In spite of the cruelty of her smile, Sia's voice sounded sorrowful, beseeching as it wavered.

"Come now, are we so ready to draw our own blood? Are we not the betters of a sororicidal, confused kinswoman? I say we give her a chance. One last chance, to show how sorry she is."

The cold fire in Sia's eyes seemed to pinion Netta down, threatening to squeeze the life out from her lungs. "Well, estranged Sister, do you have anything that you want your Sisters to hear?"

Netta felt her mouth fall open as no sound came out. She saw as Sia's secret smile widened.

Closing her eyes, Netta tried to think of what few happy thoughts that she could dredge up - hope.

All she could find there, instead, was a terrible, bloody wish that turned her stomach with the hate, the anger in it.

It shocked her to feel it. And for the first time, she could not discount it as some residual emotion that she had picked up from Ash.

With her eyes closed, she took a step backwards and forced herself to talk loudly, yelling.

"I killed only in self-defense! I know I've been estranged from all of you, but I want to change that!" Netta gazed at her Sisters, wished that she could see their expressions beneath the shadows of their hoods. "I was wrong. Wrong to think that I could run away from this - and it's come back to me in this way. I don't want to do anything else, I just want to live in peace - with whoever will have me, here, now."

Netta took in a shuddering breath, allowing her eyes to close for a moment of peace. When she re-opened them, she looked at the Sisters on the raised platform. There was no comfort to be found in the hooded, shadowed faces that looked back at her.

She swallowed thickly and tried to envision their faces in the dark hoods.

She continued, desperate. "I don't want any more bloodshed to happen. I've seen enough to know that I would like nothing more than to be - with those of you that would have me, in spite of what you think has happened. I just - want to be a part of a family again." She felt the difficulty in choking those words out, the feeling in her neck was as though a snake were constricting it. Her voice sounded, even to her ears, strained. Desperate.

There was a pause and it froze the moment in time. Netta looked up at her Sisters, hoped that some could see the truth in her words.

And then one of them laughed.

"I'm sorry," A voice that Netta recognized as belonging to Erith cried out. "Are we supposed to be taking the shit that comes out of that one's mouth seriously?"

There was more laughter, hard and unkind, sounding almost barbed.

The others were joining in laughing.

"We hate you, kin-murderer," Caspia said, pushing her forward from behind so that Sia had to grab once again at her hands to steady Netta.

Sia seized Netta tightly, drawing Netta to her for a moment. She whispered into Netta's ear.

"You need to accept your fate, like you always have." She then dropped Netta's unwilling hands, as though she had been burned and, turning away, she turned halfway around and yelled out to the three who had brought her in.

"Majority rules, bring her forward."

Netta yelped as she pitched face-forward onto the platform. She felt the stinging pain that radiated from where her nose had flattened against the ground.

She moaned, reaching up and finding her hand coming away, stained with blood.

She shook with the realization that if she had landed differently on her face, she could have died.

Her nose drooled blood and she blindly clamped her hand onto it to staunch the blood. As she struggled to her feet, she could hear a panicking voice crying out.

"Oh my gosh - someone, heal her before she bleeds out!"

A voice that she recognized as belonging to Sia snapped, "Shut up, Winnie, how she dies won't matter as long as it's on this platform."

Netta felt Sia wrench her head up from her chin, forcing her to look at her.

"Look at yourself. Did you ever think that you could stand against me?"

The only thing that Netta could do was moan in pain.

Sia brandished a knife, a wicked thing that seemed to glow in the bare candlelight in answer to the savage way that Sia held it. Immediately, Netta was haunted by the memory of how she had killed Ximenia. She froze.

Sia was grinning, Netta was vaguely aware through the pain clouding her mind, the shock, that her sister was speaking.

"For someone who had such a problem with me fucking them, it's poetic that the last thing you'll ever feel is me penetrating deep, deep inside of your intestines."

Netta clutched blindly at the chain around her neck with her right hand, slippery and rapidly cooling from her blood.

Her pain-addled brain reached out for the mental power to comprehend the danger in front of her.

She recognized her only hope in her hand - it's so hot now, how had I ever been able to hold onto it when Erwinnia had given it to me? - Although she knew, with grim certainty, that there was no way that her Familiar could possibly save her. Not in the face of these seasoned Witches who had had a human's generous lifetime to perfect the innate power between them and their Familiars -

Somewhere in the sea of her fear and hopelessness, she thought that she could hear her oldest Sister speaking, whispering to her.

"This will all end, if you do as you're supposed to."

And then a voice said something in her head, a voice not belonging to her.

She thought that somewhere she could hear a woman shrieking at her, but Netta clenched her bruising eyes shut tightly. It was hell's own cacophony that pulled her in, locked her.

