Month: June 2025

PREVIOUSLY:  By trickery and deadly threat, eight-year-old Pen has agreed to help the succubae until dawn, as they raid the Venetian capitol late on a storm-torn night of floods, seeking to destroy what the Venetian spy service has learned about the succubae and to release an imprisoned grandfather and a young girl accused of witchraft.  Pen has now been geased to compel him and spelled to trust Channah and believe she is by his side.  NOW: 

Pen, bound as a safety net by a leash attached to a harness, and following Chava’s reasonable suggestions and whispers, crossed the hallowed space, picked the lock (under a minor delusion that he was simply unlocking a difficult lock using several keys at once), opened the door of the archive, and crept inside to access the secret files of Europe’s, and perhaps the world’s, most-extensive and most-advanced spy agency:  The Council of Ten of the Serenissima. 

Within the windowless archive, with Chava’s guidance and encouragement, Pen found and raided the Venetians’ magic books, written in Latin, the language of religion and science in Western Europe, which Pen read and spoke fluently, along with his aristocratic caste’s language of Norman-influenced French, and his local language of English.  He read all their titles for Chava, setting aside for Chava’s review the very, very few Chava didn’t already possess or hadn’t already known of, or that were so rare they would be difficult or impossible for the Venetians to replace.  Although the books, collectively, contained many grains of truth, they also contained falsehoods and honest misapprehensions which the Succubae valued, not to keep their own magical primacy over humans, but to help them predict the actions of the humans who hunted them and the other creatures of hell.

Turning to the written records of the Council of Ten, even though they were written in Venetian (rather than Latin), a language Pen had only first been exposed to when his Aunt brought him to Venice earlier in the year, his Latin and French allowed him to read the spines, introductions, and section titles in the books well enough to locate what the succubae wanted most:  The records of the interrogation, conviction, and execution of Anzola Ipato, by one Gasparo Orseolo of the Council of Ten, who had been burned at the stake on Wednesday, the 3rd of October, 1515.  Morally, exposing an eight-year-old with even partial literacy of Venetian to such material was one of several testaments given during the course of the evening, to Chava’s limitations as a surrogate mother-figure. Technically, the very existence of the record was a testament to the efficacy of the Venetian secret service, which had accomplished something very few humans, human governments, or even human civilizations were ever able to achieve:  identifying, capturing, and questioning an actual demon of hell:  Tirtzah the succubus.  After weeks of agonizing tortures, including especially vile and inhuman tortures methods devised by the Inquisition that were not normally performed by the Venetians (who relied heavily on the strappado), her mortal form, and thus her ability to visit Earth, was destroyed by fire, possibly the most agonizing form of banishment from the Earthly plane. 

Chava had persuaded Pen to push, pull, and drag the heavy folio volume back across the church to her position in the Venetian Senate Hall.  There, with Pen nestled on her lap, she read and carefully edited the record, using her magical powers and her great manual skills, to alter—as subtly as possible to try and evade any Venetians re-reading it from suspecting it had been changed—the text.  As much as she estimated she could get away with, she replaced information learned about the succubae with inaccurate information that would be less helpful, or even self-defeating, the next time the Court of Lust tangled with the Serene Republic.  Chava’s focus was on things Tirtzah had said that might hint at or reveal anything the succubae perceived as a potential weakness or exploit.  Then she had made Pen reverse the difficult process of moving the volume back into the library.  And because Pen lacked the strength to lift the folio-sized hardbound volume over his head back up to the high shelf he had pulled it from, she had him pull down all the nearby volumes and pile them up with the altered volume somewhere in the middle.

Pen also found and recovered for Chava, Tirtzah’s magical ring, which the Venetians had taken from Tirtzah.  Ultimately, they had not been able to make much out of it since capturing it.  By recovering it, the succubae ensured they never would.

Finally, Chava had tried various ways to help Pen make sense of a section of books written—and even labeled on their spines—with lines and geometric combinations of lines that Chava suspected was a Venetian code.  This, neither she, nor any of the succubae, had anticipated:  volumes so secret, they were encoded when written and kept within their very fortress and capitol?

In the end, she decided against doing anything with them, at least not tonight.  Even if the boy started with the last volume and worked his way backward, dragging every single volume out to her, it might take him hours to bring her the volumes covering 1515.  If, indeed, she could even identify which ones those were.  And then to repeat her work on the Venetian-language records, she would have to decipher the code well enough not only to make sense of the text, but to try and replace existing words with credible substitutes.  The only other option would be to burn the lot; but in addition to being a terrible and unnecessary loss of knowledge—a possibility she loathed on principle—it would be pretty clear to the Venetians someone had been in their secret archive and was trying to destroy at least something the Venetians had learned and hidden there.  Chava couldn’t even be sure what the coded—or cuneiform, for that matter—books were, let alone whether they actually recorded anything about Tirtzah, which seemed unlikely.  If they did, keeping a copy in Latin would rather tend to defeat the purpose of keeping a copy in code.  And because Anzola Ipato’s trial was only two years’ past, thus alerted to an effort to tamper with their institutional memory, they could and probably even would reconstruct much or all of it—accurately—from living memories, which would completely reverse Chava’s efforts to destroy the Venetians’ Latin record of their recently-acquired knowledge of succubae.  Destroying a vast knowledge without helping the succubae, and thereby making it unlikely she would destroy the limited knowledge actually harmful to the succubae?  That would be the worst of both worlds, and she decided against it.

