She leaped in the shower, feeling the cold water cascade on her. 

Netta scrubbed herself to the point where her skin glowed from where she had removed flesh mercilessly with a rough pad.  Afterwards, she stood under the water for a long while before she realized that she had turned only the cold on for the entirety of the shower. 

The waves of cold beat on her body, but did not affect her. 

Shuddering, she had her hand hovering over the knob for hot water before she withdrew it.

The water coursed down her face and her skin seemed to radiate a heat that rendered her invulnerable to the cold.  Indeed, looking down at her nipples proved that where the water poured over them they were still soft.

She shivered, clenching her hands up to her chest.

Finally, she said, Why me?

There was an infinite pause and Netta found her gaze drawn to the pastel pink tile work on the wall of the showerhead. 

Finally, he answered her. Does it matter why?

Netta shut her eyes. Please. Just tell me.

You were never afraid to fly.

What does that mean?  Unerringly, traitorously, her mind glowed with warm, fond memories.  A girl clutching tight the hand of a creature who wore the body of a young boy, the hesitant smile as he kept looking back at her as they soared, high above the trees.  

Slowly, Netta seemed to be comprehending, at least, some small aspect of what she had discovered. 

Somewhere, Netta had felt that Ash was hurt by this reaction. 

 Had he taken for granted her ability to deduce who he was, what he had done?

Had he underestimated how far she had been willing to sink into delusion, to keep their relationship somehow purer to her than the nightmare that had befallen her - to ignore the obvious?

Do you regret marrying me? It was quick, like a blade being plunged into her side. 

Underneath the sharpness of his words, Netta was unable to not see his own yawning pain, how his words were cutting into him as well.  She could not stop herself from wondering how ancient that pain was.

Netta clenched her hands around herself, felt the imprint of her own fingers burying into her her sides. She shuddered in a breath, tried to find a reason besides shock, fear and disappointment why she should hate him.

When she came with nothing, save for wrongs committed before the first true civilizations of humanity - ones that he had been well humbled for - she could feel the answering brush of him against her mind. 

It was like he had come close to placing his hands across the walls of her mind, his lips almost - so close - to grazing.

Mine. It was like a sighing wind, stirring leaves of her own tangled emotions, rolling them in a cyclone. Somehow, Netta could sense in his word a question, a begging of a right.

Without realizing it, Netta thought that if he wanted to touch her, Ash could do it - she had not only given him the keys to her, her power, her body, but she had ripped the padlock off of the door. 

Ash was silent, his emotions implacable as she tried to not feel them.

I could. He said finally. Netta was surprised, not by his answer, but by the emotion behind it - a lushness, a warmth, as though he had, instead, told her he loved her.

What would she do if he told her that?

But, then again, hadn't he already?

A pain that had yawned open when she had seen the full truth, no matter how Netta still seemed unable to comprehend the vastness of it for herself, reopened. 

Your existence was a lie, your memories that you shared with me. Your name is a lie.

My name is not a lie.

But you're the King of -

My true name was forgotten as I became a legend. I told you my true name - with some hesitation - when we first met. The closeness I wished for us to share, even so long ago, was enough to render my better senses to nothing. I wanted someone to say my true name once more after so long of being bereft of it. Forgotten.

Ashwood. 

Saying his name in her mind, Netta felt the flow of the emotions in that name ebb as new layers of meaning did not cloud it, but instead seemed to somehow clarify.

His name was like poesy to her, a spell that evoked something terrible but a thousandfold more wondrous. 

She felt her mouth opening, her lips, wet as water coursed down it rapidly, forming the word. "Ashwood."

She felt a shiver, beginning at those lips as though she had kissed them against his body, then felt as the sensation spread through her body. She felt her nipples hardening to tight peaks.

Her lips trembled in the beginnings of a slightly manic smile, shuddered. "Ash-wood..." 

She could feel a tingling sensation, as she was expanding, opening to accommodate him. And why shouldn't she - he was another aspect of her mind, her body, a mutation akin to a vestigial limb.

"Don't say my name another time, or else I'll not be responsible for what happens." His voice came from the other side of the shower curtain.

Netta stared at the black of the silhouette imprinted on the innocent, cream blue of the curtain. She wondered, with a soft, sighing breath that was lost underneath the beat of the water on her, how ancient that rasping voice was.

The shadow was large, so tall. His horns penetrated above the line of the curtain, she saw the twisting mass where they ended in deadly sharp, pointed tips. 

How many humans had once found a fear beyond the simple terror of death at the sight of that crown of horns? 

How many magical beings - Monsters - had fallen to their knees in front of them?

It occurred to Netta that he had never needed the floral crown that had once encircled his hairline - the black, chaotic twisting of his horns were always his true crown.

Unknowingly, her right hand had sunk between her thighs, parting herself. A soft moan caressed her throat, coaxed her mouth opened. 

She could feel his name in that sound, did not care as it slipped out.

He did not say anything as he appeared behind her.

They were beyond words.  And, anyway, words had only thus proven harmful to them.

For a moment the physical world and the many layers of his psyche that she had fallen through merged, so that when she looked up, she was looking up at the face of the transformed Roebuck.  Then, for a moment, there was a boy with eyes that spoke of profane knowledge. She tried, desperately, to unmeld herself from him and instead found him clinging stubbornly to her even as her mind was purged into the psychical realm once more.

