"Say them, Brenda. Say the words."

Brenda's tired eyes struggled to focus on Derrick, her sister Wendy's boyfriend. Instead, they settled on his dangling cock. From her place, laying on a dirty mattress on the floor of the barn, she could smell his arousal. She tried to lick her chapped, bleeding lips, but her tongue was parched. Her trembling lips parted. "Puh-Please... ," she pleaded. Whether she asked for release, or sleep, or death, she was unsure.

"My lust lights the flame," Katelyn, Wendy's longtime roommate, whispered into Brenda's ear. Her hand groped Brenda's tit, before her fingers converged on Brenda's stiff nipple and pinched. "My will is his to burn. Until only darkness remains." Her teeth grazed Brenda's lobe.

Wendy looked up from her place between her sister's thighs, her chin dripping with cunt juices. "My lust lights the flame," she purred. "My will is his to burn. Until only darkness remains." Her fingers worked Brenda's hungry pussy with fervor, but with an unpredictable, maddening cadence.

"Say it, Brenda," Derrick said with a shit-eating grin. "Say it and this will all be over."

"M-My lust... I... ," Brenda moaned. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head.

Derrick rolled his eyes. "Katie, your turn."

Wendy stood, towering over Brenda, her skin slick with sweat and bodily fluids. She leered at her big sister and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before she walked away. Katelyn immediately took her place, placing Brenda's limp legs over her shoulders and lapping at Brenda's raw, overstimulated sex. Brenda had only met Katelyn a few times, but Katelyn had pointedly insisted on being called by her given name. Her tacit approval of Derrick's nickname was a demonstration of how deeply subjugated she had become.

Wendy disconnected Brenda's phone from the charging cable plugged into Derrick's Model 3. Brenda squinted into the headlights that were illuminating the barn. She wasn't cognizant that her fingers were curling into Katelyn's dark locks. "Mom says hi, Bren," Wendy said sardonically, reading her text messages. "I—I mean, you—told her we're going thrifting today."

Brenda was supposed to be spending a week with her little sis, and technically, she was. Wendy had grown distant, and her communication erratic, after she and Derrick, a project manager for a software start-up, moved in together. But she had always been a free spirit, and she told Brenda she had just been busy, but wanted to catch up. So Brenda flew out to Kansas City, and Katelyn made a welcome brunch for the four of them. Brenda had no reason to suspect her food was drugged, and that she'd wake up naked, on a mattress, in a barn.

As she weakly ground her hips into Katelyn's voracious tongue, Brenda had no idea how long she had been here, or what they wanted. She had been kept awake, in a constant state of arousal, for days. They only stopped their assault to let her shit or piss in a corner, or to walk her around on her wobbly legs for exercise. She was rationed water and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which she had to earn by swallowing Derrick's semen first. Refusal gave way to reluctance, then acceptance, before finally her body betrayed her, demanding enthusiastic oral compliance in order to secure her meager sustenance.

Each time they brought Brenda to the brink of orgasm, they would ask her to recite that mantra. She refused to cooperate at first, defiantly swearing at them. Eventually, she stopped answering altogether, before she started to beg and plead with them. For the last few hours, what little reason she had left was spent questioning why she shouldn't say the words. If it would end this torturous hell, why not?

"Fuck," Brenda groaned. "Please. I want..." Her voice trailed off into a delirious moan.

Derrick approached slowly, as Wendy leaned over the hood of the Tesla, eating an energy bar. "I know what you want, Brenda," he said as he squatted by her side. He tangled his right hand into Katelyn's hair, pushing her mouth into Wendy's engorged sex. "I want you to have it. I want to give it to you. But I need something from you first. I need you to say it."

Brenda blinked rapidly. She felt her mouth open and heard the words tumbling out before her brain could stop her. "My lust lights the flame," she said, her small voice scratchy. It had been so easy. Why had she resisted? The momentum of her descent broke through what feeble resistance she still maintained. She repeated the first line, louder and clearer this time. "My lust lights the flame."

Her eyes rolled back as her head tilted back. "My will is his to burn!" she declared. A week's worth of torturous arousal was about to hit her like a semi truck. Hot tears of shame and relief rolled down her cheeks. "Until only darkness remains!" she practically screamed.

Brenda tried to open her eyes. She was no longer in the barn, and she was alone, without the others. Instead, she was in an unbearably bright place.

A voice boomed, seemingly filling the space despite its vast emptiness. "Child," it said, "I am Hadit, the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am the manifestation of True Will. What concert do you have with me?"

Looking at the source of the voice was like looking directly into the sun. Brenda opened her mouth, her eyes tightly shut, but the only thing that spilled out was, "My lust lights the flame. My will is his to burn. Until only darkness remains."

"That wasn't what I asked," Hadit said disapprovingly.

"My... my will is his to burn?" Brenda stammered.

"I see," Hadit said. The bright light faded, and Brenda was able to open her eyes, looking upon nothing. The voice spoke again, this time directly into her ears, as if originated in her own mind. "Your will is yours again, child."

Brenda gasped as her mind focused with clarity, the haze of the past days clearing like fog from the coast. Unfortunately, with the lucidity came the sobering reality of her situation. Betrayal by her sister. Systematic and psychological torture by Derrick. In the real world, she was a broken, irreparable husk. A non-person. "Oh God," she said, choking on a sob.

"You are not an instrument of his will anymore. So I ask you, what is your will?" Hadit waited for an answer.

Brenda sobbed, rubbing her eyes. "I just... I don't want him to hurt anyone else."

A pause. "I can grant that request."

Brenda stopped crying. Her reply was strong, and tinged with hurt and venom.

