In spite of the cruelty of her smile, Sia's voice sounded sorrowful, beseeching as it wavered, sounding as though it were on the verge of collapse at any moment. "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, threatening to puncture the life out from her heart. "Well, do you have anything that you want your Sisters to hear?"

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

Closing her eyes, Netta tried to think of what few happy thoughts that she could dredge up - what hope remained. All she could find there, instead, was a terrible, bloody wish that turned her stomach with the hate, the anger in it. One that, even in among the myriad of other emotions around it, managed still to shock her in its untamed ferocity.

For the first time, she could not discount it as some residual emotion that she had picked up from Ash.

With her eyes closed, Netta struggled to control it. She took a step backward and forced herself to speak 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, but 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. 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.

Netta 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. "Does the Great King slumber inside of you?"

Netta froze, confused. King? "What are you talk-"

Sia throttled her, shaking her. "You walk around with that powerful Monster. Do you call another, much more powerful, infinitely so, your true Familiar?"

When Netta turned her gaze to Sia's, she was shocked by the zealous, calculated look that the woman gave her. It was the gaze of a woman choosing whether it was in her best interest to cut the head off of a hen yet.

Confused as Netta was, she realized quickly that it would be better for her to blindly agree with whatever her obviously maddened sister was asking of her. Before she had a chance to, it seemed as though Sia could see the truth in Netta, read it in her eyes.

She shoved Netta away, but not before hissing into her ear. "Then if you can't be of use to your kin, you need to accept your fate, like you always have." She dropped Netta's unwilling hands, as though she had been burned and, turning away, she yelled out to the three who had brought her in. "Majority rules."

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

Netta 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 flow. As she struggled to her feet, she could hear a panicking voice crying out.

"Oh my - 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. "Maybe he'll come if he senses your pain, your imminent death. He'll reveal himself to us. 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 she held it. Immediately, Netta was haunted by the memory of how she had killed Ximenia.

She was frozen.

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 that she held 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 call him. I know he must be near, he is pulled to you, cannot hope to resist."

And then a voice said something in her head, a voice not belonging to her. It felt like a thousand men screaming as boiling oil was dropped on top of them, the deafening roars of caged lions as they descended on their once-handlers to tear at the napes of their necks.  Agony and wild, unbridled glory.

Netta 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 inside of her.

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

Netta was 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, who she recognized as Erwinnia - when her gaze caught instead on the massive, red beast that stood on the platform.

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

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 features.

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. It was like gazing into two abysmal pits, knowing that they saw all of you, not as though you were naked, but more as though your secrets, your very soul, were flayed open for It to see.

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 him - in loosing him into a room with that Thing in it.

He'll come - she was horrified to recall the madness that Sia had been babbling.

"Ash!" She screamed 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 them.

Netta felt herself being pulled to the right, then heard as she realized that if she had not, a moment later, 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 Netta, even in her shock, struggle against Erwinnia insistently.

Erwinnia pulled harder on her ex-Sister, pulling her close, making her hood fall off of her head as she jerked Netta roughly. "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 ex-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 ex-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 ex-Sister's scrutiny as she looked at her. 

Her ex-Sister's hands worked, skimming lightly over the hot, wet mess of her face. Erwinnia's healing magic calmed the searing pain there. Dazed, Netta felt her magic wrapping all over the bruises and cuts.

She was vaguely aware of Erwinnia muttering to herself, could plainly hear as the Witch said, "Healing magic aside, that's gonna be the last magic I'll be able to use."

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 before she had a chance to fight it.