In the end, Chava—with Pen’s semi-witting help—completed her mission before Channah and Rivqah finished theirs.  Instead of risking Pen coming out from under her influence while he was in the secret archive, and thus beyond her physical control, she brought him back to her and, inspired, decided to make the most of the opportunity by influencing Penny to do whatever he could, to save himself.  Chava warned him he literally could not escape the succubae until dawn, and must avoid crossing Channah, or if possible even attracting her attention again, in the meantime.  But once he saw any part of the sun, he should immediately, or as soon thereafter as possible, slip away when neither Channah, nor Rivqah, nor Miryam was watching him, and run for his very life.  When Pen protested that Chava should come with him, or that he wanted to see her again, she promised that if he obeyed her like a good boy, she would visit him again in a week.  Finally, still concerned that she had not impressed the danger upon him sufficiently, or persuaded him that a 5,000-year-old succubus didn’t need an eight-year-old boy to protect her, and having already used him to cross the sanctified church and plunder the secret archive, she added the force of compulsion to ensure his commitment.

Literature Section “06-124 Grimm Transformations VIII:  Child Laborer or Child Soldier?”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 124 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1264 words—Accompanying Images:  1960-1963—Published 2025-06-24—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

PREVIOUSLY:  n/a.  When I was kicked off DeviantArt in early March, I was advancing two story lines:  The first, adult Penny’s and adult Chastity’s introduction to hard-core succubus sexual and moral domination; and the second, child Pentecost’s very first introduction to the succubae.  As best I could tell, images generated in relation to the second story line (not the first one) were what DA’s algorithms decided were unacceptable and caused me to be kicked off DA without any opportunity to defend my work or make it conform to DA’s standards or even be told what DA claimed I was doing wrong.  I therefore backed off this second story line until I felt like I had enough distance and perspective to avoid DA’s matrix-agent-like algorithm. 

Mind you, I don’t think I have any worry about failing to comply with DA’s policies—I don’t think I actually ever violated them before—but rather, to avoid being summarily and arbitrarily dumped from the platform and having all my work and comments and followers wiped out.  The arbitrariness with which this gruesome artistic death sentence is applied is a significant deterrent, and even an overbearing threat, to creativity, artistic integrity, and intellectual honesty.  I can’t really say this thread of the story is what it would have been before my previous avatar’s execution; but rather, it’s a similar story I care about enough to tell, even though it is limited and redirected enough to give me some hope I might—might—be able to do the story-line and the subject matter justice without the figurative death penalty from DA.  I guess we’ll see.

Here, then, is a summary of the second plotline to date.  NOW:

On All Souls’ Eve in 1517 AD, Channah, with three members of her Court (Miryam, Rivqah, and Chava) and a human child swept up with them (Pentecost Argent), are mounting a surreptitious assault on the Doge’s Palace, capitol of the Serenissima—the Serene Republic of Venice. 

Venice is drowning:  Storms dominating the Adriatic and Central Mediterranean have brought acqua alta (“high water”) to the lagoon city, flooding its streets and basements even as rain and lightning lash its domes and towers and canals.  

Queen Channah and her Duchesses, Miryam and Rivqah, all three of them trained and experienced assassins and infiltrators, are spearheading the assault.  By contrast, Chava, her Queen of Arms, is a strong, skilled metalsmith and stonecutter with a meticulous personality and a bookish mind, brought along with them for her very specialized knowledge and skills—not her prowess in battle.  Chava had come to Venice the night before, on All Hallows’ Eve, an auspicious night of power and disruption, to raid the empty, unconsecrated church of San Zaccaria for precious metals and holy water to use in service of her Queen.

There, she had been surprised by Pen, a neglected English child in the inadequate care of an indifferent Aunt.  Like many human children, Pen had some capacity for sensing and perceiving the supernatural.  Like a much smaller number of such children, he was ignored and reckless enough to pursue his curiosity about the things he sensed, rather than sensibly ignoring or cowering from them.  At San Zaccaria, Chava and Pen had been immediately drawn to one another by their compatible personalities and—much more powerfully—their respective needs to take advantage of their chance encounter to fill the awful, aching holes in their own lives and persons.  Pen’s innocence, and Chava’s capacity for empathy, conspired to protect Pen, an altar boy at the church, and allow Chava to complete her mission.  She had rocked him to sleep in her warm, dry cloak and then stolen away with her prizes, the most supernaturally-charged relics and ritual items in the church, leaving only the crucifix on the altar as a concession to comfort the boy and assuage his conscience.

