Tag: magic


1727 06-85 In the Realm of the Senses
1728 06-85 In the Realm of the Spirit
1729 06-85 With a Devil on both shoulders…?
1730 06-85 The Maddening Discordant Orchestra
1731 06-85 Frenzy

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.


1708 06-83 Fear of Falling
1709 06-83 Into the Abyss
1710 06-83 The Fear Unto Death
1711 06-83 Helplessly Entombed
1712 06-83 Sweet Dreams of Scarlet Salvation
1713 06-83 Can You Be Saved by a Fallen Angel?

Explicit version containing anal themes at 06-83 The Unconditional Surrender of Penance Batonnoir at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Penny has been completely deprived of vision, hearing, smell, and taste, disoriented with her hands tied behind her back.  Walked to a waist-high guardrail along the edge of the castle parapet, she has just been pushed over it.  NOW:

Penny screamed ineffectively, silently, unheard even by herself and alone in her silence, as the combination of the shove in her back and the yank down on her leash propelled the top half of her body forward and down, and her center of gravity out beyond the rail, out beyond the relative safety of the edge, over the abyss.

As her head and shoulders plummeted down, gravity and the bar at her hips lifted her feet from the solidity of the platform and she went flying!  Inside her guts, the blind eel that dwelled there somehow connected to her emotions, and spasmed violently.

Until a moment later a sharp pull on her ankles stopped her from falling further.  It was so solid, so unyielding, her mind recognized she had not been caught by human—or even demon—hands.  Her bonds must have caught on something!  But that half-thought was about all she had in her and her body was out of control already, her deliberate mind having shut down and ceded control to the basest and most animal instincts, things so deep and distant she could not even recognize them as parts of herself.  Like foundry workers around an exploding furnace they were shouting soundless orders and alarms, flashes of sweaty muscles and hurrying silhouettes and panic-filled eyes rolling in trapped sockets, they made her body jerk and twitch in every direction, trying to free a hand, trying to catch on something else besides her ankles, trying to fall feet-first, trying and failing to do something, that would make a difference long after her will and intentions had shut down and closed their eyes, bracing for impact.

She flopped and jerked and twisted like a fish tumbling out of a net onto the deck of a boat.  In her absence, her body was trying to exert any slight degree of control that would allow it to survive and choose, if not with any specific haven in mind, simply to change what was happening already through no decision of its own.  Her body would take any fate other than the one her mind had told it to expect.  And her body would not give up, even without her mind to help.

It was several seconds before her reason could realize she still wasn’t falling, and work out they must have chained her ankles to something when they spread her legs.  With another lost expression, Penny sobbed and fell limp and ragged, her waist and her very life held by a solitary narrow iron bar, her momentum over it checked by her ankle cuffs, her arms still bound behind her back, emphasizing their uselessness and Penny’s own ineffectiveness as a living thing.

Penny screamed.  Penny screamed and wept, shaking and sobbing, her sense of balance telling her gravity still roared and slavered for her, wishing to snatch her away like the jaws of a wolf.

At first, Penny hardly registered, hardly had the room to register, that her dress and underskirts had been thrown over her head, before she was shocked and focused by something cold and hard and wet.  And the instant it touched her—

She felt absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing.

At.

All.

Not her own weight, lying on the narrow bar and tugging on the ankle chains.

Not voracious gravity, trying to devour her.

Not the hot and humid air pressing tightly around her.

Not her own heartbeat.

Not her own breath!

Not even the darkness and silence of her world.

A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E N-O-T-H-I-N-G-N-E-S-S.

And so Penny learned what complete and utter forlorn terror really was.

Was she dead?!

She must be dead.

But even death shouldn’t be so lonely and isolating.  So… naught.

She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she would go mad.  And not slowly:  soon.  Maybe she already was.

Her mind was certainly thrown to mad thoughts without anything real to anchor it in any way.  Thoughts like these, that were real because they were the very world she was experiencing, raw and immediate, nothing esoteric about them:

What was happening to her body?!  Inside her own body?!  Her mind knew because it remembered.  When it was aware, it had rarely even realized how thoroughly it knew it was alive every second.  It felt its own breath, felt its own heart, sometimes even heard them or felt the rise and fall of its chest; sometimes smelled and felt the slick moisture of its own sweat.  Now, she could not even tell if her body—if she—was still there, or had ever really been there.  She didn’t know if she had ever even had a body at all.  Perhaps it had all been her imagination.  Or was her body being destroyed, inside and out, continuing the assault every sense she’d had, had been screaming at her to report?  It had to be; her senses were gone, unless reality was actually gone—and she had no way to tell.  Was she even now, falling towards the sea of devils and demons below, who would tear her to pieces for all eternity, over and over again?  Or had she died, and these were the last seconds of her consciousness, mere seconds stretching and lasting in a final desperate effort to cling to life?

