Netta tried once more to work loose the enchantment that worked as a lock.

It had taken a some time to reach this place, existing as it did in the far reaches of the desert.

The enchantment was protecting the Homestead. The cottage lay up ahead, looking for all purposes like a simple - humble - one-story home. It sat on a hill in the midst of a series of a light cropping of trees, alone.

Netta cursed in the very real sense of the term, exhausted by the walk up to the hill after the old magic barrier had killed her rental's will to live.

The enchantment that kept the cottage at a good walk's distance from where she stood was impassable. Not as though Netta could expect anything less from the iron-willed nature of her deceased mother, Hera, than to leave an enchantment that was insurmountable to all but those who knew the way in.

It was too bad for Netta, though, discovering, far too late, that she could not remember the incantation that would allow her to pass through the barrier.

In no small way mortified by how she had forgotten the only way into her family's home, she began to hurl the worst that she could recall from fledgling days long past at the leering, magically kept face of the little white home in the far distance.

Netta spent about five minutes of yelling incantations at the house, making herself believe that she simply wanted to do enough minor damage to allow her to enter the place.

As she wound down however, she knelt down on the snow to recover her winded breath that had burned out of her like the blast from a firework, burning her up.

When she glanced down at herself, she was unsurprised to see that the continuously failing magic had managed to turn her abdomen into a lightening bug's - a side effect of all of her energy that she had burned.

She closed her eyes, for a moment considering giving up and calling Calliope to ask for the incantation to get in.

It was starting to get cold - almost unspeakably so to Netta, even in her heavy layers of winter clothes. The magic was leeching a good deal of her energy so that she felt liable to swoon at any moment onto the ground.

She stood up on shaking legs and was readying to try a few more when she felt a sudden pressure on her shoulder from a hand.

Netta yelped, diving backwards.

"Ash -" she cleared her throat, aware of how much she sounded like she was relieved to see It.

If there was a flicker of something in Ash's eyes, it was hidden by a gust of that snow that blew between them.

"I take it you need my help here." The Monster said it smoothly, almost emotionlessly.

Netta looked over at the cottage and then back. Under normal circumstances, she would have asked Ash what It could have hoped to accomplish. At that moment, her toes were starting to freeze from where the snow had snuck into her shoes from the worn, and ragged places.

"What do you suggest?" She asked, hugging herself tightly.

Ash reached over and wrapped an arm around Netta's shoulders.

Her heart jumped at the touch - or it could have been his intense, comforting warmth.

The Monster dragged her close to It, and for once, Netta didn't struggle.

It softly spoke against her hair. "What do you need to do?"

Fighting to at least stop herself from burying her face against the fabric of Its shirt, Netta said, "I need to repeat the incantation we were all taught to get in - I can't get any closer than I am now without finishing it properly."

Ash paused. "Oh Is that - is that all?"

Netta sighed. ""Is that all?" Well, smartass, it might be difficult for a Witch who's not used a particular spell in half of a century, let alone who's not used magic in many a decade. Besides, I couldn't even record the thing in my book, it's forbidden to write down entry incantations -"

"Don't mind that. I know the incantation, I'll just tell you it to you so that you can repeat after me."

Netta had to suppress a laugh. "No. I - I just need to call Calliope and have her tell me the incantation..."

Ash pulled her slightly away.

Netta shivered in a sudden burst of wind that seemed to flutter with ease through her layers of clothing to chill her bones.

It looked down at her. "I mean it. I remember the incantation. I just need you to trust that at least you're no use to me dead, if you drop from overextending yourself further in this manner. Can we agree on that, at the very least?"

"What's the incantation?"

It was Ash's turn to sigh. "I'll chalk it up to you being exhausted, but you know that those who aren't your kind can't just start rolling incantations out aloud."

Netta seemed to realize then just how muddled her mind had become after the cold and the failed spells that burned out inside of her.

She fought to understand the importance of what Ash was telling her.

And then she understood it in a flash.

"No. Not my mind."

True fear then - fear of something, beyond even death - flashed before her.

Ash pushed back his hair, a frustrated, strained look on Its boyish face. "The only way I can share it with you is through a brief link into your subconscious -"

"Once I let you inside, you'll run amok." Netta clutched at the side of her head. The world seemed so unreal around her as she forgot why it was that she had been so worried about moving forward. It became astoundingly clear to her in a moment's flash that the real danger was the very Monster who seemed to be trying to protect her from the elements.

"You'll drive me crazy, turn me into a husk."

Ash clicked Its tongue, reaching out to shake her as if sensing her falling away from It, pulling away in disgust and fear.

