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.