She couldn’t say which was more disconcerting, more upsetting and unreal:  the loss of her body, or the loss of her world.  Because without her senses, she had nothing.  She had imagined she was lost with the mere departure of her sight, hearing, taste, and smell.  What she wouldn’t give to return to even that half-state of being!  To be without even touch, even balance?… Without anything, really.  Without the senses she had taken for granted, and the things they brought to her, reality itself did not exist.  She felt no gravity, and it was gravity that had connected her to this world all her life, like an umbilical cord to her mother, without her even realizing she felt it:  a sense of up and down, right and left, solidity.  Without the pull of the world she was utterly untethered.  There were no people.  There was no sun, no wind, no earth, no wind, no fire, no air, the very elements themselves dissolved, if they had ever existed at all.

Oh, Domina!  She thought, her mind crying where her body no longer existed to weep.  Her Domina! 

For the first time in her life, she felt a perfect clarity, a perfect certainty:

Penny knew, absolutely knew, with every shred and fiber of her being, that only her Domina could bring her back from… if she had had shoulders, she would have given up and shrugged.  She was nowhere.  There was nowhere to bring her back from.  But only her Domina could pluck her out of this absence and bring her back to reality, the world, her sweet smell, her soft skin, her warm love, bring Penny back to Penny herself, from this awful nothingness.

Oh Domina!  Please please please please please please bring me back to you!  PLEASE don’t let go, I know there is a golden spiritual umbilical thread between us, connecting us always, unbreakable and forever!  There has to be one because I need it, I need it so badly I can still feel it, because it’s the only thing that exists for me here!  The certainty you care about me is complete.  I don’t know why, I can’t understand your ways and wiles, and—and maybe I don’t need to.  A part of my soul knows I probably don’t want to.  But do need the fact that I know.  That you cared about something you perceived in me, with senses I don’t even possess, senses that must be able to find me now!  I just need to know you are going to bring me back to you!

You’re going to bring me back!  And that’s what I want, more than anything, to be back in your world, back at your feet, back where you want me.  Back where I BELONG.  I know it now!  Please hear me!  I’m sorry for having been so slow and suspicious.  I’M SORRY!!!  PLEASE!!!

I love you!  I need you!  I am NOTHING without you!  Not without you!

Please….

Literature Section “06-83[X]-The Unconditional Surrender of Penance Batonnoir”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 83 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1374 words::Explicit 1538 words—Accompanying Images:  1708-1712—Published 2025-05-05—©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.

1596 06-63 The powerful, mysterious Duchess Fang^
1597 06-63 Duchess Fang catches Penny^
1598 06-63 Handsome Incubus Prince saves sweet sissy^

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.  Now comes the hard part—landing.  NOW:

Their minds realized, through the screaming senses of their bodies, that this chariot was going to touch back down on the ground, whether under Channah’s control, or that of merciless gravity.  The faint hope and desperate prayer of survival suddenly reminded the girls they needed to prepare for that absolutely certain impact.  They frantically stuffed their corks back in their bottles, set them in their slots at the front of the chariot, then braced themselves as tightly and desperately as they could, arms deep through the leather straps bolted to the chariot, bodies pressed tight against the outer edges and back of it, their free arms crossing one another’s at the wrists to clench onto the back edge of the chariot with knuckles whiter than their dresses. 

From their vantage point, the horse and chariot seemed to be coming in too low over a final, monumental two-story arch separating the road from the open ground, as if the horse’s hooves would hit the top of it and he would tumble through the air, crippled, throwing their chariot forward over him.  Gaining a final impression of a formation of guards waiting to their left on the sand, the girls’ faces tightened into closed-eyed, rictus-grinned masks of clenched muscle.  And at least one of them might have screamed, only the speed with which events were progressing preventing their bodies from attempting something instinctive and crazy like jumping over the sides of the chariot before it hit, knowing:

There was absolutely nothing they could do except pray—

And with a breathless panic their bodies felt weightlessness for a second as Fury stopped and dropped, their momentum exactly matching Fury’s deceleration and therefore shrieking up their nerves that they were in free-fall just like their bodies had feared all along.  We told you so, assholes!  Before the bone-jarring reconnection with the ground at once caused an instant terror this was it, followed by the realization they were still alive and on the ground.  Then just as they started to hope, they were panicked by a final jolt—the wheels running off the end of the road into the sand, they opened their eyes in alarm to see the black stone wall on the opposite side of the triangle rushing at them with too much speed.

They gasped and breathed in relief as Fury decelerated, squeezing one another’s hands again, almost in disbelief that Fury and Channah had had everything well in hand after all, and nothing bad was going to happen to them for defying the gods by attempting flight. 

