m not gonna just ignore Shamura’s traumatic brain injury.
As a side note, I’m very unsure how to write the medical stuff, my guess is that cotl is based around 1300’s-1700’s but that’s a wide net to cast. My excuse for the stronger understanding of medicine and trauma is magic.
Shamura, could you stop being ominous and vaguely threatening please, you’re killing the vibe.
I’ve foreshadowed this idea a bit, of new gods taking up the crowns. Y’all are begging me to stop introducing more plot threads to my au and finish up old ones but I’m full of ideas. The award for most confusing timeline goes to me, oops.
I got experimental with the colouring on this, idk why I had this mental image of big blocky blue shadows and I re did the colours like five times trying to get them to work.
