Myanna’s body lurched as every muscle in her body suddenly tensed, causing her to sit bolt-upright in the rain. Still covered in mud, she could see the suit of armor Tobias had been occupying lying in the mud only a few feet from her, the chest plate smoking and sizzling as raindrops hit it. Pain clamped down around her skull like a vice as the image of Olcaru’s face entered her mind, followed immediately by Tobias’s echoing howl of agony. She couldn’t recall what had happened after he tried to invade her mind and feast upon her memories.

Pressing her palm against the side of her head, the cuirizu slowly regained her footing amid the mud and stood. Burned into the surface of the chest plate was a distinct handprint that looked to have brought the armor down somehow despite the rest of its structure being left relatively intact.

*Reach out,* Olcaru’s voice echoed in her mind. *Reach out and let my work be done through you.*

Frowning, Myanna kneeled beside the suit of armor, removing her hand from the side of her head to place an inch or so over the imprint in the armor. It was an exact match. Onesa’s voice cut through the rain behind her as she continued to examine the markings.

“Myanna!” the dark elf called, scrambling down the slippery slope of the hill before reaching her. “Myanna, are you---?”

Onesa froze as she took in what lay before her. Somehow Myanna had put down a possessed suit of armor with a power she didn’t quite recognize. “How did you do that?”

Standing again, Myanna shook her head. “I don’t know. I think it was Olcaru, but my memory is muddled. Perhaps a side effect of his attempt to feed on me.”

“Olcaru? Here?” Onesa sounded surprised, her eyes searching the darkness for any sign of the goddess. A distant rumble of thunder was the only reply she received.

“Where’s Drusilla?” Myanna asked, regaining her composure before turning to face Onesa once again.

Onesa brushed the sopping white hair from her face before gesturing vaguely up the hill. “Just up there. Are you alright?”

Myanna nodded slowly as she flexed her left hand, opening and closing it slowly. Something felt different now. There was a certain sense of anticipation growing in her that she couldn’t quite explain. “Yes, I’m fine,” Myanna replied after realizing she hadn’t spoken as she ascended the hill. She moved carefully to avoid slipping in the mud and sliding back to the bottom, cresting the hill after a few minutes of careful navigation.

Drusilla sat on the back of the kochwe, shivering in the cold despite the cloak she had wrapped around herself.

*Seek the heart*, whispered a voice in Myanna’s mind. She glanced back at Onesa to see if it was her that spoke, but she already knew it hadn’t been. Frowning, she turned her attention back to Drusilla. The matter of Tobias remained open and would become more difficult to handle if they fled now. Giving him any time to bolster his defenses would be a mistake, especially if she had somehow stunned him again with whatever she had done to him while he was in her head.

*End it,* the voice in her mind repeated. *Seek the heart. End it.*

“Drusilla,” Myanna croaked before clearing her throat. “If Tobias was bound to the estate, what would you consider to be at its heart?”

“What does it matter?” Onesa interrupted. “I thought we were leaving.”

“Olcaru has different plans for me, it would seem,” Myanna replied calmly. As tired as she was, she could not go against the mandate of the goddess. “I’m to put an end to this.”

“What are you talking about?” Onesa frowned, shaking her head. “She spoke to you?”

Not requiring the same level of explanation and convincing as the dark elf, Drusilla brought the kochwe about. “I think I might know where to start.”

“This is ridiculous,” Onesa objected, “How are we to strike at the heart of an entire estate?”

Myanna took Drusilla’s extended hand and pulled herself onto the back of the kochwe. “If your faith has wavered, Onesa, remain here and wait for my return to collect you.”

The dark elf stared up at Myanna in silence as she considered the veiled threat in the cuirizu’s words. Myanna had said plainly that it was the will of Olcaru. Choosing not to comply with the will of the goddess would undoubtedly result in punishment for her when they returned. Worse still was the damage that it would do to her house. When put into this context, Myanna’s words became less of a threat and more of a statement of fact.

“Forgive me,” Onesa apologized. “I don’t know what came over me. I am with you.”

“Excellent,” Myanna replied as the dark elf retrieved her own steed. Though caked in mud from losing its footing in the rain, it looked no worse for wear. The cuirizu gently tapped Drusilla’s arm, signaling her to lead the way. Whatever had happened with the suit of armor wouldn’t buy them enough time to dawdle.

Drusilla brought the kochwe into a steady gallop through the rain, knowing the grounds nearly as well as her husband, even in the dark and the rain. A flash of lightning illuminated their surroundings, followed shortly after by a crack of thunder Myanna could feel in her chest. Drusilla’s experience as a rider showed significantly in how she handled the beast compared to Onesa, knowing when to lean with the creature’s weight and when to ease off of it.

