PREVIOUSLY: Channah, a Queen of Hell, for reasons of her own, has married two human transgender girls. The girls, raised by Channah’s servants as her grateful wards, had just been put through the arduous indignities—hazing and trials—required for a human to be properly bound in left-handed marriage to a demon. Seclusion is the last requirement of the ritual; but to reach their destination quickly, they will have to travel through the honeycomb, which is only accessible in Hell. Now the girls are getting their first taste of it. So far, it tastes like sulfur and sand. NOW:
Instead of trying to answer Penny’s question about the Unforgiven in the midst of the clamor, Channah led them to the right, where a golden chariot waited, hitched to a huge red equine beast somewhere about where the chapel would have ended and the entry hall of Fensmere would have begun.
Penny looked over her shoulder for a final glance at Earth, but the unlighted chapel was just a slightly-less-inky spot between the horizon and the near-perfect onyx blackness overhead that may have shimmered a bit, or may simply have been separated from Penny’s eyes by the little grains of sand that appeared to swirl around them but without touching them, matching the flickering torches that whipped unpredictably to one side or another despite the absence of any wind she could feel. She swallowed, catching Channah’s eye as she turned back toward the Chariot, warming slightly when Channah winked and squeezed her hand reassuringly.
Thanking Fury
A soldier in black and red armor stood beside the great red monster at attention, holding his reins. As Channah approached, he snapped his arm out in parade-ground fashion, formally offering her the reins, eyes fixed forward on the horizon.
She accepted without even glancing at him; letting go of the girls’ arms and stepping up to hug and greet her horse, whatever she was murmuring to him lost in the general din. The second she moved away from the girls, hell got worse. Both girls gagged on the sudden, thick smell of brimstone filling the air so heavily it was like a weight bearing down on their lungs, and reeled from the sudden, immediately-irritating barrage of tiny grains of sand striking their skin, and worst of all their eyes, nonstop.
After at least a minute with the horse, Channah turned, laughing at the sight of the girls choking and rubbing their eyes. Pulling the girls’ ears close to her mouth, and thus bringing her halo of sweet, fragrant peace around them again, she yelled over the din: “Curtsy and thank Fury for agreeing to pull your little cart,” by which she presumably meant the heavy gold chariot. “Then follow my lead, staying a few steps behind me.”
They were looking at one another, unsure whether they should take her instruction literally or what else she might mean or even if she was punking them, until she leaned in again and yelled: “He’s almost as old as I am—far senior to you both! And he won’t even take a saddle unless we’re riding into battle, so it’s a great honor he agreed to pull a little cart to cushion your delicate little bottoms!”
With that, she slapped both girls, hard, on their rumps, eliciting a jerk and a squeal from each, which in turn seemed to excite the nearest devils and demons, causing a stir that started with them and then radiated out like a wave of rumor.
The girls could swear the horse snickered, but red-faced, they both curtsied as politely as they could. “Thank you, Mr. Fury, for agreeing to pull our cart for us! We’re ever so grateful, sir!” This time, they were certain the horse at least snorted at them, and moved its head in something that might have been a nod. Uncertain whether they were finished or not, they each curtsied briefly again, blurting less-formal thanks, and scurried after Channah, who by now was walking around the rim of the satanikoklus, looking down on the screaming crowd with her arms spread wide and an almost-but-not-quite beatific smile on her face, as if she were doing them all a favor by giving them collectively a moment’s notice.
Showstopper
And perhaps she was, the girls reflected: The crowd certainly seemed to get more excited when she came close to them. When they caught up, grateful to be back within her protective field of sweet-smelling, sand-free sanity, she smiled at them mischievously and asked: “Let’s try a practice run, shall we, girls?”
“Practice? Practice what?!” they asked fretfully.
“Watch, learn, and imitate!” she replied, before striking off down a black stone runway extending from the satanikoklus, directly into the center of the square—and therefore, of the mob. It formed a narrow peninsula of Unforgiven territory free of demons—well, the lesser sorts of demons that filled the square, anyway—putting her directly in the midst of a sea of them. Although the creatures could not touch the black stone without being scalded, they could lean in and reach over it, their hands so close to Channah’s boots the girls yelped with fright that one of them might catch her.
One thing was obvious: Channah wasn’t just walking. She was sashaying, swinging her perfect hips so they showed on one side, then the other, making the most of her long formal ladies’ dress with its wildly-inappropriate waist-high slits. She was strutting so her demoness’s thigh-high high-heeled boots gleamed red in the torchlight and drew the eye with every dramatic step. And she was flirting, her smile ramping up from mere moonglow to the sun’s brilliant midday beam in this gloomy desert, waving cheerily and cheekily.
When she reached the end of the runway, she turned fetchingly 90 degrees, looking back over her shoulder at the girls and licking her lips with amused delight to catch a miserable, mortified Penny bent over at the waist, adjusting her suddenly-painful cage. She winked, like driving a nail home though Penny’s heart, and laughed, confidently enjoying the effect she was having on every single one of the thousands of admirers that surrounded her on every side.
And that effect was both massive and disruptive, like an earthquake shaking every admirer until their teeth rattled, their legs felt rubbery, and their erogenous zones clamored for attention. All the devils and demons (the overwhelming majority men, but even the women), and of course Penny and Chas themselves, were among that enormous number. Like the sea under the command of the moon, the crowd closest to her compressed even further, and began to swell upwards, the most-crazed trying to clamber onto the shoulders of the merely-desperate in front of them. To all intents and purposes, they seemed a wave, crashing uselessly into the invisible barrier around Channah as if it were a sea wall, before receding as the weight of those on top flattened those below, driving them ba
Literature Section “06-58 Hella Honeymoon XIV”—Part 58 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1066 words—Accompanying Images: 1580-1582—Published 2025-04-10—©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.