Downstairs, Netta felt drawn to look at herself in the mirror.

In it, she closely examined first her face and then her body. To be frank, she found both to be lacking - especially in comparison to Ashwood's.

Biting her lip, Netta wondered what it was that had driven Ash into such a frenzy the night before - horns or no. She was relieved that, at least for the day, Ash had said that in the spirit of pre-marital vows, he would stay out of her mind, allow her thoughts to herself, like before they had made love.

She was interrupted in the middle of examining herself, turning awkwardly in the mirror when she heard someone walk into the room.

Turning, she saw Morgan before the tipsy Witch gave her a large, sappy smile.

"Howya doin'?"

Netta had to fight to keep from smiling at the sight of the drunk-happy Witch. "Ah, just - checking to see how I look. How are you?"

"The ceremony's going to be in two hours, ya know."

"Oh. Is it - are we already almost there?"

Morgan shrugged, in her stupor the movement looking dramatic. "Geh - hope you enjoy the last two hours of your single life. Ah, shit, I'm about to get all choked up all over here..."

To Netta's surprise, the woman did as she threatened to, sobbing loudly and dramatically. Finally, she sniffled loudly, then said. "I'm sorry, there's just something about weddings that trigger that "middle of Bambi" moment for me."

Netta wrung her hands for a moment before she gave up, rushing over to the Witch's side to press her against her shoulder.

Morgan looked up, teary eyed and smelling of gingerbread rum and said, "It's so beautiful to see one of my Sisters married, happy. You're my Sister now, ya know?"

Netta had to suppress a sudden laugh. "Um, yeah. I figured that."

"Ya know, when Anais died, we were all heartbroken - scared - but then you came along. Do you mind if I tell you that you gave us hope?"

Not waiting for Netta to answer the purely rhetorical answer, the woman continued, saying, "This world sucks to Witches, and I may have been a bitch when you first came here. But. I forgot my point, the one I was trying to make, so instead just let me apologize so that we can get past this and maybe I can show you my wedding present."

Netta murmured her forgiveness, then was pulled back upstairs.

They reached Morgan's room, and Netta was staggered by the sight of the room. It was easy to be blown away by the sight of books stacked on every available surface, the massive amount of handwritten notes, stacked on every available surface.

"Oh," Morgan said in passing as she showed her into the room, stumbling a bit as she did so. "did I mention that I am the resident Monsters and Magics nerd-person? 'Cause I am. I can see the surprise in your face, it says that this bitch sounds like she's full of shit, but I am actually a published - writer person as such. Well, at least, only in the Mother Tongue."

Netta interrupted the woman as she looked as though she was about to say something else. "You write about Monsters?"

The woman hiccuped. "Been at it for seventy odd years, about the time that sex got real boring with Aristotle - that's my Familiar, before he flamed out and I moved onto my beau, Castophines. Where was I? Oh, yeah, been writing referenc-y material since you were probably dealing with your first menses."

"I'm not that young."

"What was that? Well, you get me." Morgan threw her arms out. "Been doing this a long time. Started out as a dirty, unsexy secret, then got complicated from there."

As Netta glanced around the room, she felt compelled to bring up the name of an author of the type of material that it sounded as though Morgan claimed to write. "Have you ever heard of Namoiah Cloister? Sort of a lesser known writer, but she wrote a lot of what I read, when I could afford my own library."

There was an uncharacteristic silence from the other Witch before she belted out laughing.

"You're kidding! You read my things?"

Netta felt her mouth fall open. "You - you're the Nemean Lioness?"

Morgan swooned, almost falling over and onto a stack of books so old that the writing on their spines had worn away completely. After regathering herself, the older Witch said, "I haven't heard that nickname in a long, long time! I think I just mentally regressed about twenty years, doll!"

She laughed, and when she looked back at Netta, her face was almost fully red, flushed from laughter and the affects of the alcohol. "Ohh, well, maybe you can appreciate this, then."

Morgan reached over and wrenched a thick folder off of the desk, waving it in front of her. "Well, don't just stand there," she said, her face wrinkling in distaste. "respect your elders and take what Auntie Morganna is offering you."

Netta walked up and took the folder.

It was tough to keep her composure. She had told Morgan that she had read her work, knew of her, but it was a lie - Netta had read all of her published work. At one point in her life buying herself every piece on their world that the eccentric, reclusive enigma of a writer had published, up until the Witch had abruptly stopped producing twenty years ago.

Even the book on Witch desserts and the rather taboo book that was almost a counter to the, at the time, quite risque texts on sex for humans, the one that dealt with sexual relations with Monsters.

