As Ash took the final step closer to her, he felt overwhelmed by a vivid sense of becoming, a glowing sense that he was no longer tethered to a physical form. He felt like he was cut away from the ground itself, was floating in the sky.

As soon as he regained control, he turned, shouted back at the teen girl. "Get out of here!"

Turning to look back at his thoroughly frightened quarry, Ash was shocked when he heard Ophelia shout back at him. "I'm not going anywhere - I want to see her!"

Ash screamed, the exertion that having to hold onto his physical form and keeping the great power at bay like pure anguish. Still, he could not let go, not until the girl had left.

He shouted at her, said, "You will leave now! This is not for your eyes, child!"

Ash shook. He was too close, he would surely lose any control he had in a few moments. He had once promised Netta that he would not let either of the Witches near when she emerged. She had told him that she did not want either to see her when he took her sacrifices, but more recently he had begun to believe that she was under no misconception regarding her own ability to control herself. Netta could, potentially, murder either of the women that she had so loved, in a fit of bloodthirst.

Ash closed his eyes, raising his arms up as he meant to beseech her, pleading in his mind so loud that he could hear himself shouting, echoing. His whole body shook as he became overwhelmed with cramping pain, hot and unyielding.

If she did not leave, there was nothing that he could do, if Netta was as powerful and yet as powerless to her own instincts as he had feared she was.

Then he caught it, the sight of a bright flash of clothing - the back of the girl as she fled out through the path that he had come from - to his left. He could have breathed a sigh of relief, if not for the pain that overwhelmed him. He clenched his weakening control tight, meaning to hold back for a few moments longer. He needed Ophelia to get far enough away, needed to be certain that she was not close enough to be in any sort of danger.

Then he felt it, as he was shoved to the ground, not by the force of the great, near-celestial entity that filled him so that he felt as though he were bursting with Its light, but by the Witch he had thought he had cornered. As he fell, he watched as she leaped over him, running back down the path that she had lead Ophelia down.

Ash did not rise, he felt as the great, sweeping power rushed over his body, like a long shadow passing over him. He grabbed for it instinctively, like a fallen creature grabbing for the chest of a wolf as it passed over him, clinging tight so as not to be dropped by It.

He clung for a moment, then felt as the great energy pulled him in, so that he was bounding with It down the path, a predator chasing Its prey. Ash watched, experienced the joy once more that he had thought he had forgotten, the slavering, mad joy of hunting prey as it fled.

Patricia had gotten away further than he thought she had, was using her own stores of magic in an attempt to get away quickly. Her familiar was not obeying her, was in truth helpless to do anything but turn his back on her.

With her death, the Monster tied to her would die, but his death was a welcoming relief. A baptism from the murders he had been compelled to go through with.

And, perhaps soon he will be reborn.

They were moving so quickly that the next chance Ash had to get an idea of his surroundings, he found that the Witch was nearly to the woods' edge. It was amusing to think that she might have been under the impression that if she got out of the gloom of the place where she had been committing her own atrocities that she would be able to escape.

As if to prove that point, it felt to Ash as though the very moment that her foot had hit the ground outside of the perimeter of the woods that they grabbed her, pulled her back into the shadows. She barely had a chance to scream.

The Witch was dragged, back to the very place where the mass grave had once been. In the mass grave's place were simple burial mounds, differentiated from one another by small rocks.

It had been Winnie's idea, upon the discovery of the grave, to give them new burials. When she began to act as though she meant to identify which of the murdered girls was who, Ash had pulled the woman aside and explained - carefully - to her that he did not have the patience for trying to figure out which rotting corpse or set of bones belonged to which missing girl. He had been beside himself from the experience of flying, and the sickly sweet smell was above what he could have tolerated without vomiting.

So they had re-buried them next to one another, with simple rocks to mark where they had been laid beneath the earth.

Even though the clearing was small, Patricia was too preoccupied with the woman-thing who was holding her up by her throat to see the graves.