Expecting their trip back to bring them to the crypt she had seen during her walk, Myanna was surprised when they came instead to a small, unassuming cabin amid a dense cluster of trees. Exchanging skeptical glances with Onesa, the cuirizu dismounted before helping Drusilla from the back of the creature. “You’re sure about this?”

Drusilla offered an uncertain look to Myanna. “If there is anything that could be considered the heart of this estate, it would be here.”

“Why here?” Onesa asked as she joined them. Though they were partially protected from the rain under the canopy of the trees, the noise had not diminished. “Wouldn’t it be in the crypt or the manor house?”

“No,” Drusilla responded with a wave of her hand. “The crypt houses the pieces of his body that he can occasionally reconstruct and animate for short periods, but it’s hardly the heart of the estate. It’s merely vanity.”

“And the manor house?” Myanna asked as they slowly approached the cabin. The fatigue running through the cuirizu’s body made each step she took heavier than the last.

“More vanity,” Drusilla said coldly. “The manor house was never a home for him. Its main purpose was always a display of power and privilege for him, with the operations of the lands coming as a distant second. It was a thing he coveted from a distance as he oversaw the cultivation of my bloodline.”

“But this,” the blonde gestured toward the cabin, her body trembling from the cold. “This is where he lived so long ago, meticulously preserved through the centuries by himself and other family members. It was kept as a symbol of sorts, we believed. In truth, we had been conditioned to value what he valued for when he was prepared to take it all back from us.”

Myanna stepped onto the modest porch of the cabin slowly, the wood beneath her feet creaking but otherwise appearing to be in stable condition. “Why is he so interested in your bloodline?”

“Because it’s his bloodline,” Drusilla explained, earning a slight cringe of disgust from Onesa behind her. “He’s my distant ancestor. Born to those who originally settled this land during the time of the Imperium. The pride they had in themselves became an obsession for him when he became a vetala.”

Myanna examined the front door and the single window that looked out into the trees from this side of the cabin. Neither looked remarkable outside of the excellent condition they had been kept in. Knowing what she did now, Myanna supposed that the structure had been maintained by Tobias’s will for quite some time, kept in the state he remembered.

“So he managed your family’s breeding until you came along?” Onesa pressed.

“Yes, someone worthy of refreshing his legacy and strengthening the bloodline,” Drusilla replied through her shivering. “For all the good it did us.”

With a sudden brutish move, Myanna kicked the door open, nearly taking it off the hinges. The cabin's interior was idyllic in a way, preserved so as to seem frozen in time. Stepping inside, Myanna’s gaze moved over the dated furniture, kept clean through unknown means and organized in a way that a man would nostalgically recall his mother keeping his childhood home. The cuirizu’s eyes settled on the hearth. “There.”

“The hearth?” Onesa asked curiously. “Why there?”

“In ages past, the hearthstone served a similar purpose in homes as cornerstones in temples,” Myanna explained as she approached, scanning the immediate area for something she could use to crack the stone itself. The fire iron on the rack next to the fireplace wouldn’t be enough, but a heavy enough hammer was all she needed. “Many would consecrate them with rituals. Those who kept the skulls of their ancestors would place prominent ones on the mantle above it instead of in the family ossuary.”

Onesa and Drusilla stared at Myanna in silence, both surprised by her knowledge of such old human traditions. Myanna paid it no mind as she continued to rummage through the room. Tobias had kept little on hand that didn’t serve a particular aesthetic amid the nostalgia of the room. Even things that ought to be present for the function of the home had been omitted in pursuit of such sentiment. Of course, with no need for such items to remain on hand in his current state, Myanna couldn’t blame him.

“What are you looking for?” Onesa inquired, craning her neck to get a better look at what Myanna was doing.

“Something heavy,” Myanna answered as she rifled through another cupboard. “Anything I can use to crack the stone.”

“Ah,” Onesa acknowledged as she stepped back through the door, returning a few moments later with a splitting maul from somewhere outside. “Saw this on the way in.”

“Perfect,” Myanna grinned wolfishly as she took the maul and tested the weight of it in her hands before approaching the hearth. “Time to put an end to---!”

A blast of intense flame suddenly erupted from the mouth of the fireplace like a dragon breathing fire into the room. Myanna fell backward in an attempt to outpace the flames, only to have the whole front part of her body badly scorched by the heat. It was better than standing there and taking the brunt of the blast, but not by much.

Onesa was much faster than Myanna had been, pushing Drusilla over the couch to one side as she leaped in the opposite direction. Before any of them could recover, the cabin lurched as it lifted itself from the ground, the floorboards churning and shifting as the structure ejected them from its interior. Myanna hit the sodden ground outside heavily but was thankful for the cool reprieve of the earth after being hit by the flames. Another one of the significant differences between cuirizu and other varieties of fiend was a vulnerability to fire. Not only could they not wield magical fire in any form, but their typically sturdy fortitude could not stand up to it at all.

