1727 06-85 In the Realm of the Senses
PREVIOUSLY: Penny has been completely deprived of all sensation—vision, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling; even their auxiliary aspects like balance and orientation and the awareness of her own heartbeat and breath. Outside her isolation, the world moves forward, with Esmeray trying to murder Chastity for defying her and disrupting Channah’s spell. Trying to recover, Channah has just put Chastity’s earplugs back in, cutting him off again. NOW:
Fang crouched over the effectively-mummified Penny, with her hands steady on Penny’s ajna, the third eye in her head, and muladhara, the basic center of trust in her root—or as close to them as her hands could be. Channah and one of Hong’s girls knelt on the restrained Chastity. Hong and her other three jawari struggled to restrain the still-livid, almost-rabid Esmeray. Like Penny and Chastity, when she could keep her skirts down, Hong almost appeared to be fully-dressed, if sweaty and disheveled with a whore’s slightly smudged makeup. Unlike them in one respect, the plunging neckline of her cheongsam had already been ripped open, revealing the inner edges of her breasts in a manner that would have been most fetching if it weren’t for the exigencies of the moment. Hong’s girls were disheveled, and naked, from head to toe, even their cages discarded on the other side of the platform with nothing to interrupt their shiny sweaty perfect cinnamon skin except the marks Hong had made on them with her fingernails and her stiletto heels. All of them had been forced to interrupt their own ritual to come running to the aid of their overlords in separating the murderous Esmeray from the rebellious Chastity, while the band played on, in accordance with its standing orders, to doggedly play until they were told to stop no matter what they saw or heard or felt, no matter what happened to them.
“Those fucking little bitches! And of all the times for this!” Channah spat, furious, astonished, and amused all at once, and shaking her head ruefully. Yet for all that, she couldn’t help but reveal the genuine, sharp concern beneath: “How is she?!”
Fang, like Chas and all the others, would have known who she meant, even if she hadn’t been caring for her. “She’s fine,” Fang assured her Queen soothingly, still snickering herself, meeting her Master’s eyes insistently to convey her seriousness and certainty despite the irresistible lightness of her mood. “Everything is fine, My Liege. I promise!”
“Then why are we both laughing?” Channah threw up her hands in exasperation as she stood, flicking her head at Hong’s girl and watching from the corner of her eye as the girl hopped to her feet and darted to help her sisters, her little noodle flopping irrelevantly.
“Because it’s funny!” Fang laughed merrily like bells pealing on a sweet summer day.
“It fucking is. It really fucking is! Isn’t it?”
“IT IS NOT FUNNY YOU INFERNAL WHORES!” Esmeray screamed and spit. Only unlike Channah, Esmeray was so out of her mind there wasn’t anything figurative about the spitting. “Bintāni al-haram!”
Hong and her girls gasped, mortally terrified to be so close to the woman, even in her vicinity, their eyes fearfully sidling to those of Channah and Fang for their reactions, to see if the five of them should dive down the stairs back to the protection of the castle in pursuit of minimum safe distance, or if they should continue to hold the defiant madwoman down.
Channah and Fang looked at one another in a shock that rapidly dissolved into even harder laughter, trying and failing to appear stern and judgmental, slowly shaking their heads in wonder, their eyes alight with gaiety, sharing an intimacy that was rare and profound because they found themselves in such a rare situation it was fresh, taking them back to their own youth. Esmeray, an even more rare specimen than Penny: A human, throwing the truth of what they were in their faces in an almost naïve attempt at disrespect, instead of hiding and burying that truth, which every human who knew or imagined the ancient succubae dreaded in their heart in the dark of night.
Without looking away from Fang quite yet, Channah extended her arm straight out towards the tangled knot of clothed qaharamanat and naked jawari, snapping her fingers decisively in command. “Don’t you dare let the truth-speaker go. Keep her here, in the hetaraslakos. Do not break the ritual. Bind her if you can, but I want her conscious and don’t you dare let her interrupt us again! Then mount them both on the rails!”
“You biiiiiiitch!” Esmeray screeched, and “Yes, Domina,” Hong solemnly swore, and “Yes, My Liege!” the four naked girls imitated Fang. And that was the last Channah paid them any mind, the sound of them fading as Esmeray’s speech devolved into a profane mishmash of bastardized Turkish and Arabic that almost complemented the discordant, insistent music of the band. Below and all around them, incredibly, the roar of the damned had grown even louder than before, louder than either Channah or Fang could remember hearing.
