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krysmcscience · 3 days

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Oh, hey, remember these cute lil kiddos who totally aren't evil or anything?

Yeah, they're in color now. And still very much actually evil.

pay no mind to the lazy background behind the orphans

Some more headcanon rambles under the cut:

Prior deets are here.

I've thought a little bit more about each Bishop's backstory kinda? But not too much - mostly just deciding how they met, and having fun assigning deaths to their families to allow for a continued cycle of abuse (in a sense). Each of the Bishops' families died in a way that relates to their eventual domains as gods, enabling them to lash out at others with the very things that left them as orphans. Because I'm nice to characters like that. And by nice I mean horrible. :D

Shamura:

Shamura's parents were already part of a cult, and had learned too much about a group of enemy heretics they'd been spying on, and thus their rather large family was slaughtered alongside the rest of the family's cult in the midst of the ongoing war. Shamura had been away to run an errand before the attack, and thus was unable to do anything about it (in parallel to how they did very little to protect their siblings from both Narinder and the Lamb). They were very close to their family, and the loss drove them to start finding new family in the form of other orphans they came across. It wasn't just the four who became their adopted siblings, but the others either did not survive, or simply couldn't keep up with Shamura's ambitions - to end the gods whose followers took up arms and cut down everyone Shamura knew.

Throughout their journeys, they intensely studied the ways of war, weaponry, and spellcasting, particularly curses; because, after all, gods could hardly be killed with mere mortal weapons. They also researched a great deal into the gods' crowns, as well as certain immortal entities who weren't quite gods, as the three birds seemed strangely neutral, and amenable to helping anyone who crossed their paths, all without asking for anything in return. Shamura's studies and research grew much easier once they met Kallamar, due to the circumstances of his upbringing.

Kallamar:

Kallamar's well-off but isolated family was wiped out by disease, spread intentionally by those who wanted to quickly wipe out proclaimed heretics, and Kallamar himself nearly died from the sickness, as well. He was found by Shamura, who had only been intending to rob the manor he lived in, but offered to nurse him back to health if he would grant them use of the place as a base of operations. He agreed, so Shamura did as they offered, with some assistance from their entourage, which by that time already included Heket.

Once Kallamar was on the mend, he was informed of precisely who was responsible for the obliteration of his family. He chose to join Shamura's group in seeking vengeance, and began to learn how to utilize various weapons from them. Due to his cowardly tendencies, though, on his own time, he focused more on subtler methods that he could use up until being backed into a corner - poisons, mainly, before expanding to contagions created from a mix of curses and natural elements. Kallamar's manor remained a base of operations for the siblings up until the beginnings of the Old Faith were established, and their respective temples constructed.

Heket:

Heket was an only child, and her parents both starved to death; they were farmers whose livestock died out across several consecutive crop failures. Those failures were made worse by intentional sabotage from several feuding cults situated nearby, as none of them wanted to risk letting their enemies barter for critical food supplies. Heket managed to survive by consuming her own parents' bodies, as well as those of dead cultists she came across while trying to go on living as close to normally as she could, though when it was realized that she was alone, her home was invaded while she was out looking for more food. Furious at the audacity, she torched the place with the interlopers still inside, and set out in search of a new home - and more food, which she was not picky about.

She would steal anything she could to eat from campsites and cult grounds, and for good measure, she would set anything she couldn't carry with her ablaze before moving on - equal parts distraction and a means to starve out potential enemies. She crossed paths with Shamura by chance - alone - and attempted to rob them of their food. They were more clever than she expected, though, and by now already used to desperately hungry orphans trying to nick a meal. To her surprise, Shamura invited her to eat with their small group, and between the food and the talk of bringing down the many warring cults one by own, Heket decided to continue traveling with Shamura - whether they wanted her to or not. Fortunately, they did, as she was already quickly learning the tricks to thievery, and had a knack for utilizing explosives. (I will die on this hill. She blew me up so many times, Kallamar had nothing on her.)

