A shrine says “stay your weapon before you pray” and sheathing does nothing. What does it want?

Steps

1. Read the shrine’s text and expect it to mislead you. “Stay your weapon” does not mean sheathe, and nothing on the shrine says so.
2. Stand at the shrine, facing it, with nothing else happening — the recorded attempt is made alone, out of combat.
3. Crouch. That is the input that works in the one session on record.
4. Expect to lose health when the prayer lands. The same player loses a visible chunk at one shrine and says of another that the god “accepted his sacrifice — I guess I took damage”.
5. Do not reload if the first attempt seems to do nothing. Two reloads in the recording cost more time than they saved, and the input was the problem, not the save.

What the shrine actually says

The on-screen text, read aloud: “Bow before the queen. Stay your weapon before you pray to the queen.” The word the player fixes on is “stay”, and he is not being careless — he checks himself out loud: “Stay means put it away, right? Like am I crazy? Do I need to pull out my weapon in order to bow?”

He tries it every way the sentence supports. He sheathes. He switches to unarmed, twice. He unequips everything he is carrying, narrating that he now has “no weapons that you could possibly confuse with my hands”. He loads a save from fifteen minutes earlier and does it again. He opens the game’s discussions to see whether anyone else has hit it, and finds nothing.

“Am I misinterpreting stay your weapon?” he asks, roughly two minutes in. He was. The answer is a crouch, and the shrine never mentions crouching.

What praying costs

It costs health, at both shrines this player reaches. At the first, he watches his bar drop and says the god “accepted his sacrifice — I guess I took damage”, and notes that this happened while that god’s moon was up. At the second, mid-experiment: “That took a lot of health really fast.”

He is a low-level character with a spell running, so how much of that drain is the shrine and how much is him is not separable from one recording. What is clear is that walking up to a shrine at low health is a bad idea, and this page says so as a caution rather than as a number.

The thing that happens next, and why this page will not call it a blessing

Seconds after the prayer goes through, the player starts floating. He drifts uphill, crosses terrain he could not have walked, cannot sprint, cannot jump, and after about four minutes it stops — “it was temporary”. He wonders on stream whether it is the queen’s blessing: “Is this her blessing? She’s like, you can now fly.”

It is very probably not. Eleven minutes before reaching the shrine, the same player says he is going in with “perilous acrobatics and pitiful floating”, names them as his plan for getting around, and casts the acrobatics buff on himself roughly four minutes before he arrives. After the floating ends he says, plainly, “let’s get rid of acrobatics” — which is not something you say about a god’s gift.

So the flight is published here as what one player guessed and this page doubts, with the two spell names he had running printed alongside it. No source establishes what praying at a shrine actually grants, and inventing one out of a coincidence would be the exact mistake the guide is written to avoid.

Requirements / limits

• One player, one session. Nobody else in the transcript pool prays at a shrine on camera, so the crouch has no second confirmation.
• Whether crouch is the input at every shrine or only at this one is not established. The player reaches two shrines and only fights this instruction at one of them.
• The health cost is described, not measured. No source reads a number.
• The shrines’ names cannot be spelled from machine captions and are not printed here. The queen’s name alone is transcribed four different ways across the sources read for this site.
• What a completed prayer grants is unknown. The floating that follows it is most likely the player’s own spell.
• The recording predates Update 7. NerveLabs list, under Fixed, that Adon shrine worship was fixed on 21 August 2026 — a different shrine to the one on this page, but proof that shrine worship was broken somewhere and has been changed since. Whether the crouch is still the input is not established on a current build.

Common mistakes

• Sheathing your weapon and expecting the prayer to fire. It does not, and this is the whole trap.
• Unequipping your gear. The recorded player strips down to nothing and it changes nothing.
• Reloading an earlier save. The save is fine; the input is the problem.
• Reporting it as a bug before trying crouch. The player on record was minutes away from doing exactly that.
• Assuming the flight afterwards is a divine blessing. He had a levitation spell and an acrobatics buff running when it started.

Still unverified

• Is crouch the input at every shrine?Not verifiedOne shrine, one player. No second recording of a prayer exists in the pool.
• How much health does praying cost?Not verifiedDescribed as “a lot, really fast” and as a sacrifice being accepted. No source reads the number.
• Does the god’s moon have to be up?Not verifiedThe player mentions praying while that god’s moon was up, and the game’s own lore says that moon transits daily. Nobody has tried it with the moon down.
• What does a completed prayer grant?Not verifiedUnknown. The flight that follows is most likely the player’s own acrobatics and levitation spells.
• Did Update 7 change how shrines are worshipped?Developer changelogIt fixed Adon shrine worship, which is not the shrine on this page, and it says nothing about the queen’s shrine or about crouching. No post-update recording of a prayer has been read here.