Ash's smell folded itself around Netta, and she fell to him, pressing her small mouth to his. 

She had done it, finally lost her mind as she hungrily devoured the boogeyman's mouth, tongue moving of its own beyond the seams of her lips to lap at the inside of his shock-slackened mouth. His tongue - it burnt, the taste of his saliva was divorced entirely from what a Human's, let alone a man's, should have been. Still, the burning of his mouth was a maddeningly painful ecstasy and reminded her not of anything sweet or remotely gentle, but rather provoked the pure neurological drive that had her hips writhing with no other touch than her mouth on his.

Even as her body jerked and writhed mindlessly, Netta's memory tried to recover, as though recharged from sense memory. Flickering in her mind were raw memories - tenderness, roughness, cruelty, almost heartbreaking worship -

A needy moan. Whose?

When their lips parted, her mouth was shaking, olfactory senses buzzing as though she had breathed in the Earth itself.

To taste, to feel her nostrils fill with the very thing that she was trapped in, was frightening. Still, it was not enough to stop Netta's heart from beating furiously, not entirely in fear. What was wrong with her, why did she embrace, touch him like this, as though she deserved no shame for doing it?

What was he, if not the worst creature to ever cast Its shadow across Human history? And what was she doing, not begging, not pleading to be spared, but taking until her blood felt as though it were teeming with lust?

All of this she filled in the pause, a moment of unexpected, shocked stillness. Their lips were fully parted as they panted, fully slackened, a lewd beading of shared saliva connecting their heaving mouths and sensory-deadened tongues.

Netta could almost sense his shock, felt as though she knew what this strangely consuming man was thinking as his dulled gaze seemed to stare completely into her while at the same time saw through her. Then Netta felt as he leaped against her, the whipping muscle of his tongue breaching her mouth as it spasmed like a reanimated beast, itself a monstrous, alien thing.

It destroyed any sanity that Netta had in her. Gone was the understanding that he could still kill her. She became obsessed with the thought that he could do horrible, magnificent damage to her.

Something flared briefly in Netta's mind, a series of emotions crossed through her. They were confusing, infuriating things that she knew in an instant had been locked away from her.

What could she do to stop him?

As she boldly ran a hand to touch the great set of fire-blackened antlers on his head, she felt with disdain that she could hardly suppress, the idea of letting this beautiful - yes, uniquely so, primally so - man be held at a distance, like a curse.

They had always called her a freak. And what did they call him in in his day, when his power had not been held as absolute?

She felt a massive hand grasp her, jumped at its touch. She shared Ash's needless, wild breath that he gasped for, needing it to resuscitate her in her hopeless, writhing fixation.

Her other hand came up, joining the other as she touched that least perfect part of him, the wicked curves and sharp, hard edges of an antler. As his tongue rolled over hers, she clenched her hands against the wild mass of cold bone, clung.

She didn't realize that he had stood up until she felt her back hit the wall, felt herself being lifted off the ground. She felt his hands scald her as the man reached under her shirt, pulling it up and pressing hands as hot as branding irons against her skin.

The heat caused her no true pain, only fueling a fire that beat against her sanity until she squirmed in his arms, mindless. She was unheedful even of the twin wounds on her palms where sharp edges on his antlers had penetrated her hands where she had pierced herself on them when she had gripped them for what felt like dear life.

Outside the world of the room, if Netta had thought to look out of the window, she would have witnessed the world ending, starting anew.

Downstairs, in a great, collapsing castle that existed only in this memory that he had been imprisoned in, a once great King was being made to bow before the curious, snickering crowd.

They had come to bear witness to the coronation of their Queen.

Outside, fire began to rain down on the world, unnatural flames that baptized the world. It encased his kind in chains, melding them fully into the material realm, making them beholden to its cycles.

Still, the sound of it hitting the ground, scalding the bodies of the Magic, corrupting the soil as it spread underground to reach even those who hid beneath it, was loud. They sounded, almost, like a twin of the enraged roar the King made.