She's grown in height, it was still something that threw Ash off whenever he saw It - her - like this. Having gotten thoroughly used to Netta's body, seeing this new vision of her was like a shock to the system. In his dreams, she took back the body that he had loved her first in, so very smooth, softly plump, and fragile.

Netta was slender, tall, with skin the color of darkening gold. It was hard to miss her skin, because save for what she wore on her head, Netta was nude. Serving as her sole article of clothing, Netta wore on her head an intricate, frightening headdress made of what looked like blackened and twisted, wicked-looking antlers. They covered the top half of her face, so that her eyes, even when he could see the bottom half of her face, were hidden.

Ash had seen her eyes from time to time, however, and knew that they were a ruby's gleaming red.

Patricia gagging and flailed, terrified beyond all imagining. Ash knew how terrified she was, for he could smell it.

Realization - that he could smell her fear, as he once might have been able to - struck him as he gasped. He had been given his old self back. Just to be certain, Ash reached up, felt his own growth of antlers, where they had once always been. Then instinctively, he reached down, felt his penis and testicles.

Yes, he was most excited to see Netta like this, but he could not deny that being given his male form once again was a wonderful relief.

Then Ash rose his gaze up, became fixated on the nude Monster who held the Witch up. The power that poured off of her was enough to make him want to wince from it as though he were standing next to some fantastically hot source of heat, like a boiler.

Even if the Witch was not overwhelmed by how terrifying the creature was, Ash knew that she could not ignore the strength that ebbed through It. He could not see her, not with Netta's back turned to her, but he felt as though he could imagine how her face looked. Terror, horror, the kind best fitting a person who had unexpectedly found themselves face to face with a God.

Or the Devil.

The Witch had begun to babble in her homeland's language, a sound that Ash knew all too well, knew to be the last thing he tended to hear from Witch prey. She wept, in between tears choking out desperate words. "Nechestyvyy - zlo odyn. Isuse, spasy mene, zakhyshchay mene..."

With barely a sound, Netta took the woman and spun around, throwing her on the ground before where Ash was He realized it only when the Witch landed in front of him like a ragdoll, but he had become crouched, prostrate on the ground.

The Witch that struggled to get up with those hollow, bright eyes was a follower of a Human dogma, and so Ash supposed that he was a believer of a higher power these days. The one he worshipped gazed down at him, red eyes barely visible beneath the nest-like structure of her antlers.

Netta slowly bared her teeth to him, two rows of sharp, heavy teeth visible as she ordered him to finish the work of preparing this sacrifice for her.

Ash nodded to her, then looked at the terror-struck Witch. He barely thought before she said it, leaning forward to take hold of the too-fragile structure of her head in his heavy, large murderer's hands.

"You shouldn't have been a bad Witch."

She spoke, her voice sharp and accusing before he could do anything to her. "And what comes next, when the bad Witches are no more? What will your food of the gods be, then?"

Ash thought about it for just a few seconds before he lowered his hands down the sides of her head, reached under her chin pulled. As her head unloosened from her neck before she even had a chance to scream, and he became coated in warm blood, Ash thought one thing to himself dispassionately.

Don't know. Don't care.

He supposed, often while standing among the Humans that Netta had taught him to care about, that he would give anything, anyone, to her. He had once often despaired that if Netta would only have him that he would gladly give her any boon she wanted of him.

As he rose his eyes back up to the tall, gaunt thing that seemed to be what happened when his power was melded with Netta's anger, her despair. He gazed at her, holding the remnants of the Witch that he had torn apart like some thick-skinned fruit that he meant to drink out of.

Perhaps Ash had become too used to the body that she had given him, a surely unintentional cruelty that it happened to be her own body, one that he wanted to love, not wear. He felt as though his nonexistent heart were about to beat out of his chest.

This time when her lips parted and she showed him her teeth, he knew that she was grinning. Ash smiled back, could feel the tears that had built in his eyes as they swept down his face.