When she opened her eyes and looked up, she was looking up at him, who grinned widely before it became a pant. As though in response to her eyes meeting his manic green ones, Ashwood pulled out and dove back in - buried deeply as he was inside of her. 

It sent Netta reeling, her head rolling back, realizing that he had entered her while she was still reeling..

I'm sorry - couldn't wait. The words were hurried, bordering on losing sense.

One of his hands worked themselves between them and began to rub against her clitoris in a mad beat as he pulled out halfway and thrust in once more. 

Netta's head stayed lolled back and seemed to have fallen out of reality until she felt his mouth working at her neck as he increased the tempo of his thrusting. 

Submerged halfway still in his mind, she felt the frenzied need and the rabid happiness merging, clouding all thoughts. She felt as though he were infecting her, making it so that she was lost in those clouds as well. Every part of her skin felt sensitized, even as she felt overloaded by it, filled with him, burning from the inside out.

And yet she wanted more, craved his touch. He had infected her also, surely, with his desire, his rutting, insatiable hunger.

I did nothing of the sort. His indignation was almost laughable, buried as it was in layers of lust.

Moaning, she writhed to meet the beat of his thrusts, moved her body so that she could feel him hitting that spot, the knotting of flesh hiding within teasing, aching distance from her clitoris. He obliged her easily - after all, he was greedily buried in her own mind, she realized.

Gasping, she found no room to consider just how they had become tethered to each other mentally. There was nothing, except for Ash, embodiment of a clash of vulnerability and wickedness, Lucifer and Lazarus.

She rode a wave that she fell beneath, became sucked deep into its vortex. She died as she fell, then rose above the waves, the orgasm no weaker from previous exercise, her flesh willing, transmogrified by large, shaking hands.

Underneath her was a sheet soaked not only by water from when she had been hurridly, eagerly lowered onto it, but also her sweat.

She felt him, tongue and lips eagerly lapping, sucking the mixture of liquid that formed, trailed away from her arching body.  His tongue burned where it touched and he moaned in lost delight.

With her eyes closed, she found that the air was corrupted with the overwhelming scent of Ashwood, earthy, musked, drugging. When she opened her mouth for a gasping breath, she was shocked at the sensation of heavy lips descending on hers, a Monster's tongue pushing inside, writhing, thick and abnormally long in length. 

His frenetic pace was a forewarning, as she soon found that he had never stopped being less eager, even as he had stopped his thrusting once she had fallen from her climax. 

His tongue began to flick against the inside of her cheeks, delved, caressed against her teeth, gums. When his tongue lapped over hers - flooding her with the sensation of softness covering thick, powerful muscle that tasted of not entirely sweet fruit - she felt a writhing pulse begin and end everywhere.

No human woman could ever withstand more than one at a time with me, he said it, a growling, moaning sound that begged for release. yet you always sought release, touching yourself for want of me.

As she jerked, she felt his cock - still heavy and pulsing from need - respond inside of her. She felt him drag in a ragged breath, then felt as they shared a moan, the heat of their breath filling her mouth.

Oh, Goddess, she thought as he reared up and at the same time filled her mouth, pressing at the beginning of her throat with his whipping tongue.  He pulled out of her and thrust back inside, and Netta was lost again. give me this moment forever.

Ash answered in her mind, not censorious, but nevertheless, firm. Do not invoke her name with me from this moment forward.

When she agreed, submerged in lust and, somewhere, a deep sorrow for so lonesome a creature as he, Ash answered her prayer for her to the best of her ability, keeping up his rhythm. 

Her feelings seemed to exist in technicolor, as she looked up she could see the greens of eyes that had once been hers open as she looked, a glowing green that gave a hint as to the unreal flesh of her lover.

A man he may not have been, but better than one, Netta felt safe in assuming, even given her profound, total lack of experience with human men.

It was no wonder that their kind were once revered as Gods, Netta thought in the haze before she fell into an orgasm that she thought was her own before she felt the blaze, the volcanic energy behind it. 

With a shock, she realized that she was experiencing Ash's orgasm, then gasped as she felt a spreading heat that filled her like a dragon's fire.

It threw her into another orgasm, this one originating in the mental link they shared, an earthquake caused by the explosive energy released by a volcano's eruption.

For a moment, she feared that she would lose her sense of self - that what she was experiencing was what possession was. Damned as she was by the creed and honor of Witches, but she wanted to give herself wholly to the tendrils of his obsession, whatever purpose he wished laid open before him.

With a gasp, she felt as he slid out of her before reappearing next to her, sprawled on his back, panting in his physical form. He looked at her, one eye covered in a lid, his heavy, used mouth panting. 

He said nothing, only picked her up and placed her, as though she meant to fit there, unerringly, on top of him.

Netta threw her head back and cried out.   When she looked down she saw, spread out before her, the panting, writhing, vulnerable physical body of an ancient King. 

He was not a conqueror, she realized. Rather, he was conquered, a being wickedly cunning - and passionate.

And, oh, but Ashwood was no longer a cruel King, his hands were tender beneath his trembling, voracious desire as they cupped breasts that looked small in his barbarian's grasp.