Even submerged in a sea of desire, Netta jerked for a moment as she was startled by both sounds. If she could look beyond the flushed face of the man holding her, she would see how the world had turned bright, blood red, as unnaturally colorful flames rained down.

Netta felt a drugged, half-interested confusion by what was happening. She could hear the bloody roar that had come from somewhere, deeper beyond the door that was just to her left, where the man had taken her from, as though wanting to take her away from the offending escape route. He had pressed her to the wall, his hands knowing no boundaries, his touch making her sweat and writhe in agony and starving desire.

Netta felt, as the Magic pressed his head to hers and she felt the imprint of his mind, desperate, that he knew all too well what was happening, somewhere beyond that door. Did he fear that she would be taken from him, stolen so that he would be once more robbed of something that he could no longer comprehend?

He had, after all, been cursed to relive this day every time he had been banished from the physical realm. And he feared that even something new, an intruder in his jail, could be ripped away in an instant. Like every other time he had been banished from the Human world, outside was the day that his throne had been taken, bloodily, from him.

Lust, which had used her body like a puppet, was killed in a moment as Netta realized the terrible, ancient nightmare that was replaying itself outside.

And then her thoughts fell from her, as he pressed her back against the wall with bruising pressure.

"Do not pity me," he ordered. "you may not find me repulsive, for some unimaginable reason," he growled, tongue licking over heavy, sharp teeth. "but you're not allowed to pity the man who's going to be torturing you for as long as it pleases him to do so."

A moan was caught in the back of her throat, and Ash's thrusting, powerful tongue unleashed it. What must this strange creature think of this woman who whimpered in desire at his cruel words, thrust herself further against him with every rough grasp and squeeze?

Her hands danced up his head, where they caught in his hair. She was blinded, drunk to the pain of the wounds in her hands as she grasped for his hair and scalp.

His knowledge - memory of that day, unerring as it had replayed itself ceaselessly time and again for him - flooded into her, blind to much of what he was sharing with her.

Downstairs, the King had a shackle clamped tight around his throat by slender, cool hands. He was being ordered to kneel. The same hand reached forward to grasp one of the larger, twisted mass of his antler. It was the same hand had once gently brushed away a tear from the face of the same kneeling creature.

The woman - one that he had once called his Queen, light of his life - leaned forward, her voice too low for the other women to hear. "Do you regret cursing me with this immortality now? Are you sorry for taking that choice from me?"

He spoke, his voice thick and heavy with sorrow, anger, pain. "I loved you -"

With the other hand, the woman took a blunt instrument and swung it forward, breaking a part of antler off.

The King cried out, anger gone as his voice was awash in pain.

Netta's hands had reached up to grasp onto the very horn that had been broken off in memory, regrown the moment that he had shown this form to her.

Ashwood was his name, but she knew him by another one, in the same way that he knew her as Netta, his Nettles. Ash.

He growled in her mouth, recognition of the act of unintentional kindness lending a blush to this recognition of his nightmare. There was an immediacy to their embrace, and the King - Ash - the aggressor, his promised cruelty all but forgotten as he forced his taste down her throat in unmeasured, uneven thrusts and began to stroke her body like she were a frightened, shivering animal.

Then his hands fell all around her as his true nature asserted itself. He was a creature who had once grown accustomed to power and control, doing what It pleased, and what pleased Ash was sliding hands that were different from the ones that supported her, trapping her down her back as another pair worried at her shirt.

They writhed, angry, against fabric until they had rended it.   Her chest bared, Netta felt hands that burned, cupping and taking what they found there as though she truly was nothing more than a sacrifice that he felt free to take from.

Still, Netta's mind blazed with knowledge of the cruelty that was happening downstairs somewhere, so long ago.

The King's crown had long since been knocked off. All that was left to finish the work of taking away his right to power was the sickening, thudding blows of his once-queen's mallet against the natural, twisting crown that he wore, heavy atop his head. He was being disfigured, antlers ripped out or broken off as he howled in pain, anger.

Netta realized, in a flush, that she had become infected by his thoughts. She could feel them, hot and coiling, somehow far too familiar.