"Listen to yourself; if I just wanted to take control of you, I had abundant chances to do just that in the last few years alone." When Netta tried to protest - how could that be true - Ash said, "Now, I don't need to tell you that dying of exposure, as a Witch, is an excruciating process that will see you in agony while I, an unattached Monster, can do nothing but watch you once your higher functions shut off."

"D-don't be so dramatic," Netta said, trying to force the clatter from out of her voice, a symptom of her chattering jaws. "I-Il j-j-just walk b-b-b-ack to the c-c-c-c-"

"You could do that, or you could, I don't know, trust me," Ash said, the impatience growing in Its voice. The Monster clenched Its arm around her tighter. "Your choice, but there's not much I can do if you insist on being stubborn. And, anyway," Ash sighed deeply. "I'll agree to let go of your mind so that you can shut me out once we're finished here."

Netta was silent for a moment as she glanced up at the incessantly, unnatural snow that fell down on top of them.

"Alright."

"Follow my instructions closely. First, I'm going to need you to repeat after me-"

At first Netta thought that Ash was talking to her, but as she repeated what the Monster said, the words themselves lighting up something skin to sense memory in her mind, she realized that the words it spoke to her were there, in her mind. They echoed like a gust of wind that slipped through abundant cracks in her seemingly impenetrable mind.

After she did as It told her blindly, Ash had to shake her to get her attention out of the daze that she had fallen into.

"Hey, would you look at that, the door's open."

Embarrassingly, Netta needed his help to clamber to the cottage, then through doorway and past the ornate, heavy work of the handcarved door.

Shutting the door behind them, Ash had laxed Its grip on Netta for just a moment.

Without the support, she pitched forward.

Ash appeared with Its arm at the ready to catch her.

"Hey, be careful now-"

Thoroughly awoken after nearly pitching to the floor, Netta blinked rapidly and shooed the Monster away.

Once inside, she began to feel some of her strength returning - and she felt embarrassed for having had to rely on Ash.

After pulling the heavy layers of outer clothing off, she walked across the cold foyer and into the cozy living room, busying herself at the pot-bellied stove. She ran her hand inside of the opened belly of the sturdy old copper.

As she saw the flames - vivid green for a moment before they camouflaged themselves with the red like that of naturally occurring flames - burst upwards at the flicker of her hand, she shut the grate and felt as the air around her began to change drastically.

The cold seemed to be sapping away, slowly but steadily, replaced with a radiating warmth. It was as though every part of her was being radiated with the heat and she could not get enough of it.

Netta sighed as the feel of the warmth seem to reach inside of her bones, only to find that her marrow was weak. The weakness was infectious; she found that all that she wanted to do was go up to her room and collapse.

Luckily, there was Ash, standing as he was over in the foyer to keep her senses in place.

Around It, she had to keep her senses sharp.

"What now?"

Netta shrugged, trying to shake off the impression of Ash being in her mind, even for a moment. She was finding it difficult to stop herself from wanting to search her mind to find some sign of Ash that the Monster may have left, somehow.

"Tea first, I think. I suppose that they might've kept a good supply of the magic infused in there somewhere, I'm gonna have a good look for it -"

"I'd rather you not."

"-and I forgot to thank you for that back there." Netta, who had begun walking towards the kitchen, stopped walking. She bit her lip as she struggled for the words that needed to be said.

Finally, she turned over her shoulder and said, "Thank you. For back here. You didn't need to agree to let go of my mind after we finished back there, but you did."

"Hey, it's not a problem." Ash smiled and seemed at a loss for what to do before It reached up to run Its fingers through thick, golden hair. Finally, It cleared Its throat. "What would Calliope want you to look for here, anyway?"

Netta didn't answer the Monster, walking into the kitchen to start looking for tea.

The place was another example of what optical illusions that a Witch was capable of.

From outside of the cottage, it looked as though there would be room for a a simple sink and a butcher's block to work on.

Instead of the simple sink, Netta was unsurprised to find that someone had updated their already quite excellent double stainless steel sink with a newer model. The sink's faucet now was paired with a curving, delicate-looking pasta arm.

This one had three compartments - and the dishwasher, the two gas stoves (one range and one flat-top), the flat-top grill - all looked like a set-up for a small, but luxurious, restaurant's kitchen.

"Your Sisters never could hold back on the bare necessities," Ash remarked, now standing next to the top-of-the-line french-doored refrigerator.

Netta mumbled something tiredly in agreement and finally managed to pull out a tea chest from a cabinet.