That one had been a secret read, in the depths of her loneliness when she had managed to exile Ashwood for a period.

Researching her culture - the one that she felt alienated from - was a long, secret joy of Netta's. One that she had, around the time that her Mother had died, had decided to try to stop herself from indulging in.

She opened the folder with a reverence that she could not hide, and was taken aback at the title of the handwritten manuscript that she saw under the folder.

"The Deep King: the Tale of - of the Traitor King." Netta looked at the paper and tried to suppress her surprise. or was it simply dismay?

"This is what you've been working on for all these years?"

Morgan scoffed. "Way to make me feel old. And, yes - off and on, off and on..." she rolled her head around and repeated herself before violently shaking her head. "-too long. Some of those pages have been stinking up my desk since the Berlin wall went a tumblin' down. Oh, great, now I've made myself feel old. Classic Morganna."

Netta bit her lip, staring down at the title page.

Morgan's handwriting was looped, intricate, giving away to a whimsical soul behind the mishmash of the scholarly, shockingly well researched.

She should have been pleased with this manuscript, to hold it should make her dizzy. Anything written by the Nemean Lioness should have been good enough. still, though...

"This is really about the Traitor King?" She could feel the tight frown on her lips and was powerless to stop it.

Morgan, who had flopped back on her unmade bed, groaned loudly, not looking up from where she lay on her back.

"Why does everyone react like that when I tell them about the subject of my last book?"

Netta gripped the folder in her hands, felt the weight of the thick sheaf of papers encased between them. "Because - because - well,-"

Morgan interrupted her, giving her legs an impatient kick.

"Go ahead and say it. He's a legend, he never truly existed, et cetera, et cetera, you've been wasting that genius and perverted mind on a folk legend..." She gestured blankly above her. "Heard it all before already."

Netta was grateful that the woman wasn't in a position to see her face. "I wasn't going to say that."

"Oh? What were you going to say, then?"

When Netta didn't answer, Morgan sighed, then said, "Let me tell you something - hold on, help me to sit up first."

Netta walked across the room and helped the woman to sit up on the bed.

"Thank you. I've been researching that tale for decades, and from the start it never felt like a fantasy to me. It's funny, we never ponder why Monsters act the way that they do to us, what could have caused this. The only explanation that gets offered is what's referred to as the Curse of the Traitor King, in the same way that people talk about Helios carrying the sun to and fro - and the so-called coming of Ragnarok."

Netta was finding it hard to ignore her surprise at Morgan's sudden sharpness and the depth of her passion.

In that moment, even with it dulled by drunkenness, Netta could see a spark of the Witch that was called the Nemean Lionness in the squat woman gesticulating drunkenly on her bed, her glasses hanging, slightly crooked, across her button nose.

"Monsters - they're drawn to Witches, prone to begging to be taken advantage of. Legends say that magical beings were once these - persnickety creatures whose power, if perverted, could be something like a natural disaster. 'Course, back then that term, "natural disaster", was never used. Take it from experience: you never read an account of a Blackfoot tribe member and hear them call a tornado a "natural disaster". Where was I? Oh. I guess what I've been trying to say is that - well - I just thought that you would benefit from reading this, because -"

Morgan glanced up at Netta, seeming to see her for the first time. she coughed. She seemed to suddenly realize something and gave her her best attempt at an embarrassed smile.

"Oh, Goddess, listen to me. A-anyway, what I want to say is all in that," she motioned wildly towards Netta's hands. "so if you want to hear any more of an insane woman's babbling, there you go."

Netta felt as though she was missing something of Morgan's intent. She cocked her head to the side.

"What?"

Morgan groaned and fell back again on the bed. "Take that accursed thing with you - toss it in a river, tied with some rocks, I don't give a damn any more. I need to stop adding to that thing, before they find me committing suicide over another dead end I hit when reading the plagued literature that I can find on the matter. And... merry wife day or... whatever..."

"I can - you're giving this to me?"

Morgan was quiet for so long that Netta finally leaned over the bed and saw that Morgan had fallen asleep.

The crude drawings caught Netta's eye first, when she had been flipping through the pages of the manuscript.

There seemed to be a lot of care taken in the art, in spite of its simplicity, and she could see where the ink laid in the paper was so old that it had oxidized, and could see evidence of the art being added to with newer, jet black ink.

As Netta flipped through the pages, she found that she had stopped, as though unerringly, on a sketch drawn in an almost kinetic craze, black ink looking as though it were cutting into the white of the paper.

It was a sketch like all of the others, but it looked - different from the others.