Ash had no time for such memories that he had long since agonized every nuance of, after too long spent reliving it. He was busy tasting, experiencing her flesh as though she truly was the sacrifice she had insisted she was.

Netta felt her earlier terror become succumb to the whirlwind of hungry lust. It became a darker, more delectable aspect of her desire. She clung to the ancient, tortured King, knowing that long ago and downstairs he was being mutilated.

No words were spoken, all she experienced was a burning yearning to learn his body, to discover thick muscle, rough hair, sharp taste, potent smell. She had no memory of moving or being moved, but she was aware of watching as Ash splayed back on the bed, with her sat just above his hip, the movement automatic, lacking not only all pretensions of Humanity, but also of his promised sadism.

Still, she cried out when she felt herself positioned above the very much naked Ash. Massive hands reached up - more than she could count - and ran up and down her body, the heat from them burning.

Throwing her head back, Netta she felt two of those hands reached up to take possession of her breasts, then felt as large hands spanned her chest. They did so easily, heavy fingers reaching, wing-like, to brush parallel to the upper lines of her rib cage. Netta closed her eyes as she felt thick, hot fingers shaking as they traced the edges of her throat's hollow.

Downstairs, his tormentor admired her handiwork. She had left his head a mass of stumped remains of antlers, blood running down his hair to stain his face.  The once-King crouched on the floor, his back curled forward in his deep bow.

She spat on him, the heat of his flesh burning away the liquid in a sizzle on his face. Still, he flinched, as though the tiny drops had done grievous harm to him.

Netta leaned forward as she felt the hands and fingers dancing along the line of her throat disappear, as though sensing her desire.  She gave into the urge to taste, tongue running wickedly along the growth of dark hair along his chin.

She felt Ash jerk in response, smelled his enchanted breath as he let out a moaning sigh. Netta became enamored with the roughness of his curling hair, scraping her teeth against it. She wondered, her thoughts a haze, what it was that came to Ash naturally in this form, and what aspects he had long agonized over with his appearance, what traits he had wished to wear to create the man he became.

Her breasts pressed to his lightly furred chest. They both moaned at the friction of soft skin against taut flesh dusted with curled hair.

Downstairs, the Queen took another half-broken stump of antler, barely noticing how the King barely flinched as she took the hammer to it. She struck close to his scalp, throwing the curving, once majestic, if slightly maddened, antler behind her after breaking it off.

Somewhere behind her, one of the new breed of mutated Human women caught it. It was a long, twisting thing, and she was congratulated by another.

In the bed, Netta ran her own pitifully physical hands against the sides of the striking, flushed man who was anything, in reality, but a Human male.

Still, he reacted as a man did, his breathing hitched. In spite of everything, it almost broke her heart to consider why it was he was so struck by the simple act of a willing, gentle caress. How could she ever give this creature, who looked up to her with eyes that gleamed with a predator's longing, but in equal measure contained devotion that almost undid her lust, enough to satiate him?

He had once been ruled by his inability to slake such desire.

Ash, it seemed, could hear her thoughts well, as he responded, in a husked, stuttering moan.

Downstairs, the Queen lifted the defiled King's head up to look at her, slapping him when he refused at first to.

By the time he did, his cheek was bleeding, his face swelling with bruises, the forced physical form that he had been tricked into tearing, fraying.

His red eyes, eyes that Netta now owned, stared, pupil-less in their hatred, the whites gone.

Netta saw the green eyes that she had once called her own staring up at her, a sort of smoking quality in them leaving his gaze heavy. It was as though he were being devoured internally by nebulous, green flames, smoldering in them.

Netta moaned, recognizing that frantic desire, that need that clawed and chewed. Her hands reached up, she clutched her lover's head and devoured his lips. She could feel his tongue wrapping, thrusting, writhing. Her body was arched, as she allowed him to shower her in his wild need. He was frantic and zealous in reaction to how she betrayed her trembling, unyielding need.

It no longer mattered whether or not he would treat her kindly. Gone was her ulterior motive for coming into this chamber, forgotten.