Digging her gloves into the ground, Myanna slapped globs of cold mud onto her burns as quickly as possible to control the damage to her flesh. The searing pain from the fire had been enough to jolt Myanna back to her senses, fending off some of the fatigue that slowed her movements. Pain was an excellent motivator for anyone bold enough to embrace it as she was. But as the house shambled around in place, shifting its form into a crudely monstrous configuration, Myanna was at a loss on how to combat such a thing.

“Whore!” Tobias roared from the jagged maw that had formed out of the front porch. But he wasn’t speaking to Myanna; his attention was leveled squarely on Drusilla. “You would bring them here, of all places? Have you no shame?”

Lifting a foot crudely shaped from the foundation of the cabin and the ground beneath it, Tobias advanced to stomp on Drusilla, who stared in horror at the monster as it bared down on her.

“Plentaaz jecantroli!” Myanna called, reaching out toward Drusilla with a mass of roots from the surrounding trees to pull her clear of Tobias’s path of destruction with barely a second to spare. The wave of fatigue that ran through her from forcing the magic through her had become painful.

Letting out a howl of rage as if from the mouths of a chorus of tortured souls, Tobias turned his attention to Myanna as he swept the back of his crudely formed fist through some of the trees. The trunks buckled and snapped with the force of his strike, the last of which he seized and swung down at the cuirizu like a club. The sound of the rain and thunder was drowned out by crashing trees and snapping branches.

Clutching the splitting maul tightly in one hand, Myanna put all of her strength into leaping out of the path of the tree being swung at her, rolling to a stop in the loose soil and mud as her wounds all reported their objections to such vigorous physical activity. Feet from where she had stopped was the kochwe Onesa had originally prepared for her, pinned to the ground by one of the fallen boughs it was unable to avoid in its haste to flee.

The cuirizu scrambled over to the creature, pulling her pack free from the bundle on the back of the saddle. Inside she found the satchel containing the vials Onesa had taken from Myanna’s room in Willowridge. As Tobias’s massive form brought the tree back down for another strike, Myanna was forced to abandon the creature to its fate, taking the satchel and splitting maul with her. Though the tree failed to meet its mark with her, the shaking of the ground and the churning earth was enough to take her off her feet and throw her through the air several feet.

As she struggled to recover, Myanna pulled the satchel open to see what she had that could offer her an edge. Her heart sank as she stared at the vials inside. Many were cracked and empty, and those that weren’t were impossible to know the contents of at a glance. The rain had soaked through the satchel, and the ink on the labels had run and smeared. She could figure it out with time, but time was not a luxury she had.

“Motherfucker,” Myanna grumbled, glancing back toward the monstrous house as it reacquired her as its target. She tried to sort through the vials as quickly as possible, plucking a few out she recognized and didn’t want. The rest was a risk, but one she had to take if she had any hope of seeing another day. “Olcaru, give me strength.”

Casting the empty satchel aside, Myanna crushed the remaining vials in both hands before bringing them to her face, inhaling the contents with a deep breath. Some weren’t effective as inhalants, but much of what she made for the Abyssals was due to the variances in digestion among the faction’s members.

The effect was immediate and violent as the various alchemical components mixed in unpredictable ways. Her wounds felt like a distant memory, only to be replaced with a burning within that screamed through every nerve ending. She tried to hold back the scream of agony at first, but once it slipped out, she found it felt good to scream. Her eyes teared up, and her throat went dry. The cuirizu felt invincible, euphoric even, as pain became pleasure and mixed within her. Her flesh began to knit as her heart raced, and an immense pressure pushed at the back of her eyes.

Myanna screams ebbed, and she began to laugh. The cabin monster that was Tobias stared at her for a moment as the alchemy tore through her body. She pressed a hand to the side of her head, feeling like her skull would pop if she didn’t. Her grip on the splitting maul tightened.

“You should not have pressed me,” Myanna grinned wickedly, her voice slightly distorted. “Failure here means death for me. What other option do I have than to take such risks now?”

Her energy surged, causing the wooden haft of the splitting maul to glimmer with branching veins of bright green. The cabin monster brought the tree down, unconcerned with whatever she had done to herself a moment before. This time, instead of evading, Myanna brought the splitting maul up against the tree. In a flash of fiendish phyllomagic, the blade bit deep and split the tree before making contact with her. Myanna laughed as the cabin brought back a severed stump where the tree had been before.

