PREVIOUSLY: Channah, a Queen of Hell, for reasons of her own, has married two human transgender girls she is taking through the Hell of Lust on a flying chariot ride to reach their honeymoon destination. At the foreboding Chang’an Castle, Penny and Chas are about to be introduced to their qahramanah, or jawari-trainer. NOW:
At Fong’s description of how desperately eager her jawari were, the three women laughed together, a slight edge of contempt tinging the sounds. “Then let’s proceed. We’ll make introductions, open the gifts, and then celebrate.”
“Yes, Domina.” And then, snapping down at the jawari on their knees around her: “Up! You’re released for now. Get up!”
Hetaraslakos
The girls scrambled to their feet around her, thanking her formally, her own four jawari assembling behind her while Fang wrangled Chas and Penny back into the awkward half-bent positions she had forced them to assume before, and began striding toward the door on the outside edge of the little courtyard. Hong watched with an amused, admiring smirk, nodding approvingly as if she had learned something useful.
“It’s your Castle, dear Fang. Please, lead us on,” Channah suggested.
“Of course, Your Majesty.” She marched the girls past the Queen, continuing to use her hands to keep them bent at awkward angles for walking, making Chas open the door to the building on the other side of the courtyard. This revealed another wide hall running straight through to the far side of the building. But in the middle of this building, the hall widened even further to make room around a broad stone staircase leading down, with four parallel sets of handrails seeming to beckon them further into hell.
Fang led them down, both girls seriously afraid of falling and desperately using the handrails, while the succubae and the qahramanah laughed at their anxiety and desperate efforts. “That’s definitely something my fawning little playthings are going to learn to practice,” Hong Qahramanah promised.
After descending a story or two into the soil, there was a simple passage, adorned only with occasional torches, close enough so they were never in complete blackness, but far enough that at times, the passage and the people moving through it were silhouettes and broad outlines. Ahead of them was a stairway back up, constructed exactly like the one they had just descended. And as they approached it, they became conscious of a low noise, at first something like the wind or the way leaves rustled across pavement in the wind. But as they reached the bottom of the staircase and proceeded upwards, it got louder, becoming more like whispering that quickly started to rise, clarifying itself into the sound of a thousand agitated voices, shouting and screaming the same meaningless gibberish that was not quite an actual language, as the wretches back at the satanikoklus had barked out.
“Pay attention on these stairs!” Fang snapped. “Remember I’m behind you. If you can’t stay standing, fall forward into the stairs. If you make me lose my balance, you’ll be regretting it for centuries.”
“I suppose I could do without them for a few hundred years so you could exact your revenge,” Channah mused unhelpfully, emphasizing the time scale succubae reasoned in. “Are you girls feeling humbled and cooperative for meeting your new qahramanah?”
“Yes, Domina!” the girls assured her in voices strained by their efforts to stay focused on the stairs. Fortunately for them, stumbling up was easier—or at least felt easier and safer—than coming down had been. For some reason, the throaty, evil sound of Hong Qahramanah’s laugh behind them, a human’s, an almost-stranger’s, and that of a singularly contemptuous bitch, stung even more than the amusement of their dominae.
As constrained as they were, they could hardly see more than three or four stairs in front of them at a time. But it felt, and was then impossible to deny, that this stairway was significantly longer than the stairway that had taken them down to the gallery. The voices kept growing louder and more distinct as they rose, finally cresting as they emerged from the top of the stairway, finding themselves on one of the elevated octagonal stone platforms they had seen from the chariot, dominating the killing grounds outside the castle walls. These were the hetaraslakos, which both girls, having studied Greek, had realized at some point, meant Companion’s Pit. Or Courtesan’s Pit. And here, the thunderous sound of the screaming voices left no doubt they were surrounded by a crowd larger than an army. From their volume, their number might have included every single one of the thousands of milling, restless damned they had seen filling the randomly-walking walls of the crumbling town around the castle during their descent.
“I think your mad qahramanah may have gathered all the damned here already,” Fang observed.
“She’s a self-starter,” Channah agreed, as they paused at the top of the stairs, and even the girls could twist their heads well enough to see who they were talking about.
The Radioactive Witch
At the extreme edge of the platform in front of them, a headful of long, wild, lustrous black hair marked and concealed most of the top half of a woman almost as voluptuous as the succubae themselves, with a prominent ass jutting back at them from under the fringe of her hair, draped in expensive, embroidered, colorful fabric. The toes of her black boots were literally over the edge of the platform, with her back arched and her hips thrust forward, meaning the dimensions and shape of her buttocks were even more impressive than they appeared at the moment. She was waving a radically curved Persian shamshir, waggling her hips from side to side, and screaming insults, but whatever exact sounds she was making were drowned out by the absolute furor erupting from the crowd immediately below her, sounding like bleating sheep finding their will to resist at the last minute in the slaughterhouse.
“What is she—” Penny choked off her question before finishing, remembering who she was being held by.
Channah seemed to think she knew—she was laughing with sheer joy; and perhaps it was the sound of that that caught the woman’s attention, because she looked back over her shoulder, making them all afraid for a second she would lose her balance, before she stepped back, shaking herself and moving her shoulder in a gesture even Penny, blushing, understood.
While she was facing away, performing that most private of gestures with glaring publicity, Chas and Penny tried to calm their own faces from the shocking sight of hers. Her hands, cheeks, forehead, even the bridge of her nose were marked with scars from old cuts, and brutal ones. Something tugged at Penny’s memory, conspiring with the spiked wine to try and surface, but was dragged back underwater before Penny could quite catch sight of it. The woman was about Hong’s age, maybe a couple of years younger, and for a second…
Literature Section “06-67 Dance of the Qahramanat II”—Part 67 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1105 words—Accompanying Images: 1608-1610—Published 2025-04-19—©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.