Still Netta damned herself as she felt hands reaching up, covering her writhing, ecstatic body as her mind surrendered. Her mind felt heavy, ponderous with shocked, naked desire as he filled her mind and she, in turn, felt herself filling him.

Downstairs, the Queen pushed the fully mutilated King backward and told him to derive as much pleasure as he could from one final sex act. The women surrounding them in the chamber - once a place where the angry King had crushed the majority of the population of Humans beneath the weight of his heartbreak - laughed.

The Queen made her meaning clear as she threw her dress up and placed her naked foot on the shivering, pain-wracked Monster's broad shoulder. The Monster stared between her thighs, blinking unevenly in pain and from the streams of blood that dripped freely down his rough, hairy face.

Netta cut their shared mouth loose, kissing Ash's face as well as she could manage. She was kissing a tormented face with an intimate reverence, then gave into lust as she tasted him. He tasted of sweat, his skin smelled of clover, and his facial hair rubbed, rough, rubbing her lips raw.

Ash shuddered with every movement. Netta felt submerged in a sea made of his feelings, emboldened beyond what she would have willingly and so eagerly done, once.

They both felt it, when Netta scooted back, her leg wrapping itself around the powerful mass of his right, knocking gently into the fully erect column of his penis.

The accidental brush flooded through Netta with a pleasure that burned as a need. His, hers, theirs.

Her eyes fell open, wide and blind. She felt his desire to bend over her, to satiate himself on her. He wanted to burn through her, branding her with knowledge of his deepest, lust-filled desires. But what stopped him was fear. Terror of the beautiful creature on top of him leaving, fleeing, damning him.

He couldn't drag her beneath him and press into her, even if she tried to flee. Her warmth, the desire she shared for him, was something he coveted, needed. He was so cold, alone and cold as he was forced to witness the moment when the world was changed due to his actions, could only imagine the suffering of his own people in retaliation to his thoughtless cruelty.

When she kissed him and he could feel the traces of her burgeoning, maddened desire for him, he felt once more like the man he had made himself into. No, even when he had worn a crown he had fashioned for a false role, no one had treated him with sincere want, desire, or deference.

She fell on top of him, will-less, and he felt willess in turn as his arms wrapped around her. It was as though he were trapping her as he shuddered, drowning her with the weight of his need. He was out of control, something like a fight or flight instinct in control of his body.

The Queen tried to look unmoved as her Familiar laved at her, the heat of his mouth potently hot.

She winced in the mixed pleasure and pain of that heat. His mouth, like his cock, was too hot for her to withstand without feeling as though she were being caressed by flame. In truth, she had never felt anything for the creature that was not tinged with revulsion, fear.

Still, there were some things that even the strongest, most potent disgust could not hope to protect her from.

His tongue plunged without warning. It sent a mixture of pleasure so consuming that the beginning of the orgasm that she had been fighting off with shuddering, sweating twitch, breached.

Netta moaned, sliding down his body, her mouth working with no finesse or skill at his neck, ears. She felt as Ash's grip around her loosened, allowing her to move with some freedom along the planes and rough, hard valleys of his body. She did not know where this boldness had come from, why she should want to throw herself at a creature who had professed to wanting to ravage her body as though she were a live creature thrown into a lion's cage.

She rarely moved vertically, running more horizontally along his body as she touched, laved her tongue. His skin was warmth, salt, hot atmospheric magic that spun around her tongue and searching fingers that twined all over her body and enchanted her. Netta knew much from the frenzied, writhing, tangled mass that was their shared memory, receiving it in wrenching, desperate jolts. She possessed forbidden that the other one, the Witch who did not know the worth of the damaged, willful King that was hers, had not tasted the full bounty of.

Netta only fully realized then that, inexperienced though she was, she was providing entertainment to a man who once had the Earth in his clutch.

The Queen laid her head back. She felt a moment of pity for herself at having thrown away the trust of a creature capable of this sort of pleasure, even if she could oftentimes barely stand to look at It.