"I don't care what it takes. Do it."

The space around Brenda went dark again, and for a moment, she thought she was alone. Then she felt it. The light was inside her. Her exhausted body felt energized, strong and sturdy. The haze and disorientation cleared from her mind, and she felt sharp, and lucid. Like she was thinking clearer than ever before in her life. She was single-minded and focused in her new directive: correction. Evening the imbalance caused by thieves of will and autonomy.

Wait. Oh no.

"This... this isn't right," Brenda said, but she didn't recognize her own voice. "This isn't what I wanted."

Hadit spoke to her in her own mind, as clear as if they were her own thoughts. "What you wanted is irrelevant, child. Your true will is your divine purpose."

Holy fuck. She finally said it.

Derrick stood up, watching with excited interest. His hand closed around Katelyn's shoulder and pulled lightly, a non-verbal cue for her to stop eating Brenda out.

Upon saying the mantra, Brenda's body went stiff as a board, seemingly every muscle flexed, as she convulsed on the mattress. Her eyes had stayed rolled back and were solidly white. She mouthed words, but the gibberish that she produced was unintelligible.

Crowley was a fool, he thought with a smirk. The old man had crafted the algorithm for absolute power, only to wrap it in mysticism and mumbo jumbo.

Derrick had brought erotognosis into the twenty-first century. Stripped down to basics. Merged with modern psychology. Hebbian learning. Operant conditioning. Neuroplasticity. Drugs in her food and water. Adderall to keep her body responsive, Xanax to put her mind to sleep. Wendy was the prototype, the MVP he kept making incremental improvements on. Katelyn was the beta version. Brenda was the finished product.

Derrick smiled as Brenda's body became a living orgasm. She writhed and twisted on the mattress like a fish on dry land, her tongue hanging out of her mouth. Her hands worked her breast and cunt so hard her dirty nails drew blood at her ribcage. The squeals she made were feral and inhuman, and she looked like the force of her undulations might snap her body in half.

No, the path to True Will through the ritual was not for the subject, but for her master. Derrick believed Hadit would agree: the true power of will was to consume it from others. Once rewarded with Hadit's power, he would be a god. And he was about to get what he deserved.

Wendy touched herself as she watched the ritual reach its climax. A pang of guilt over the annihilation of her own sister's ego was overshadowed by the pride that she had served Derrick well.

Wendy remembered how she had cried at first when Derrick conditioned her, but it was a distant memory that her brain had chalked up as necessary. The pain had ceased long ago, or, it had become indistinguishable from the pleasure. It didn't matter which.

By the time Katelyn's cries for help, in this very barn, had reached her ears, Wendy couldn't hear them over her own moans of ecstasy, and the squelching of her fingers in her sopping pussy. Giving Katelyn to Derrick and enthusiastically helping him break her closest friend had been a test—one she aced. Any remorse she might have about Brenda had already been conditioned out of her. Brenda's sister Wendy was long gone, and in her body was an extension of Derrick's will.

She retrieved her fingers and licked them clean, like a cat.

Jesus Christ. I need to get the fuck out of here. Derrick stumbled away from the light. This was supposed to be his milestone, his moment of triumph. But it had gone south so fast.

Brenda threw Katelyn to the floor like a rag doll. Or, what had been Katelyn. The irises of her eyes, which she used to lament for being garden-variety brown, were gone. Her pupils had dilated to the point they completely absorbed the color. Her mouth was agape, drool pooling in the dirt.

Katelyn never knew what hit her. She was the lucky one. Because what pursued Derrick wasn't Brenda. It wasn't even human.

A hand caught Derrick's ankle. It felt like a bear trap that had been sitting on hot coals. Derrick screamed. His hands reached out to Wendy, who watched in horror by the Tesla, its headlights inexplicably waning. "Help me!"

"You fucking coward." The speech was Brenda's, but the voice was ethereal and unnatural, as if she was speaking in chords. "Time to get what you deserve."

His fingers clawed at the dirt as he was turned onto his back. "Please, I'll give you anyth—" he begged, but then he stopped. What he saw was beautiful and terrifying. Brenda was on one knee. Her body had not just recovered instantly from nine days of atrophy and hard use. On the contrary; her muscles were lean and powerful like a lynx. Her hair was wild and stringy, falling around her face in all directions.

But all Derrick could focus on were her eyes. They were practically glowing and... shifting. They fluidly changed color: gold, then amber, then bronze. Flickering, like candles.

She let go of his ankle, but he didn't try to escape.

Her mouth curled into a grotesque grin as she leaned forward. "Say the words, Derrick."

Wendy sank to her knees and screamed.

It wasn't because Derrick, the sun in her universe, and Katelyn, her closest friend, laid on the barn floor, listless, their eyes colorless and black. It wasn't because her sweet sister, rising from her crouch, had been possessed by an ancient malevolence. It wasn't because she feared retribution, or death, or that worse fate that lay just short of it.

It was the guilt.

The chaos that had just unfolded before her eyes had unraveled Wendy's fragile grasp on reality like a ball of yarn. Five minutes ago, she would have told you Derrick's will was her absolute truth, and now she couldn't tell you her name. But she did know she had done this. It didn't matter if her mind wasn't her own. The weight of her deceptions and treachery had landed on her like a ton of bricks, and she was buried under it.

Wendy wasn't gone after all. She was here now, anguished and shamefaced.

Brenda approached her. All Wendy could see were teeth and eyes.

"Bren," she sobbed hysterically, "I'm sorry. Please. I'm so sorry."

Wendy looked her sister's eyes for mercy, a human emotion, and found none. Only purpose.