A noise in the kitchen made Netta want to leap.

Beryl cried out, clapping her hands.

In the next moment the kitchen door swung open and the world fell away from Netta as she smelled the pungent, overpowering smell of a perfume that she recognized all too well.

The woman sat down at her seat at the head of the table, gracefully throwing her knee over her leg. Her dress was not on par with Sia's, but it demanded respect. Grey, perfectly tailored and full of straight lines and rows of buttons perfectly aligned. Her hair, a pitch black, tied up in a bun that drew attention to a face lightly dusted - just enough so as to not dare suggest whimsy or a detraction from the mostly smooth light tone of her skin - by soft, yellow freckles.

Deep green eyes swept Netta into a storm that, for a moment, led Netta to believe that she was in a nightmare. Her face, her body belonged to a fit, elegant eighteen year old, but it was those eyes that revealed a darkness belying a greater age.

With deep red lips, Hera Oleander smiled at her middle daughter.

"I'm so glad you came to join us. Of your own free will, no less. No fleeing from one of my natural daughters, when the chips are down." She paused, then turned to gaze at Sia, an uncomfortable smile pressing her lips. "Be a dear and let the poor thing speak."

Sia smiled fully at her mother. "Of course." She turned her gaze over to Netta, raising her hand to snap her fingers towards her.

Netta cried out as she felt something akin to a malevolent energy ripping out of her. She shuddered, wrapping her arma around herself, the perverse impression that whatever her older sister had used to control her felt like she had been dived into.

Barely fighting back tears, Netta said, "How?"

Sia interrupted sharply, barking, "Show respect to your matriach, wretch!"

Netta tried to find courage, tried to recover her earlier will from somewhere.

"Mother, how - how are you - how can you be here?"

Hera's gaze flicked over to her eldest daughter and smiled indulgently at her.

Hush, Saorise." Her voice was soft, but beneath it Netta heard an almost hidden tone that made her skin crawl. It was like she was soothing a child with her words while smacking a blunt instrument in her hands.

"Dear child," she said, turning attention abruptly to Netta. "you aren't overjoyed by the return of your own mother." She smiled then, indulgent at first, then feral. "I could not be more proud of your instincts if I tried."

Netta felt a moment of shock that she could not place. Then it came to her.

She realized that not once growing up could she recall a moment in which Hera had ever given her a moment's mention of pride in relation to her.

Had she spent her whole childhood wanting it, craving it?

Now, at the sound of her mother's praise, she only felt sick. Could it be Ash's influence on her, or was it something in the way that her eyes had widened when she said it, the momentary flick of her tongue again her lower lip?

Hera continued. "We had a feeling that you would try to flee, when your Sisters found out that we had left two runts out in the woods." At her words, Netta felt a chill run through her, a shaking that she could not suppress. "Lucky for all of us, you decided to show a moment of clarity and you came to us."

Sia said. "I must confess to a lie on my part - Mother is not the only guest that we have this evening."

As though they had been summoned, two forms fell out of the kitchen door as it swung open another time, depositing them on the ground in a shared cry of pain as they hit it.

Netta sat up in her chair as her eyes confirmed what she had known with her older Sister's words.

Erwinnia and poor, traumatized Ophelia struggled on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs, gagged.

I have to do something - somehow -

But Netta felt as though she were submerged in a surreal nightmare. How could everything have gone this wrong?

What had she gained along the way back to the house, if all she had to show for it was her own helplessness, watching the only two who depended on her, flailing around on the ground, crying through their gags?

She watched as Ophelia raised her head, a lock of her wavy hair falling into her youthful face, her usually cold blue eyes widening at the sight of her. She screamed in her gag, rolling partially over to give Erwinnia a hard shove as she motioned for her to look up at Netta as well.

The sight of the two females looking at her with deperate fear - hope? - in their eyes filled Netta with a horror that she thought that she would never feel.

Having to see others in the same situation that she had been placed in countless times as a child.

In that moment, she understood, perfectly, the pain and fear that Erwinnia had faced as a child, as a sole sane person amongst a system of the insane, powerless to stop it.

Was this terror, anger, agony the reason that she had sook to prematurely grasp power, only to find herself the victim of it?

And then Hera spoke. "They look as though they have something to say to you, daughter. Shall I remove their gags to let them speak?"

"For Goddess' sake," Netta said quickly, thoughtlessly, "what is this? Untie them!"

She wanted to stand up, to punish Hera with darkness that should have been at the ready for her. Instead, she found nothing quelling, no spark behind her words, with Ash still bound.

Hera snapped her fingers.

The gags fell off of their mouths as they writhed in a panic. As the gags came loose, the sound of their screams made Netta have to shut her eyes.

It was Ophelia who spoke first, her voice a cry that was befitting of a frightened teenaged girl.

"Netta! Oh Goddess - Netta, they took us after you left -"

Erwinnia interrupted her, "You were right, Netta, they came for us, oh, they took us -"

Ophelia interrupted, her voice directed now at the other Witches. "You three - you'll be sorry for this, Neith hunts bad Witches, makes them pay for their cruelty -"

Beryl laughed, a shrill sound that pierced Netta's ears. "Now that's a funny joke!"