“What have you done?” Onesa gasped, revealing her hidden position among the undergrowth in her shock.

“Olcaru’s will,” Myanna replied with a degree of sadistic glee, fiendish eyes fixed upon the advancing cabin monster.

The clash was a chaotic storm of splintered debris, wood, rock, and plant life. Tobias hurled everything he could at Myanna in his weakened state, willing the trees to uproot and lend themselves to him. She countered with such a surge of Phyllomagic that it ignited the night in flashes of green, masses of plant life that had been under his control suddenly exploding and turning against him as she hacked her way through the pieces of earth and rubble that she could not take control of. She was a wolf on the hunt with the scent of blood in her nose, leaping and tumbling through tight spaces with the grace and power of her cuirizu ancestors born of Ivalia. Any slivers or shards of debris that found a home in her flesh went unnoticed, her sense of pain wholly divorced from reality and her conscious mind.

“You only delay the inevitable, cuirizu!” Tobias roared as he hurled another wave of churning earth in her direction, narrowly missing Onesa and Drusilla. His aim had grown sloppy in his semi-panicked state. “You cannot hope to outlast me!”

“That’s your problem,” Myanna laughed maniacally as she burst through the wave of earth, her arms and legs coiled tightly with protective thorns. “It’s always been your problem!”

Hacking into the front face of the cabin with the splitting maul and prying it apart with a surge of alchemically enhanced fiendish strength with her other hand, Myanna glimpsed the hearthstone within as the cabin thrashed around to rid itself of her. “You always rely on the passage of time to do your work for you.”

Immense hands of splintered wood, shattered rock, and warped iron descended upon her, only to be rebuffed by swings of the maul as it began to weaken under the stress of the magical enhancement. Without being specifically crafted to hold magic, many mundane weapons and tools would buckle under the pressure before too long. Wounds opened along her shoulders and back as pieces of the cabin pulled some of the corset piercings free, peeled the leather from her torso, and tore through the protective thorns she wore.

“I prefer my way,” Myanna growled, feeling her body reaching its limit as the initial rush of the alchemy began to wear off and take its detrimental toll. “Hard and Fast.”

She surged forward, moving into the cabin as Tobias screamed in protest, trying to reach within the cabin body first before willing the interior to shift. The floor rose to meet her, and the walls ripped open to assault her plank by plank. Furniture even hurled itself at her in a vain attempt to keep her at bay. None of it was strong enough to stand up to the swings of the maul or cause her to register enough pain to stay her hand.

Desperately rearranging his structure to bring every piece of iron he had available inward, Tobias formed a crudely shaped shield around the hearthstone. As hard as she could swing the splitting maul and as powerful as she felt, the likelihood of penetrating that amount of iron was slim.

*Do it,* the voice in Myanna’s head whispered with ecstasy. *I gave you the means. Use it. Speak the word.*

Myanna leveled her free hand with the malformed shield of iron and called upon the magic gifted to her by the goddess. “Auxeda!”

The corrupting power of Olcaru surged through her, leaping from her fingertips and rapidly oxidizing the metal of Tobias’s final desperate act of defense. As though left exposed to the elements for countless years, the metal turned to rust, flaked, and crumbled away, leaving the hearthstone unprotected.

The cuirizu wasted no time, bringing the pack of the splitting maul down upon the hearthstone with a thunderous crack that rivaled that of the storm overhead. She brought it down repeatedly, the power running through it twisting and warping as Olcaru’s profane might bolstered and empowered it for a few seconds more. Each strike was true, finding its mark in the stone with the power of an unholy smite with each swing. The stone cracked and split as the agonized wails of the entity bound to it rang in the ears of the cuirizu, whose only choice was to press onward, hard and fast.

“Yes!” Myanna gasped, euphoric destructive power surging through her as she hacked the heart of the creature to pieces and defiled the very memory of the place in the process. “Take it, you pathetic worm! See what your betrayal and weakness have wrought for you! The end of your line, the end of your legacy!”

The stone, cleanly split through, began to crumble under the mystical weight of death and time as the undead curse on Tobias buckled and released, unable to preserve his consciousness any longer. His screams of agony began to fade into the dark as he lost his grip on reality, yet Myanna continued to crush, split, and tear everything in front of her.

“Almost there,” she gasped as the sadistic pleasure approached a crescendo. The utter desecration brought her to the brink of orgasm. Then, just as she was about to surrender to the psychosexual climax of sadistically slaying the vetala, the last whispers of undead power vanished. The floor went out from beneath Myanna as the grand finish eluded her grasp, and everything came crashing down around her. Below her, the broken foundation of the formerly possessed cabin rushed up at her, while above her, the roof descended. Everything in between was crushed as Myanna’s vision went cold and black.