For some reason, Netta felt her eyes drawn first to the subject's own hollow, black ink eyes, hidden beneath a mass of jet black hair.

The ink that had been inlaid into those eyes - purest black, surrounded by the yellowing white of the paper itself for what aspect of his face had not been covered by his hair - seemed to have been tattooed into the paper many times in a heavy hand.

They seemed to look up at Netta, stopping her errant flipping of the pages.

She felt her eyes open, astonished, as she looked at the figure.

He looked like a scarred man, heavily muscled and nude, bowed at the knees as he looked out from the page at the viewer.

He had bared his teeth, massive canines exposed, jaws jutting almost out of his skull. Black ink (signifying blood? Shadows?) seemed to drip down his face, almost looking at though it were the essence from the black in his eyes draining down his face. Like tears, or blood.

On his head was a crown of twining branches, a simple crown that was dotted with what looked like dessicated flowers and buds, tilted off of his head, kept in place only by the matting of his heavy black hair that tangled with the crown - and the broken, jagged ridges of horns that looked to have been forcibly broken off.

Beneath the shocking illustration, in Morgan's looping handwriting, it read: "The Humbling of the Traitor King."

Netta shivered and had to close the pages on her lap.

The burning holes of those eyes haunted her, were there when she blinked.

When a woman's voice called out from the doorway leading into Netta's bedroom, she almost felt herself throw the papers that she had been holding in the armchair, as though she had been caught doing something taboo.

Netta made an undignified sound as she tried to look as unbothered by the presence as she actually was.

Leaning in the doorway was Wu, whose appearance first threw Netta for a loop. She had never seen the tomboyish woman in much of anything that was not jeans, a ballcap and a worn t-shirt.

The woman was now showcasing her pale beauty, her black hair sweeping over a plain tunic that managed to make her look sweet, almost innocent.

"The wedding's taking place in an hour," she said, thumbing out. "they're looking everywhere for you - oh, is that - what I think it is?"

Netta looked down at the opened folder in her lap.

"It - it's Morgan's manuscript."

Wu walked into the room, leaning over to look at the papers. A smile teased at her lips - or it could have been a sneer.

"I see that Morganna the Learned has passed on her pox to you."

Netta clutched the papers instinctively. "I wouldn't call it a pox."

Wu laughed then and waved her hands in front of her.

"You got me all wrong. I call it a "pox" in the nicest way possible. What else would you call this obsession of hers?"

Wu leaned down to stare Netta in the face. "Twenty. Years. She used to pull in an income from all of the stuff she wrote, but she got into this subject, and then it's all she writes."

Wu sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose with her index finger and thumb. "And she's never finished this thing. I should know - I've tried reading this thing, hoping that I could edit it one day like I did all of the others -"

"Wait - you edited the other books?"

Wu looked as though she was suppressing a laugh at Netta's expense.

Instead, she grinned, then said, "You don't seriously think that my best friend in the whole wide world, Miss Scatter Brains, would be able to publish a book all on her lonesome? You did? That's your first mistake with Morgan. She's got the biggest heart of all of us, and she used to have this thing about "scholarly integrity" before she wrote that handbook on magical sodomy, but she can't manage to publish without someone's help."

Netta looked up at the witch that hovered in front of her and found that her mental image of the great Nemean Lioness was building before her very eyes. Or crumbling.

Wu scoffed. "What I wanna know is - how is someone other than me allowed to read the precious genius' rough draft?"

"I - I don't know. She took me up to her room and told me who she really was, then she gave me this. she said that she didn't want it anymore." Netta paused, finding her eyes drawn to the thick folder on her lap.

"Ah, what else is new? She doesn't go about giving her writing away, though, so, that's new."

She looked down at the papers in Netta's lap, an inscrutable emotion buried beneath the frown that had formed. Finally, she sighed and stood back up.

"Never mind. I take it this was her attempt at a wedding present?"

When Netta nodded, Wu shrugged, clapped her hands. "In that case, you'd better read it, typos, crappy soliloquies, over exaggerations and all."

"Why do you think that she gave me this?" Netta managed to finally ask as Wu was leaving.

Wu turned to look at her, a vicious smile on her face.

"What better present to give a fresh wife than the biggest Bluebeard story in creation? Say, you'd better be ready, really ready, to commit to this guy, because these puppies have an awful lot of biting the hand that feeds them in their blood." She shrugged and seemed to be re-adjusting a shoulder blade, turning as she threw her final words over her shoulder as she left.

"Not that I blame any of them myself, really. Not after what the Goddess did to their King. Poor, miserable bastard."