Ophelia's gaze, twisted to look at Beryl, belied a murderous, cold rage, a gift belying a need for revenge.

"You won't be laughing when she's - when the King of Monsters is tearing you to pieces." She hissed.

Hera sighed, leaning onto her arm.

"Well, that problem is as ridiculous as the two of you look. I am dreadful sorry to break your hopes so easily, but my daughter's Familiar, powerful though he is, is not the King of lore. Not any longer, at least. No," she turned her gaze to Netta, the cold of her eyes seeming to work as powerfully as her words did in destroying what courage Netta had. "Neith, did you really believe him when he told you that he was the Deep King, complete with all of these Godly powers still somehow intact - or does your heart tell you what your better senses should have already told you?"

Netta clenched her eyes shut, repeating, in her mind, the word, no.

Through the thunderous sound of her breathing, and the train of her ceaseless thoughts, Netta thought that she could hear Him, yelling for her to listen to him.

She gazed into her mother's too-bright eyes, tried to find warmth, solace from the words that she spoke there. Finally, she felt her mouth open, and she said the only thing that, still, she was capable of saying.

"No."

Her mother's mouth curved into a smile - stunningly bright, voluptuous.

Leaning forward slightly, she seemed to be speaking in a conspiratorical whisper, although her voice traveled easily across the length of the table to her middle daughter. "Did you believe what you wanted to believe - because you wanted to believe a Monster's lies? So that he could fuck your virgin cunt, without you feeling like you were letting the vile, depraved desires of some ancient beast control you, as he has?"

Netta shook her head, feeling the tears as they fell. Her hands rose up, taking hold of the sides of her face.

Hera's teeth shown in a wide, almost unbridled smile, then they disappeared behind lips that strained to withhold showing them.

Hera said, "Your "man", powerful though he is, is undoubtedly only meaning to use you as his vessel. Even if he was not under our control at the moment, he is incapable of the power he was once reputed to have. Magic does not replenish, it only dies."

Somewhere, in the maelstrom that had become Netta's mind, there was the sound of someone screaming.

Do not listen to her!

Netta rose a hand over her mouth, numbly grasping onto her face.

She allowed her hand to slip loose, to drop onto the table before her. "That's not - that can't be true. He - he promised me -"

Hera laughed then. "Did I raise you to so readily believe the lies that come so easy to his kind? Don't you know better - know that his kind, so like men, will say anything to get what they want?"

Netta shuddered, shook her head violently. She was repeating the same word, over and over. "No, no, no -"

Hera interrupted her, shaking her own head softly. "For everything, little girl, I did try to warn you. I never lied to you about what was expected of you, what would happen. We chased him away, together, me and the young ones, to save you before we knew that it was only the King playing a sick game with you." Her gaze flicked up, for a moment catching onto the Monster behind Sia, the one whose voice only seemed to echo vaguely in the halls of Netta's mind.

"But now I understand - you were always here with purpose, you mean to push this Coven into the very last of what we were meant to be. Mothers of the new world." She smiled then, her gaze lingering - flickering with horrible animation as she spoke - saying, "Me, the bride of the King. And, you - whether he relishes the thought or no, your magic will be what will replenish his power. All of that stored death, all fo the energy of your adopted sisters..."

The yelling from the voice in Netta's mind was almost powerful enough to cut through the cold, unfeeling sensation that had taken over her mind.

Still, Netta could only look at her Mother, wish that what the Witch said was not the truth. And yet, Netta knew that a plain, weak child such as she could not desired by anyone. Save, perhaps, for something wicked that wanted control over her.

Netta took in a deep, heavy breath, buried her face in her hands.

She could hear only two things, then. The sound of her rushing heart's beat, then the sound of her Mother's voice, as she coldly explained.

"I must confess, child of mine, that you are the end result of an odd process of gestation. You were not conceived through wholly natural means. You were meant to struggle, to attract the attentions of the one who would bring the King upon us all. Your birth heralded the rebirth of the King, in the faithful role of slave to our kind once more. Only when your binding together has been dissolved, which him eating you, will I be able to take him as my Familiar." She laughed. "Now, we have killed many Witches who did not have the protection of a Monster - sacrifices to the slumbering God King - as well as all those in our Coven who are unrelated to us by blood. And all that stands left to do is to break you fully, to allow the enchantment in this house work fully on you."

Netta felt her trembling hands raising up to her head. She could feel her pulse beating a thick, all too familiar beat in her throat, in her chest as she feared, then, that she was very close to losing her mind.

"Allow me to show what happens when you're made from the kind of ritual it took to create you. Now, girls," Hera said, shockingly, even in her youthful voice, sounding like a soothing mother. "let me be clear on one fact first. My daughter is a creature of habit, and it is patently obvious to me that you have pinned your hopes on your own executor. Neith, dear, do me a favor and pick up the knife to the left of your plate and walk up to your little friends."

Netta looked down and took the exaggeratedly long chef's knife that had been sitting next to her plate all along. Had she simply overlooked the shining blade that called to her then, or had she known it was there all along?

She took it in her hand and felt as she stood up from her chair.

The screaming she heard, she was unsure if it was in her head or was coming from the two Witches on the ground that she was rapidly approaching.