Burn the Flesh.

	Diana moved purposefully alongside her allies, numerous and mismatched as they were. All were from the portal and had been in the second wave through, the first wave having passed through merely hours beforehand, and she was tired of waiting. She would find a husband in the next six hours or die trying.
	The ground she skittered over was broken and torn, a brown wasteland of mud and dirt that her sisters in arms (more like a bunch of succubi and amazons in ill-fitting armor, she thought) had much more trouble with than her -- she was out in the lead by a good ten feet even with all of them in dead sprint.
	In hindsight this is probably what saved Diana from what happened next.
	Diana barely noticed the whistle and the small metallic object hurtling overhead as she purposely moved towards the ridgeline which separated the blasted wasteland around the portal and the fields surrounding it. And then everything turned white -- and hot.
	Diana's reflexes kicked in the second her skin erupted in flames. She was facing away from the blast, luckily, so only the back of her body was directly sprayed with the exploding white phosphorus and it would be another three seconds before the fire spread to her eyes. In that time she managed to get four clawstrokes into the earth, digging roughly three feet down before the agony struck her hardened nerves.
	She screamed. Long and loud she screamed, a wail of agony deafened only by the chorus of the dying behind her, endless and limitless their voices echoed in her ears along with the hissing crackle of the fire on her skin that just would not go out. She scrabbled, clawed, and rolled but still it burned. Her regeneration merely prolonged it and the demonic energy in her blood was having a hard time doing more than blunting the fire.
	All was pain. Her thoughts were obliterated by the excruciating pain and her mouth had long since been sealed shut by the burning fire welding her jaw together. There was naught but silence behind her and the crackle of fire from her ex-sisters. She rolled and burned, rolled and burned, the fire spreading nearly as fast as she could put it out. Her eyes had boiled out of her skull, her skin was gone and every motion was agony as her raw muscle and nerves burned and scraped against the rocks and mud.
	The mud saved her. It coated her skin and extinguished the burning phosphorus, blocking it from oxygen and wiping it off of her body. All was silent, but Diana was not sure if that was because all the fire was out or because her ears had ruptured and melted. Her horns were likely the only part of her body seriously unaffected, still standing tall and twisted. She lay there in silence, breathing heavily through her ruined nose and expelling a mote of burning phosphorous from her nasal cavity.
	Luck. Luck was all that she survived by, she decided. She was alone -- her sisters were dead. She was crippled. And she lay there and couldn't remember why she had wanted men so badly -- only that she WANTED. But what did she want?
	She could not remember. She pushed that thought from her mind and her mother's image came unbidden to her thoughts. Strip the flesh, she whispered. Lick the wounds. Let your body heal you. Let your blood heal you.
	So with her one remaining functioning arm, she rolled over to pull it from the safe spot underneath her and expose it to the over-warm air. With a heavy arm and clumsy movements wracked by pain she reached over to her other arm -- and rent straight down it, claws gouging into her flesh.
	If she still had a mouth she would scream. The pain began newly, but it was more dulled this time. Nothing could compare to the horror she had just experienced and even the pain of pulling flesh from bone was nothing compared to the fire on her skin, in her flesh.
	A wet sound and the claws rent the flesh on her arm free, exposing the black-stained white bone underneath and her blood flowed freely, torment ignored as she continued to scrape down with her claws. In mere moments the blood coalesced into a veneer of muscle, layers stacking on top of each other. If she still had eyes, she would have been fascinated. And within two minutes an entirely new arm lay there, fresh and ready for action.
	And so she continued. The flesh on her torso and upper body was wounded. Strip it. Rip it off. Tear it. Gouge your flesh. The pain must be worked through, she though as she howled in her sealed mouth while her organs were slowly, carefully exposed as the outer flesh healed. Then the legs. Her legs were, surprisingly, fine. They were mostly bone to begin with, and if they were a bit more slaggy now, well, that was fine. They still worked, right?
	Her abdomen and thorax were hairless and likely would never grow hair again. Her skin needed to be stripped but the pain from doing this was lesser now. It hurt not nearly as much to flay herself open like a piece of meat. Still she metaphorically gritted her teeth as she stripped herself bare in that muddy, toxic wasteland.
	And all of a sudden she was whole again. She could not speak, but she could see after a few moments of gouging of the ruins of her eyes. She ached. She wanted. And as the ridgeline came into view again, she would HAVE.
	Diana moaned through sealed teeth.