Leshy:

Leshy's nomadic family was killed in a freak accident - a lightning strike right in the middle of a random ambush by traveling cultists. Being little more than a toddler, Leshy initially survived by burrowing out of sight, and then by disarming the attackers with how deceptively cute he looked. On a whim, one of the cultists decided to try to indoctrinate him, and he was carried along with the group until nightfall - after which, in a fit of pure unhinged toddler fury, he wrecked their campsite AND their faces before fleeing underground. He survived just short of feral for a while, catching his food (animals and people) in the pit traps he'd learned to make from his family. After that, he wound up wandering close enough to Kallamar's manor to spot a group of kids heading inside, and decided to be the little menace he is.

He started off digging traps around the manor - and definitely ate at least one of the orphan kids - before graduating to breaking and entering. He nicked food, toys, and/or weapons each time, mostly just for the fun of it, before Shamura eventually managed to catch Leshy in a trap he couldn't burrow or bite his way out of (and his cute puppy eyes were not going to work on them anymore - not after the first two dozen times). Kallamar attempted to make Leshy fix all that he'd broken in the manor, as well as return everything he'd stolen, with very minimal success. Heket wound up being the one to bring Leshy more or less to heel, mostly by feeding him and showing off all the cool ways she could blow things up, which he found entertaining enough to become slightly more bearable around other people. For a long time, however, having him around was more or less like living with a half-feral and all-manic hyperactive animal without any concept of or care for social niceties. Kallamar did not appreciate all the property damage, but conceded to Shamura's certainty that Leshy's...unique skillset would be useful going forward. (Naturally, they were not wrong.)

Narinder:

In keeping with parallels - more than one this time, even - Narinder attacked and killed his own family. Eventually, at least, and as retribution, because his parents saw him as the runt of the litter, too needy and not worth the effort it would take to keep him alive. He was not merely abandoned, but sold off for a pittance to cultists, who wanted to sacrifice him to the then-god of death. Being as small as he was at the time, however, he was able to squeeze out of his shackles and wriggle from his chains on the way to the cult's ritual grounds, sneaking away while his captors were distracted. He did not go far, however - he was too furious with them for that. He trailed after them, instead, waiting until nightfall, and strangled the leader in their sleep with the very chains they'd put on him, before cutting the throats of the rest of the sleeping cultists. He then attempted to track down his traitorous family by following scent trails, but was soon thwarted by a downpour. Still, he vowed to find them one day, and sacrifice them the same way he would have been had he not escaped.

The deets for his meeting his siblings are in the prior post, so that really just leaves his family's deaths. After Shamura began their rise to power, their growing influence - along with help from the other siblings - made it easy for Narinder to discover where his parents and littermates had taken refuge. With his own influence in Shamura's budding cult, he faced no issues with ordering his "family" to be brought to him for sacrifice, though he did briefly fly off the handle and cut down his father for being the one to suggest selling the runt. Speaking of which - Narinder was quite delighted to let his so-called family see how much bigger he was than all of them by that point. He was equally delighted to behead every last family member himself, and to desecrate their remains by putting various pieces of them on display around the cult grounds. I'd say his adoptive siblings were disturbed by this, but. Obviously, every last one is fucked up enough to where we all know they weren't. <:]

At some point I'll share the toxic obsessive Narilamb AU that draws from this backstory, lmao, but for now I need to sleep. X_X;

#fanart #cult of the lamb #cotl #cotl bishops #cotl narinder #colt shamura #cotl kallamar #cotl heket #cotl leshy #all of these kids probably could have been normal if their lives hadn't gone completely off the rails so early on #well. except for narinder #he was fucked up and ready to stab a bitch the second he came into the world #and we all love him for it #i am so tired lol #EDIT: oh right - the scars on narinder's forehead were from the cultists he was sold to - another reason he was so pissed at them #they were trying to carve the symbols of their god into him but he kept moving around so they just ended up looking like trash ahaha

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