When the King plunged his tongue in and out, pausing before he thrust it in powerfully, she felt her legs go out from under her. She fell, backward, with the King's mouth clamped, tight. A scream tore at her throat and she fell backward, exhilaration and terror filling her mind.

As she fell, she saw the exquisitely painted image on the high, gold ceiling above her. 

It was of a nude man with massive, curling black antlers, his shoulders circled in a blood-red cape. He stared emotionlessly down at a bowing Human man, and seemed to be dispassionately aware of her.

She felt, for a brief moment of terror, that she had made a mistake in making an enemy of this proud beast.

Netta tasted his flesh.  And Ash was helpless, as though frozen, capable only of shivering, jolting and making shocked gasps. Was he more overcome by the wild torrent of memories that hit him, or by the sensations, the realization of a Human woman touching - no, relishing, worshipping - his body?

Netta traveled down, her mind no longer her own, possessed with no true intent. Still, as her hands spanned, she found the source of his strongest, most potent smell. It belonged to the long, heavy mass that sprung out from a curling spray of brown and rust-tinged hair.

She felt his sudden and powerful reaction like a blow to her head as she took hold of it. She more watched herself cup his massive, lightly furred testicles then she was cognizant of doing it. She felt the sudden realization glow bright in his mind, that sharp, aching desire that was so shocking that it was almost painful, was not unknown to her. Netta felt her lips parting, lowered her head, then her mouth covered the thick, bell-ended tip of his cock.

She could feel the pleasure that the wet, slipping suction gave him.

As she slipped her lips up the thick mass of Ash's too-warm cock, she quickly looked to her right, feeling as though eyes were on her.

As she did, she saw that she was met with a face very much like her own, the woman's limp splayed backwards on a stone floor.

Covered in heavy face paint and a fallen, wild spray of fire-red hair, intermingling with the tendrils of caked blood from her scalp covering some of her face, Netta nevertheless saw planes that matched her own face in many respects. She recognized a look of absolute terror on the woman's face that she had felt on many occasions. 

Netta felt the woman's gaze on her, even as it seemed as though her dark eyes could not find focus.

Attached to her, looking as though he was hell bent on eating her in the truest sense of the word, was a massive, dark-haired man who shook the bottom half of her body from where he viciously ate her out.

Surprised, Netta felt Ash's penis fall out of her hands as her mouth opened in surprise.

She knew what her lover was about to do a moment before he did it, plunging himself into her mouth with a hand pressed to the back of her head.

Her cry of surprise was lost first with the lush fullness that filled her mouth, then the lusting moan that filled her mind as a reverberation from his which became her own. She continued, feeling, with panting madness that forgot what she had seen before, as his orgasm that built with breakneck speed. It flowered inside of her until her generous stimulation of his penis became a conduit of her own pleasure.

As she felt a riptide of sensation overtake her without anything stimulating her physically, save for the thick, musked weight of his cock in her mouth, Netta moaned against him. The vibrations from her moans fueled their pleasure, reverberations bouncing down the length of him.

It was as the end came that Netta felt truly reunited in every sense with him. The pleasure from her own empathetic orgasm in response to the bursting upswell of his, broke through her.

As his desire flagged, Netta recovered from the bursting shock of remembering Ash - her Ash - in the flesh of this strange man that she had given herself to, had worshiped as his only disciple in the darkest night of his memory.

She felt herself being pulled up as she looked into the eyes of a man who was ancient, reviled, legendary. Above all of that she knew, he was loyal, adoring, more naturally than he hated and raged.

Outside there came a boom, and Netta jerked, looked out of an arch in time to watch as a great ball of fire fell close to the castle, the mad light it let out as it crashed into the Earth rapidly followed with a great, shaking boom.

Shocked, forgetting every moment that she touched Ash's flesh what was happening outside, Netta almost leaped off of the bed.  

She was stopped, as Ash reached forward, cupped her chin, forcing her attention back to him.

And he spoke, in a chuckle that sounded wary in its trust, rusty with lack of use. "What's the rush, Nettles?"