Pulling the lid up, she tried to take careful consideration of which of the manied variations that one of her sisters had kept stocked. Eventually, Netta settled on something called Orange Tea Gardenia and started to boil some water in a kettle. S

he had started to rifle through a cupboard for a mug when she heard Ash say something.

"I think that you'd best look out the window."

Leaning next to where Ash was, Netta peered into what she thought was an off-white cotton curtain that was covering a window. When she saw a swift movement, she realized that she was looking out of the uncovered window.

The wall of snow outside took her by shock.

"Yes, I am going to have to sleep here tonight."

Netta, pulling a throw blanket from out of the chest in the seemingly endless storage room. She allowed the chest, an ornate thing that was made out of some of the most seemingly heavy, dark wood in existence and fashioned with a metal face that would look out of place anywhere except for a period piece about the Dark Ages, drop with a resounding clang.

"Well, there's not much that you can do about a blizzard," Ash answered from his spot on top of where It sat. Where Ash had found a place to seat happened to be atop a massive full-length mirror that had been covered with a sheet. As he sat, his legs dangled carelessly like a child. If Netta gave It a second's consideration, she might have found the sight of the well-dressed, handsome man somehow sitting on top of a mirror that should have broken from his weight on it maddening.

As it was, Netta had other concerns.

"The Chronicle is here - somewhere." She murmured, shutting the chest that she had finished looking through.

She had begun to search through a cardboard box marked with the words, "Tinkerthings" when she felt something tap her arm. Turning around, she found Ash looking down at her, a smile aimed at her from Its far superior height.

"Saying that anything "has to be here" is like saying that the penny that you dropped is in the house, somewhere, in one of the gargantuan hiding spaces that you birds've built this nest into. Good on narrowing it down, good effort there, but we're wasting a lot of fun time," It bounced Its eyebrows at her meaningfully as Its smile turned more predatory with a definite flash of canines. "and I do mean, a lot of time that we could surely find something better to do with it than we currently are..." Ash shrugged, sitting back and as tall as it could on this form's spine while still making every movement seem effortless. "I mean, if you want to be horribly, wastefully pragmatic about it all, then once you get the magic to do so, we will be able to find that tracking book, no problem."

Netta sighed, then sneezed. She had gotten a good lungful of a jar of some incense components that had been broken.

Sneezing two more times, Netta leaned onto a wall. After she had finished, and looking up with tired eyes, saw the seemingly endless stretch of magicked space that made up the rest of the storage room.

She glanced around her and looked at the ten or so boxes that she had already poked through. Reluctantly, she found her gaze lead to the door to the room proper.

It was disheartening to realize that she was only five feet into the room after seemingly all of the work that she had done.

Groaning, Netta kicked a box and could only hope that she had broken a good jar or two.

"This is going to take forever... No wonder Callie wasn't excited to get arms' deep in this room. I mean," Netta bent down and on second thought, decided to take a cursory look through the box full of incense makings before she threw it to the side with an explosion of grassy and floral scents rising away from their broken homes. "this is the problem with storage space. You make it, thinking you're gonna come back to it, but you never do." She paused, waiting for a reaction from Ash.

When she didn't get one, she turned to look at where the Monster had been, only to find that he wasn't there any longer.

Puzzled, she turned around and began to dig through the box beneath the incense box. Her movements were stopped abruptly by Ash grabbing onto her hands.

Jumping, Netta angrily tried to dislodge her hands from Its.

Resisting, Ash continued to hold onto her hands. It seemed to wait until she calmed down.

"There are better ways to go about all of this. If you're really worried about the welfare of your Sisters, then you could use my help."

Ash smiled. Its smile was pure canines, no optical illusion. They were obviously larger than they normally were in this form It had chosen, digging furrows into its exquisitely full bottom lip.

Netta coughed and pulled her hand loose of Ash's.

"Or I could start looking in the bedrooms. I haven't checked there yet. You know, before I enter into a contract with an Incubi."

Grateful to be out of the massive room that seemed to have no visible end, Netta went up to the floor that housed the bedrooms. She found her room first.

The cleaning spell that made everything in the room resistant to dust. It gave her four-poster bed, dresser, personal library and window seat the eerie look. It almost seemed as though she had left her room not too long ago only to return much older, fatter and more cynical.

The sudden urge to stick her head out of the window and holler that the coast was clear for Ash to visit her came briefly.

Trying to squash the thought in her head the moment that it appeared, Netta turned to look at the Monster in question.

She was unnerved when she saw the knowing way that It gazed at her

"Been awhile." Ash said, its arms crossed as it surveyed the room. "It feels a lot shorter to me, but I'm sure that for you it feels like a lifetime since you've last been here."