Her hand wrapped around the chain, pulling on the burning metal so hard that she was vaguely aware of it snapping, breaking once more with enough force to draw more blood. She clenched it with all of the will she had left in her.

The screaming was no longer just in her head. Someone was yelling in her ear, shaking her out of her reverie.

She was now laying down the long line of pews, opposite to where she had been, perched on the edge of the raised platform. She was about to look to her left - to the cloaked woman, Erwinnia, when her gaze caught instead on the massive, red beast that stood in the center of the platform.

When It turned, Netta saw the large, thick tail - easily as thick as a massive tree's trunk - whipping about, erratically.

She took in the rest of his features in a sort of nightmarish haze, seeing legs that ended in cloven hooves, a massive and muscular frame, a head supported by a thick neck that was crowned in large horns that wrapped in on themselves to create a pattern that only a mad man would devise.

The creature broke through walls, the ceiling, and roared.

The sound was like an enraged, dying animal's, but Its voice was anything but natural. It was senseless, alien.

The dust roused by Its destruction swirled in the air, the power in the wind whipping Netta's hair into her face, pressing against her bloodied face.

She could hear Erwinnia then, howling out, "That's not an Incubi!"

At first Netta had no way of knowing what it was that she meant. Her mind seemed to process every detail minutely. It was when the creature turned around, having sent the Witches running from their places, screaming as though they had all gone mad that Netta found her eyes drawn, unerringly, to Its face.

The eyes were black on Its bony facial structure, hanging, heavy, in hollow eye sockets. They possessed a swirling darkness that seemed both devoid of space and weight but also possessing a leaden fullness.

She was thinking, in a daze, that this was the doing of her Sisters. But then her fear was submerged as she felt the weightlessness of the broken, bloodied chain in her hands, relative to how it had weighed, hot, in her hands.

Looking down at the chain, she realized, with horror, that Ashwood was undoubtedly no longer in it.

She had succeeded in freeing Ash - in loosing him into a room with that Monster in it.

"Ash!" She screamed suddenly, her mind sharpening beneath the dulling influence of the pain. The words she screamed came out, muffled and grotesquely distorted, as the blood continued to pour into and over her mouth. "Oh, Goddess, no!"

It was as the creature paused to turn to look at her, unseeing but also seeing all in her at once, that Netta realized that it was Ash's mind looking down at her. Responding to her desperate pleas.

She shrank back, felt her shoulder hit Erwinnia, then felt her Sister's grip on her arm, forcing her around.

She could hear Erwinnia yelling for her to run, and Netta blindly obeyed.

Her feet seemed to run over the broken structure of the fallen walls and the decorations, pulverized by whatever Ash had become. Erwinnia pulled her, steering her in her dulled state through the rubble left by the broken pews. All around them, the ceiling had been broken and snow fell in, blinding, seeming to come from the darkness of the night's sky above them.

"Keep running - we're almost out of here -"

Almost as soon as Erwinnia had said it, she saw the door become buried by a falling wooden beam, blocking the door.

Netta felt herself being pulled to the right, then heard as she realized that if she had not, a moment later, as she would have been crushed utterly beneath the weight of more of the ceiling collapsing.

The sound was like being a hair's breadth away from a tsunami's wave.

She didn't look back, even as Erwinnia leaped in shock before she cried out, pulling Netta.

They wove their way through the first corridor that they had found. They were going back downstairs and Netta recognized, vaguely, the way that she had been herded upstairs from her cell.

Realization - that they were going downstairs, where they would surely be trapped by the Monster that had once been Ash - made even the shocked Netta struggle against Erwinnia's insistently.

Erwinnia pulled harder on her Sister, pulling her close, making her hood fall off of her head as she jerked Netta.

"Don't you fight me - we need to escape down here to where the back exit leads. Oh - Goddess, you're bleeding out so much, though - we'll need to scrap that idea and hope that this place doesn't fall down on top of us and find a room to rest-"

Netta allowed her Sister to pull her, even as fear choked her. She imagined the crushing pain of being hit by the Monster only just above their heads.

The world spun around Netta.

She was barely cognizant of being herded into a room, her Sister sitting her down on a bed. Erwinnia worked rapidly, putting a magical barrier up on the door.

When she had finished, Netta could feel her Sister's scrutiny as she turned to look at her. Her Sister's hands worked, skimming lightly over the hot, wet mess of her face. Erwinnia's healing magic calmed the searing pain in her face. Dazed, she felt Erwinnina's magic wrapping all over the bruises and cuts.

When she was laid back on the bed and covered in a blanket, she felt her mind empty of all of the horrors that she had just seen, a sleeping spell descending on her mind.