Varshan: The Mortmain and the Malignant Heart

[FlamingoDetective]

The whisper begins before the dungeon loads. A name, repeated in no voice, carried on no wind, yet present in the wanderer’s awareness as surely as the thirst that follows a long fight. Varshan. The Mortmain. The first victim and the last servant. Diablo 4 Boosting buries its most intimate horror not in Hell’s deepest trenches but in the choked tunnels beneath Kyovashad, where the Cathedral’s light penetrates imperfectly and the roots of ancient trees have learned to feed on what the inquisitors leave behind.

Varshan was not always a monster. He was a man, a father, a farmer who tended his crops and feared the darkness like any sensible resident of Fractured Peaks. When Lilith’s influence spread, when neighbors became cultists and fields yielded blight instead of grain, Varshan did not flee. He did not fight. He simply continued his labor, trusting that his obscurity would protect him. It did not protect him. Obscurity is not protection. It is merely delayed visibility.

The Malignant, those corrupted by Lilith’s whispered promises, found Varshan in his root cellar. They did not kill him immediately. Death, for the Malignant, is not the objective. It is the byproduct. They transformed him, slowly and deliberately, into a vessel for their most experimental corruption. His heart, removed while he yet lived, became the Mortmain—a pulsing organ of crystallized hatred, still beating, still hungering, still tethered to the man it was stolen from. Varshan did not survive this procedure. Varshan became this procedure, his identity dissolved into the Malignant collective, his consciousness reduced to the single imperative that drives all Malignant: spread.

The wanderer encounters Varshan not as a boss but as a culmination. His arena is not a throne room or a temple. It is a root cellar, still recognizably domestic, still containing the rusted tools and empty preserves that testify to the ordinary life he lived before extraordinary horror claimed him. His attack patterns are not those of a trained combatant. They are the spasms of a body that no longer remembers how to stand, how to breathe, how to exist without the Mortmain’s relentless pulse driving its limbs. Varshan does not fight the wanderer. He flails against them, his movements simultaneously overtelegraphed and unpredictable, the corrupted instincts of a farmer who has forgotten his harvest but remembers, somehow, that his hands were once capable of gentleness.

This gentleness survives, fragmentarily, in Varshan’s death. When the wanderer severs the Mortmain from his chest cavity, when that crystallized heart finally ceases its eternal systole, Varshan does not collapse immediately. He pauses. His body, freed from the Malignant imperative, resumes momentarily its original posture. He stands, not as a monster, but as a man. His face, obscured throughout the encounter by corruption’s fungal growth, becomes briefly visible. He is not young. He is not old. He is simply ordinary, the face of every farmer who ever worried about rainfall and taxes and whether his children would inherit a better world. Then he falls, and the roots reclaim him, and the wanderer carries his heart toward the alchemist who will render it into potions.

Varshan respawns. The Malignant Heart, that seasonal mechanic, regenerates its corruption and awaits the next wanderer who descends into Kyovashad’s undercroft. The farmer’s face does not reappear. His body, reassembled by forces that neither know nor care about his original identity, resumes its flailing. His heart continues its pulse. His name continues its whisper. Varshan. The Mortmain. The first victim. The last servant. The dungeon waits.