For the first time since he had left the forest Althos lived more or less peacefully in the dark chapel. The young god and his allies passed the next five days doing a variety of tasks throughout the chapel and in the surrounding area.

Althos spent most of his time outdoors, calmly and quietly tending to the gigantic area he had manipulated and transformed with his powerful nature magic. Though it surprised his companions, who were used to the deity's violence and adventuring, the deity took to peace and a stable lifestyle quite naturally.

Tristan retreated to the chapel and spent most of her time there. She poured over what few books she had in her possession, and frequently struck up telepathic conversations with fellow members of the Order of the Dark Saint.

Althos, while combing through her books, had told her that convincing them to accept him or even visit the chapel themselves was probably the next important thing the party could do, while she worked on uncovering more details about the second trial Althos needed to complete.

The imps swiftly took over the nave of the chapel and created their own small school of devilishness. Salifinos spent hours teaching its two young students. The three of them passed the time by vividly discussing the history of Infernius, the devilish hierarchy, and valuable techniques imps needed to ingratiate themselves into mortal circles and push mortals towards structured evil.

Gallow passed the time by aiding Tristan with what he could, and occasionally practicing his new abilities, the ability to camouflage himself, read minds, and peer through illusions. The rogue even trained with his master, asking the young god to come up with complicated illusions for him to peer through. In exchange, the orc helped Althos harvest crops and transport them into the chapel for the mortals to eat.

The orc felt his relationship with his master improve and expand bit by bit, with the young god working with him to hone his skills and the orc keeping him company from time to time. Of all of the party members, Gallow was the only one to prioritize spending an equal amount of time inside and outside during these days of peaceful research and homemaking.

Althos gave Raverangos, who was very much an out-door demon and not an indoor one, a series of tasks to do. The god knew his pet too well to ask it to help him when it came to doing non-violent tasks so the demon's role was to patrol the boundaries of the territory and Althos would send it on hunts twice a day.

Sending the demon to patrol the boundaries of the barrier the young god had established was busywork. Althos' barrier would hold and the deity knew it because of his enhanced control over his own magic. But the hunting was not busywork.

Althos had carefully instructed his pet to leave whatever it hunted alive when it returned home. Althos studied the critters Raverangos rounded up, saving a handful of them while allowing Raverangos to devour others. The young deity did not awaken the creatures he mercifully let go, but he did bathe them in divine energy.

He established a pattern quite quickly. He'd send out Ravernagos to hunt twice a day, and when the demon returned to him he'd carefully scrutinize whatever his pet had brought with him. He'd allow it to devour half of whatever it brought home and save the rest of the creatures in the demon's clutches.

When it came to the critters he saved, he'd do a few things to them. The first thing he'd do was heal them, curing their wounds and undoing the harm Raverangos had done to them. Then he'd bathe them in divine energy.

This was a dramatic process that'd fill them with potent magical and divine energy, in more than a few causes causing them to evolve then and there. Althos then explored their minds, creating a copy of them, and wiping their memories. He wiped their memories entirely.

He then gave them over to Silander. He had resurrected within her the ability to speak to animals, and she used this ability to preach to animals in Althos' care. At first, it had been a joint effort by the two of them, for the first two animals that Raverangos had captured. After that Silander quickly demonstrated a knack for this sort of work, leveraging her status as Althos' first awakened creature and first mortal familiar, to inspire awe in the creatures of the desert.

On their first night in the chapel, Althos and Silander sat down and discussed Althos' curiosity about the desert and his plans for her ability to speak to animals.

Within the chapel's nave, Althos and Silander sat in a pew the night that they had arrived at the dark chapel. Silander waited for her master to speak first, because he had been the one to summon her, hinting that he had a plan for her. She didn't have to wait long. Her master turned to her and quickly began to speak.

Althos' voice was quiet as he spoke. "Silander, I have an important mission for you." He said, gazing intently into her eyes. The young great-frog stared back, wanting to know her master's intent and desiring to get started with the mission he wanted to assign her too. She quickly responded to him.

"Yes awakener, what can I do for you?" Silander's voice was quiet, still having a bit of difficulty speaking the words of humanoids. This had been a constant problem for the young amphibian, but Althos knew how to fix it.

"You can speak your language. I can understand it and I don't want you to be in pain. Only you to accomplish what I'm going to ask you to do." His voice was soft and filled with concern for his familiar related to her obvious discomfort with humanoid languages. It hinted that the god cared for her, a realization the frog was not oblivious too.

She listened to her master and stopped trying to speak in the words of humanoids. So instead she spoke to him in her natural tongue. "Master, please. What do you need me to do?" Her language was an odd one, the language of the frogs was one that involved deep, croaking noises and required listeners to interpret the amount of time between sounds as a part of communication with distinct, recognizable meanings. Fortunately, Althos' ability allowed him to do so.

He looked at her and grinned, enjoying the sounds of her natural way of communicating. "I would like to use your animal speech ability, one of the abilities I resurrected within you. I've been thinking about its applications for a while now and I want to use you as a cult leader in your own right. I want you to help me gain animal worshippers and for you to be one of their leaders. Would you like that?"

Althos' voice conveyed his excitement at this thought. What felt like a long time ago, when she was first awakened, Silander knew she wanted to worship her awakener, Althos. She told him as much. Now as she looked at him, his eyes dazzlingly dreaming of a future where animals of all sorts worshipped him and where she led them, she was delighted.

She smiled at her master and spoke in her native tongue. "I'd love that. I will do my best to be a leader of a movement in your name and in pursuit of your goals. If you'll allow me, I'll convert every animal I can and unite us all, across species boundaries, in your worship."

