#yarna

I came up with Yarna one day while I was playing the game and indoctrinating a follower. I think the default name given for her was Yana? Then I added the R because haha cat and yarn, and also because it reminded me of the name of that one Doctor Who character. I stuck with that, then I had the thought of giving her a brother, and I named him Chanto after Chantho, another Doctor Who character. If you’ve seen these specific episodes you know exactly why I stuck with those names lol- I actually went kind of insane the night I thought of Chanto because I felt so smart and like I was Winning At Symbolism.

Mary I just made on a whim because I thought of “Mary and her lamb, but what if Mary is the lamb?” and so I justified her existence with a half-shitposty comic, and that’s the end of that

Anyway, here’s a little bonus!

It’s Lambie and Chive’s children if they lived long enough together to have them:

After like a thousand years of being a cult leader Lambie starts thinking that they want a break from all their responsibilities, and so they decide to try having a child with Narinder to see if they can keep the cult leading in the family. On account of their… eldritch-ness, Lambie’s unable to have children the regular way, so they needed to use a ritual that would actually make it possible. Use your imagination for that part.

They didn’t expect it to work since they kinda just bullshitted it, but somehow it did work and so Narinder ends up carrying their firstborn, which they name Yarna. From her birth Lambie has groomed Yarna into becoming the perfect cult leader, just like Narinder did with them, but there were still a few doubts in their mind. They decide to have another child, Chanto(Narinder carried a him too), and raise him as a sort of back-up plan. They also decide to raise backups to the backup but with children of their followers instead of having another of their own, starting a sort of cult leader/disciple school. This along with Lambie’s selective shows of affection breed jealousy and rivalry between the two siblings- Yarna believing that being the next cult leader is her rightful place as the firstborn and afraid of losing her position, and Chanto just wanting to prove himself to Lambie and get the same treatment that Yarna gets.

Narinder notices the growing tension between the siblings and does his best to teach them to cooperate with eachother and keep a healthy relationship, but his idea of a “healthy sibling relationship” isn’t the best to begin with… still, he warns his kids of what happened with his own family with stories of the past, but that’s pretty much all he does. Aside from keeping them apart so they don’t fight, he doesn’t do anything else, and the kids have heard his stories so many times that they start to tune them out and forget- retreating into their own world of spite and jealousy. This is all made worse by Lambie deliberately stirring up trouble between them, seeing them as in competition with eachother and their schoolmates and making no effort to hide it, believing that if they’re in competition with eachother then they’ll strive to be better and pick off the weaker ones.

Jealousy runs amok between them. Yarna has always had an advantage with being the firstborn and first student, giving her more time than all the other kids to learn and hone her skills as a cult leader. This obviously makes her the biggest source of jealousy for everyone else since they’re basically playing catch-up and hoping that she’ll get behind somehow to actually give them a chance. Though this also means that there’s extremely high expectations put on her to be the most model student of the entire cult, causing her punishments to be even more extreme when she does make a mistake, and Lambie’s punishments for her are the worst of all. Since she’s the most promising student, she’s the one that Lambie pays the most attention to and that’s an extremely sharp double-edged sword- not just for her but for everyone else too. Lambie pays the most attention to Yarna, so she gets most of their affections, leaving everyone else basically in the dust. Nobody else gets as much of their attention and praise as Yarna, but this also means they’re allowed much more freedom and their punishments for mistakes aren’t as severe.

Chanto as the second born is at a disadvantage with their studies that they try their hardest to overcome, and though the hard work does pay up and they inch ever closer to Yarna, in the end they feel like they could never reach her- not only in their studies but also personally. Both of them want affection from Lambie, their parent and beloved god, but Chanto also wants Yarna’s affections too, at least at first. They believed that if they caught up to Yarna then they could both have fun as siblings while also getting Lambie’s attention. Yarna, of course, only sees him as a rival. What he gets praised for is something she’s expected to do without it, and when he does something bad he’s punished with a lot less severity than a small mistake that she would make. Not only that, but he has a freedom that she craves. Yarna is constantly on edge and acting perfect all the time, studying 24/7 and doing it all with a forced smile she’s perfected to look natural all while her own brother is allowed to play around outside in the trees and with the other kids. She believes this is an injustice, and so every chance she gets she “disciplines” Chanto herself, using his naivety and craving for affection against him, becoming his biggest bully. She would berate him, steal his food, destroy his things, and spread rumors about him all around the cult in hopes of getting his reputation so low that Lambie will finally discipline him the same way they discipline her.

Years of bitterness, jealousy, anger, hate, and routine neglect pass by and Yarna is still the first in line for cult leader status. Lambie’s attention has turned solely to Yarna after a while, practically ignoring all the other students in favor of constant monitoring of her to make sure she doesn’t mess anything up. They’ve gone from grooming her into the perfect cult leader to instead turning her into a mini version of them, feeling that they could only leave the cult in her hands if she did everything as they would. This has led to them ignoring even Chanto, their other child, who has started defecting against their leadership due to this neglect without them even noticing. Their plans of pitting their kids against each other in order to make them better leaders has failed, turning one into a constantly stressed internal mess and the other into a secret dissenter that slowly blooms a rebellion in the dark of night, growing it steadily for years. Chanto has realized that Lambie has been abusing him, his classmates, and most of all: Yarna. He tries to help her out of the situation several times but she never lets him- she’s too deeply brainwashed and still resents him for what she couldn’t have. She’s going to follow the path that’s been laid out for her like the obedient half-sheep she is or die trying- and, well… Chanto will free them both from their lifelong misery, by any means necessary.

A few more years pass and Yarna has finally taken her place as the new cult leader while Chanto and half of the original cult have dissented and split off to live somewhere else. This, in theory, should make everyone happy, but… neither Yarna nor Chanto are at ease with the other group’s existence, and so there’s still friction between the two, but a war wouldn’t benefit anybody as of now and so they’re just keeping their distances for now. At least, that is until the dissenting group settles into a place with an abundance of a specific resource, causing them to thrive more than the original cult.

I’m gonna speed this up because I’ve been writing this over the course of several weeks and I’m tired but basically:

Trade negotiations are started but eventually fail so bad that it snowballs into a war, Yarna and Chanto leading their own respective armies

Lambie leaves the two groups to fight amongst themselves believing that it’s just another one of their kids’ sibling fights while Narinder is freaking out knowing that this will kill both of his kids. He attempts to convince Lambie to join the fight only to protect the kids and make sure that they don’t fucking die even if it means killing everyone else because he doesn’t have any power in this situation. It works but way too late

Lambie goes to the war site and finds their kids. Dead. They stabbed each other in the heart and died at the same time, the consequences of Lambie’s actions being this. They kill every single cult member- old, new, dissenting and loyal, deciding that starting from complete scratch with only Narinder is the best course of action.

This isn’t the first time they’ve had to start over with only Narinder, but while the first time was accidental this one was on purpose, and it hurts a lot more. Lambie truly is devastated at the loss of their kids but it’s Narinder who took this the hardest. He will always love the lamb and how ruthless they can be, but this… this made him realize how much more evil they could be. However, what hurts the most is just how complicit he realizes he had been.

The whole situation changes them both but mostly Narinder, leaving him in a state of shock for so long before he finally starts to grieve.