"For a normal human, my time away from here is a lifetime's worth. Hey, can you do me a favor and scrounge around a bit? I feel like I left a charm that could help me find that damned Chronicle somewhere in here..."

She had begun to look through her shelves, trying to force herself to seem as though she were in a hurry. The nostalgia rose up, strong as the smell of the wood in the bookshelves. The memories of her time spent in her books coiled around her, warm, comforting. Sad.

"That depends, Lovely. Do you have any aversions to sodomy?"

"You know what? I think that this game of seeing if you can shock the virgin must get old at some point."

Netta, who had pulled a collection of Barrie's many versions of Peter Pan to flip through, felt lost, a sense of falling back into her childhood ambushing her.

A knot seemed to be growing in the back of her throat, a veneer of tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

She faked a cough and furiously rubbed at her eyes, letting the book drop onto the ledge in front of the book's shelf.

Ash appeared next to her. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine."

Netta pushed the book back into its spot among the rest of her gently worn collection. She quickly decided that what she had been looking for had not been put into her library. She did not feel anything faintly magical among the books.

Turning around, she set found her gaze on the Monster who stood in front of her ceiling-height book case.

She hesitated, then spoke before she could censor herself. "If I asked you if you sincerely enjoyed the time that we spent together when I was little, would you tell me the truth?"

Still standing in front of her books, Ash was quiet for a moment before It answered.

"I wouldn't lie about that. Those were happy times for the both of us."

"Mmm. I'm sure your kind enjoy playing patty cake with Witchlings - huh, I think in another context, the humans would call that sort of behavior "grooming". On second thought, that was more or less what was happening, right?"

She tried to act busy, looking at her old Encyclopedia set. Her index finger shook as she grazed the pebbled texture of a dust jacket.

When Ash spoke next, he sounded annoyed. "Not everything has to be black and white, Nettles. Even if I hid certain things from you, I was not your enemy then, and I'm not yours right now."

Netta felt her back tense. She and wondered if it was possible to hide her reaction to Its use of that term.

She said, "I wonder if I would have regretted trusting you once you drained me of all of my life force and then moved killing other Witches?" She tried to not grip onto the spine of the book that she had pulled out, blindly, tried to force false cheer into her voice. "Hey, I've got an idea; lift the edge of the bed up and hold it while I look in my hiding spot."

Ash grumbled, saying something about not wanting to aid her. Still he assented, lifting the massive, antique bed well above its head with no effort. The Monster held it aloft as It began to speak to her, watching Netta as she scrabbled around on the wood floor where the bed had been covering.

"Hiding spot - you always were so damn private. And here I thought that you Witches were such an interconnected, trusting lot."

"Yeah, well," Netta said. "we both remember the journal reading incident of nineteen-twenty one that almost blew our whole cover. I almost pushed Beryl off a cliff for that, so from personal experience, I trust my Sisters as far as I could carry this fucked house. Huh." Netta had pulled the panel of her own creation from out of the floor.. She peered into the dark hole it hid and, thinking briefly of the dangers of spiders before brushing it off, shoved a hand into it.

"What'd you find?"

Netta crawled back out of the bed, the box in hand.

"My old treasure box."

Ash dropped the bed with a bang that made Netta wince. She struggled to her feet, using her knees in that slow manner that never failed to make her feel fat.

As she got to her footing, Ash hovered over her as she sat the box down on the side table.

She pushed a loose lock of her hair that had fallen out of her messy ponytail. Hesitating, she pressed her thumb against one of the long ends of the rectangular box. Netta turned it this way and that, looking at the seemingly completely solid box before she gave it a light shake. She heard the lightest sound of something shuffling around in the box and then felt a slight shift of weight in the box.

"You've had that puzzle for as long as I've known you," Ash remarked.

Netta shrugged and started to run her hands over the still familiar hidden spots on the box to open it. She had expected that there would be a hitch in being able to open it. After all, she was pretty tired and there was a lifetime's worth of time from when she had last.

Instead, she found that she had managed to slide the complex inner mechanism into place.

"Huh."

The box shuddered. In a breath, the spring popped that held the top in place, revealing the contents of the box to be a pouch.

"Huh -"

Netta emptied the contents in the pouch into her opened palm, but it took her a moment to realize what she was holding.

The full memory of the last day that she had lived in the house fell back into the forefront of her mind with terrible, sickening clarity.

"Oh..."

The God's Chain - her sole inheritance from her father - felt cold and heavier in her hand than it should - could - have.