The moment was so real and genuine, Fang felt comfortable breaking through the centuries and millennia of formal fealty that had calcified their once-passionate relationship, the bond they’d shared before they understood their new reality, even back before their Fall, to tell her what she needed to know: “It’s kind of your fault, Channah,” she laughed. “Stop, and experience!”
“But Penny—”
“I’m telling you, she’s fine,” Fang assured her master, understanding Channah’s concern. Every moment she was cut off from her own metabolism, Penny was at extreme risk: In life, her soul needed her body, inhabited her body; and her body incarnated her soul. With the connection interrupted by the Ajna-nerve wall, Penny’s mind could go mad—a typical mind would have already—and her body could die. They couldn’t do anything for her mind beside monitor it, because the wall was something they were doing to it already. The most powerful sorcerers debated whether a soul in this state even was alive, but agreed that at best it was on a knife’s edge. But what Fang could do—and was doing—was reassuring Penny’s body in her absence, persuading her Penny was alive, that she was alive, reminding her heart to beat, her lungs to breathe, every cell and organ of hers to continue going through the motions necessary for life. Indeed, the actions arguably constituting life.
That was what Channah had been doing when Esmeray lost her shit, throttling Chas and bowling Channah over in the process of her violent struggles with the thrashing, desperate, senseless Chastity. A particularly violent jackknife by Chas had thrown Esmeray full-on into Channah’s back, impossible to ignore, impossible even to weather, knocking her away from Penny and breaking her sacred contact.
Back in this moment, frowning curiously at Fang, Channah did make herself pause to experience this moment, this place, comprehensively—with her full complement of outer senses, and also with her third eye, taking herself out of her narrow focus…
And gasping.
“Yes!” Fang nodded excitedly. “Discordance… on a potentially astrological scale.”
“Yesss….!” Channah agreed, breathing faster, practically leaping to kneel beside Penny, opposite Fang, restoring her connection to Penny, and joining Fang’s consciousness and hands at Penny’s ajna and muladhara.
“Feel her, Channah!”
And then Fang saw something she never saw. Something that no one saw, not from the Queen of Lust: uncertainty. Almost fear. In this moment of connection, Channah whispered her confession, as she needed to: “I’m not ready! I don’t feel ready—”
“My liege, you’re ready,” Fang assured her, moving the hand on Penny’s muladhara to be on top of Channah’s so she could give her a reassuring squeeze. “She’s ready. Finally,” she widened her eyes for emphasis, reminding Channah how long she had been working towards this.
“But—we haven’t even shared solitude—”
“Then do it now,” Fang urged her. “Use the wall.”
“How can I know she’s ready, when I couldn’t even—”
Fang nodded with understanding. “The one thing you can’t do, in all of hell and Earth, because it’s beyond your comprehension.”
“But then—how did Chava—?” She shook her head uncomprehendingly.
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was Penny. Most likely, it was just an accident.”
“Our plan—it’s hubris. Madder than Esmeray! Pure good can never surrender to pure evil.”
“We know that.” Fang struggled to conceal her exasperation. Of course, it was the steadiest of all who didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, really internalize the doubts until the moment of crisis. “You know that already, My Liege. And that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just doing what can be done, the closest we can come. A makeshift bridge.”
“And if it doesn’t work—”
Fang laughed at Channah, to show her the absurdity of the last-second surfacing of doubts they had harbored from the very start. “You know this. Then we start again. Or if we can’t make it happen, we wait for it to happen again.” She shrugged and smiled, the immortal’s joke: “It will give us something to do. It will happen. Again, and again, and again. Every one of our enemies has found one—”
“And ultimately failed!” Indeed, it had been their very success in the attempt that had been their undoing in the world.
Which was why Channah had waited for so long before she even considered it. Perhaps it was the only reason the Succubae alone still roamed the Earth: because demons could not understand the good, and therefore struggled to use it instead of corrupting it. Fang honestly didn’t know what the correct course of action was. After so many millenia, she wasn’t even quite sure she cared. She was pretty sure the High Coven, maybe the whole Court, had agreed to go along out of some brand of inertial boredom or simple fatalism, rather than a careful analysis of their enemies’ mistakes and how to avoid them.
Fang shrugged, doing and deciding what she urged Channah: “It is a mystery. It will always be a mystery. You must know even better than me. Experience it and tell me—is this the best moment we are likely to have? Or not? Decide, don’t decide, roll the dice. Time and heaven don’t care. Only we do.”
Literature Section “06-85 Penny’s Astrological Discordance”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 85 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1653 words—Accompanying Images: 1727-1731—Published 2025-05-07—©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.
