Hearth Taxel is a chimera dullahan with roughly a wolf's head, cloven deer hooves and a spiked dragon tail. He was formed after a fight between those three species ended with body parts heaped in a forest clearing as a marker; a lightning strike revived those parts into one conscious being, albeit with loose connections and exposed ribs.

With his burning neck stump and the memories in his inherited brain he sustained (and taught) himself from the gifts of travellers he guided through the surrounding forest until Tori Taxel summoned him as a Halloween partner. It was the tiger genie who patched up the dullahan's chest hole and named him Hearth, for his neck flame provided a lot of warmth and light but did not burn things, but he had already gained the ability to cleanly disassemble and reassemble both himself and creatures around him.

Creatures retain control and sense of their own parts under Hearth's modular magic, but only Hearth can levitate his own parts. He prefers keeping his head detached, sometimes letting his headless body cuddle it while asleep, and is wont to use his powers on those he meets to help them relax. Tori still lets him roam the forest he came from, but otherwise he writes mathematics-related computer programs as a hobby.

This is the first character of mine I bought from someone else – in this case MommaSelk for Halloween 2021 (the original adoption page can be found here). As soon as I got the reference I began thinking of simplifications so I could make my own vector of him, but the bulk of the work had to wait until after my university semester, from which the title A Head Full of Galois Theory arose: one of my just-completed modules dealt with Galois theory.

SVG here.