Tonight, All Souls’ Eve, he had surprised Chava (again) and Channah as they prepared to assault the Palace.  Driven again by feelings deeper than and separate from common sense and conscious reason, desperate for Chava’s attention and care, he had come to return her cloak.  By doing so, he had inadvertently brought himself to the attention of probably the wiliest, most-passionate, and most-evil creature to still walk the surface of the Earth.  His arrival, discovering them in the storm-filled Piazza San Marco minutes before their secret raid on the Venetian capitol began, had complicated the Queen’s evil plans, to say the least.  Too young and innocent to be of proper interest to the succubae in his own right, he was simply a nuisance.  Leaving him alive risked his reporting their presence to Venice’s nocturnal guards, the Lords of the Night.  But leaving the body of an eight-year-old child on the metaphorical steps of the palace risked raising a general alarm.  And by revealing Chava’s tender tendencies to Channah, Pen had unknowingly put Chava at risk of punishment by her Queen, because he was not the first human toward whom Chava had shown what Channah considered an inappropriately undemonic attitude.  Indeed, this was not even the first time Channah’s own plans had been inconvenienced by one of Chava’s little pets. 

Fortunately for Pen’s life—if not exactly his soul—Channah, always practical, egotistical, and purposeful above all, had seen a way to turn the unexpected complication to her advantage.  Because the Venetians had protected their secret archives on the second floor of the palace behind a church that had been properly consecrated, neither the Succubae nor any of their familiars could easily sneak into the archives.  At least, not without either risking teleporting into a space they had never seen (possibly to be bisected by a wooden panel, or have their guts or legs or arms scrambled by a pile of books) or undertaking a loud and destructive aerial assault on the archive by flying demons blasting holes in the stone walls of the Venetian capital in the middle of a crowded city.  Neither option was really acceptable.  And thus, the succubae required a human who would be able to enter hallowed ground:  A human neither under their compulsion, nor already marked as the property of hell. 

They needed a human either detached enough from humanity or reality, or vulnerable enough to influence and trickery, to do their bidding.  And to keep their purposes secret from humanity, they preferred not to hire or recruit humans ahead-of-time.  Instead, they had planned to free a teenage girl already known to them, tempted but not yet owned by them, from Venetian custody in exchange for her help, and then use her to raid the archives for them.  Having already been labeled a witch by the Venetians, tortured, and thrown in the semi-submerged cells of the Palace known as the Wells because they weren’t quite ready to execute a minor girl, the succubae counted her as well reliable to do what they wanted in exchanged for being spirited away.  But if Chava could use the boy to raid the archives while they accomplished their other dark purposes, it would shorten their time in the Palace and thus improve their chances of escaping without the Venetians ever figuring out for certain whether they had raided the secret archives. 

With a combination of artful deceit and deadly threats, Channah had tricked and cowed Pen into agreeing to comply with a geas:  not a compulsion, which might keep him from entering the church; and not a contract, which he was too immature to make; but a deadly magical consequence that he understood would befall him if he failed to do what he had said he would do:  To do everything he could to help the succubae until dawn, and to obey Chava’s instructions until dawn, insofar as he could do those things without committing any deadly sins.  In exchange, Channah had ungenerously promised not to murder him that very night.

With Channah’s plan thus secured, Rivqah scaled St. Mark’s Basilica and from her vantage point atop it, slew the Venetian guards outside the Doge’s Palace.  Channah and Chava rushed Pen to the Palace and past the guards too quickly for him to examine them or even properly see them, while Channah lied to him that the guards had simply been knocked unconscious; while Miryam dragged their bodies out of sight and, disguised as a Venetian soldier, took their place guarding the half-finished stairway leading to the planned, “new” entrance to the Palace.

Chava and Pen made their way to the Senate Room, just outside the church, where Chava shrewdly used a trust spell, building on Pen’s natural gullibility as a child and the rapport they had developed the previous night, not to control his actions or decisions, but to persuade him she was by his side rather than talking and appearing to him inside his head.  Then she simply guided him, as an adult might guide and influence a good boy like Pentecost Argent, to break into and rob the Venetians’ secret archive, by convincing him they were simply recovering an article stolen from the succubus and taking a peek at the Venetian’s books. 

Literature Section “06-123 Grimm Transformations VII:  The Red Beast and the Little Boy”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 123 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1237 words—Accompanying Images:  1956-1959—Published 2025-06-23—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.