Althos grinned at her, happy that the first creature he had awoken turned out to be such a devoted servant. And then the two of them spoke about tactics.

The two decided to not lie to any potential followers. They focused on honesty, on demonstrating Althos' power, and on converting creatures to Althos' worship based on the creation of mutually beneficial relationships. Althos wanted to help his worshipers, he wanted to make their lives better and safer. And in exchange, he wanted their devotion and service.

Silander asked her master an impressive barrage of questions so as to help her decide what to tell any creatures she was asked to convert.

Her inquisitive barrage included hard-hitting questions that touched on the relationship between different sorts of animals that may be united in their service to Althos but be on different ends of the "prey-predator" dichotomy. She also asked about Althos' feelings towards aiding worshipers in evolving into other forms of monsters.

His response to the first question reflected what he had once said about his followers eating fungi.

"I am a deity of nature. I know that eating and being eaten is a part of nature's cycle. I will aid those who are devote in their service to me, but I do believe in the importance of knowing thyself. A creature who seeks to serve me and to be protected by me must know themselves as they know me. They must be strong or swift and they must seek to become stronger or swifter."

Althos considered how to respond to the second question, but it didn't take long for him to reach his answer.

"I wish to aid those who wish to follow me. I will give my followers the tools to strengthen themselves, including the key to evolve in a way they wish to evolve in. All they must do is approach me and ask me for assistance. If they obey me, I will aid them."

The two of them must have spent nearly an hour and a half sitting atop that pew, Silander asking questions and her master answering them to give her an honest understanding of the deity and his goals related to divine leadership of animals.

Surprisingly, Althos had told her not to mention the possibility of awakening them. The deity demonstrated unusual patience and explained that he felt it was worth picking and choosing special members of each species to awaken as opposed to awakening them all. He did this because he wanted to see what sort of creatures both awakened and unawakened servants would evolve into without his non-divine interference unless they explicitly asked.

By the time the conversation was over, she had a much more thorough understanding of her master's state of mind. She was grateful for the time he took to give her this new mission and his reassurance that her natural language was a great language in its own right, something she hadn't heard from anyone until that point. His indiscriminate nature was one of the things the great-frog loved about the man who awoke her.

Silander's true and heartfelt desire to serve Althos enhanced her charisma and it conveyed to animals in her presence that Althos was an odd, and unique master. In time her sermons, combined with the divine energy of the god himself flowing through them broke any hesitation they initially had towards becoming Althos' servants. Usually this took a few hours. They inevitably found themselves convinced to become minions at least, and often worshipers of the odd deity.

This labor of love that fused the work of Raverangos, the decision-making of Althos, and the skills of Silander, resulted in Althos gaining servants that ranged from small to large scorpions, to lizards, and even desert foxes. None of them were awakened, but the divine energy flowing through them caused about a quarter of them to spontaneously evolve.

Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was that it meant that Althos gained eyes and ears that went far and wide across the desert. The creatures Althos spared universally became familiars that served the young god across the desert because he released them back into the desert after they had been converted into his servants.

Althos also welcomed creatures into the remade area surrounding the small chapel, freely inviting prey and predator alike to drink of the water sources he created. Animals from all over the desert came to the chapel to drink. They knew not to attack any of the creatures they saw, as Althos always appeared before them and warned them not too.

They were also free to eat some of the fungi he had planted in the fungal gardens he made close to the chapel. From time to time some of them would eat the wrong fungi, and they'd pass away in the gardens. Althos used their corpses as fungal beds, and due to his powers to speed fungal growth more and more beds of assorted sorts of fungi appeared in the area near the chapel.

On the fifth day since the end of their adventures in the tomb of Agowraith, Althos found himself in one of the many fungal gardens he had carefully created.

Althos proudly examined the fungi with a hawklike eye. He had cared for the majority of the fungi blooming in the verdant soil by hand and he had fertilized them using a variety of bones and organic matter. The fungal garden in front of him was the result of his own patient handiwork.

It blossomed beautifully, and the fungi in it were remarkably active creatures. There must have been dozens of them, of all sorts. Most of them were small, but a few of them were meters tall. Most of them were pitifully still, but some of them were incredibly animated and expressive things.

Althos watched as perhaps the single most animated of them, a gigantic monster that he was very pleasantly surprised to find growing in a garden he had created last night, extended fleshy tendrils outward in search of food. He kept his eyes on the tendrils. The things tapped the ground around them, hoping to snatch a snack.

After a few moments of careful searching, the tendrils retreated to their home, underneath the cap of the single biggest mushroom in the particular garden Althos found himself in.

Althos laughed as the thing's tendril meekly returned to their default position which was a defensive one that protected the mushroom's stalk. The thing approached him and rubbed the cap of its shromy form against him. He patted the thing's cap and smiled at it. He spoke, gently and soothingly to the thing.

"There, there... you're a hungry thing aren't you?" He said that, while searching his person for something suitable to feed the fungal monster. Much to his disappointment after searching his person for a few moments he realized that he couldn't find anything to feed the creature.

The creature who was eagerly nuzzling itself against him was a baby fungal lurker, strange fungal beasts who normally only emerge as an evolution of lesser fungi. For some reason, perhaps due to his mastery of the fungal domain, one of the powerful creatures was grown in his fungal garden. This made him quite happy but he truly didn't understand why it was that the thing had appeared as the fungal equivalent of a newborn in a garden he had created from scratch.

The creature had rapidly grown, and he had made sure to feed it hand-selected meat. The deity could sense the creature's power and wondered what would happen if he raised it carefully and painstakingly. He hoped to find out over time and for now, was content to raise the thing like a dotting parent.

The deity wondered what to do with the rest of his day, and came to an interesting realization.

If I have some free time today... I should go visit the dark elves!