He bent his head down, began to devour the flesh from the Witch before her body would begin to disintegrate. She tasted like metal and her flesh was as soft as flower petals, and Ash chewed and swallowed her as greedily as he could. Netta would take her nourishment from him, only after he had finished.

As Ash ate, the forest around them seemed to return to the life it had taken before the Witch had been killed. Somewhere, even in his delirium and fixation, Ash could hear the sound of a bird cuck-ooing and the hurried scurrying of rodents through the underbrush. A woman had been killed, was being devoured, and the woods could no more care about it than if a tree were decaying.

If it were any indication of approval, Ash heard a bird sing sweetly, as though meaning to provide music to them as Ash devoured.

It was only when he had ripped her innards out, left only the stomach and those entrails due to how much effort it took to do and nastiness they left in his mouth, that Ash heard her speak to him.

"Beloved pet, you work so diligently for me."

Ash rose his head, gazed at her as he sat on the forest's floor, the partially dismantled Witch at his knees, his whole body gleaming and wet with viscera.

He stared at her, breathing heavily. He was so full, but this meal was not what he hungered most for. He moaned wordlessly at her, chest heaving, sweat and blood running through patches of drying blood.

She stood, pristine with her golden skin. The nipples on her softly rounded breasts were peaked, hardened.

He always cursed himself later for not being able to speak to her, mindless in her presence. Able to only sit before her and do what was told of him. He wanted to ask her what it was that she meant to do with all of the power he gave her, why she could not take the body that she had given him to wear. Why she could not be with him as she once had.

There were others things, still, that he should have been concerned enough to speak of. Like why he only saw her as she once was when he slept, or after -

She drew her arms apart, as though she meant to embrace him even from their distance apart. She began to glow, a bright, overwhelming light taking over her. Ash had to close his eyes, then took in a breath, breathing in the heady smell of the woman he had once held close to him in bed.

When he opened his eyes, Netta - the one who could have been the sister of Netta, save for the soft curling of antlers that twisted on her head, the soft, doe-like blackness of her eyes, the soft tawny color of her skin - gazed at him.

She was naked, glorious, everything. Able to only grunt, Ash got to his feet, then stepped over the remnants of his meal. He had looked away from her for only a moment, then he found her, nude, reclining at the foot of the tree that her tall form had been standing before.

She laid against the tree on her back, one knee raised, beckoning to him. A soft, knowing smile played on her lips, then her lips broaded, parted to reveal her white teeth at him.

Here, now, Ash felt like he was being offered exactly what he most desired, and no matter what questions and fears would plague him later, for now he was offered his place inside of his beloved. As he crouched, splayed on top of her, large hand taking one half of her face in his trembling, wet grasp, his tongue probed against her lips, found entrance with a soft giggle from Netta.

He could feel her hands, sliding lovingly against his chest, heedless or in wonder of the wet mess that coated his body. He ached, throbbed to meld with her until it was pain.

It was this intimacy where both he was given his reward for giving her what she needed, and she took what she wanted from him, the magic from the Witch that he had killed and devoured. Often she would try to stop them, just short of her draining all of the magic from him, but Ash persisted, gave all willingly to be able to touch, taste her, to be awake and male while he did it.

Some times while he was alone, often in the moments before his consciousness waned, he felt the question of what it was that Netta was planning bother him, as though waiting for his most vulnerable moment to fill his mind with doubt. He was not stupid or altogether naive, he knew that there was some ulterior motive to what it was that Netta was doing in this form. The question was intriguing, and he found that as time went on that for Ophelia and even Winnie's sake, he wondered what his powerful lover meant to do.

For the most part, Ash remained unbothered by the thought of what it was that Netta's power was meant for. He had come to the conclusion, after all, that he was willing to give anything to her.

As Netta's thighs parted and he slid between them, Ash gasped. The pleasure was maddening, addictive.

Before his mind fell away from him, Ash moaned out, "My Goddess."