Domina Fang

“Oh my.  Oh my.”  The girls squealed and hugged tightly and happily, before a cold, unfriendly woman’s voice with a heavy accent they didn’t recognize, interrupted them, speaking Arabic:

“Come out of the chariot now.  Fury is ready to be done with it.”

They turned, seeing soldiers on both sides already releasing Fury’s harness and simultaneously detaching the twin tongues of the chariot from the harness, careless of the fact that as a two-wheeled vehicle, the chariot would pitch forward and unceremoniously eject them the second it was loose.  Penny didn’t begrudge the horse at all, he had just performed a miracle for the girls’ benefit.  But it was oddly deflating and disappointing for yet another denizen of hell to confirm that here, Channah’s horse was of significantly more importance and regard than the two girls. And after surviving such a flight!  Penny thought unreasonably.  As if mundane death or injury was less likely after a miraculous and unexpected survival.

All thoughts of honoring their Queen with their ladylike dignity were pushed aside by the imperative to get out of the chariot.  Penny was about to jump off the side of it, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be scary after what they’d just been through, only to notice another soldier already folded up in footstool position below her.

With a slight lack of decorum induced by haste, Penny half-scrambled, half-fell out of her side of the Chariot while Chas did the same on the other side, wincing and flinching “Sorry!” as her shoes landed on the soldier’s back with more force than she would have intended, and too much momentum to completely avoid her heels digging a bit into the poor man before she staggered down to the sand, barely stumbling to a halt as someone caught her arm, stopping her inches before bumping into them.

Raising her eyes up the detailed red leather boots and tooled red leather armor, Penny immediately registered from her shape this was a woman, and from her clothing she was wealthy and well-appointed.  As her eyes continued up, she knew the woman would have been a head taller than her even if they were both barefoot.  And finally, looking up into her face, she gasped in surprise to find a woman with lovely, glowing pale amber skin, exquisitely curved horns carved in bas relief, and eyes that for a split-second she registered with fright as demonic, perhaps because of what Penny sensed behind them.  Those eyes looked back at Penny like a cat’s, trying to decide whether it wanted to waste its time toying with an ant, or simply ignore it.  Penny shrank back involuntarily, sensing the woman’s satisfaction, before something about the woman’s face, or perhaps the patterns tooled into her leather armor, jarred an even stronger impression:

“Are you from Cathay?!”  Immediately aghast, even as the woman’s brows knit further in displeasure, Penny stumbled on, curtsying as best she could, feeling particularly pathetic in the awkward semi-curtsy she was forced to make with one arm still held rigidly by the woman’s strong hand:  “I’m sorry, Mistress, I’ve never met anyone from Cathay before.”  Penny was a stranger in hell, but even without the benefit of having read Dante’s Inferno, she would have had no doubt at all the woman outranked her.  Everything about her, from her clothing to her appearance to her attitude to her speech to her position here greeting her Queen, screamed she was of high rank.  And eventually Penny got around to saying the right thing:  “You’re so beautiful and exotic, Mistress.  More than I could have imagined from woodcuts.”

“Human ignorance never ceases to amaze me,” she concluded, her eyes softening just a little bit at the compliment.

Literature Section “06-63 Hella Honeymoon XIX”—Part 63 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1048 words—Accompanying Images:  1596-1598—Published 2025-04-15—©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.

1593 06-61 Imagining the worst^
1594 06-62 A red fire shooting across the sky of hell^
1595 06-62 Ready or not, coming in hot^

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 to reach their honeymoon destination.  But before they get there, she’s taking them on a memorable hellride.  NOW:

As their destination grew closer and more real, sensation—and then immediately panic—rose back in them from oblivion to preeminence.  Their eyes could see, and their bodies feel, that the movement each sensed corresponded to one another again.  And those senses immediately started clamoring that they were hundreds of feet above the ground, with nothing under them to hold them up, and indeed that they were descending toward it.  Hurtling toward it!  Their bodies remembered what they may never have consciously realized in the limited world of short distances they had spent their lives living in:  That when unsupported things fall, they accelerate, with potentially-gruesome consequences.  Their senses started screaming at them to do something, anything, to stop their fall.  When their minds knew full well, they could do nothing.  Nothing but hold onto one another and trust in their bold Domina’s confidence.

Hard Stop in Chang’an

Below them, the city—for that was what it was, many times larger than the village of walls around the satanikoklus—unfolded, with large straight whitish stone main avenues and narrower red trails snaking between them around a confusing welter of incomplete wall fragments at angles to one another.  There would be three walls with a fourth missing; wide gaps instead of narrow doors in curtain walls; softer dark-gray pumice blocks piled on top of more solid white granite; and a complete absence of floors to insulate any of the occupants from the searing heat of the naked sand. 

The humidity rose, reminding them how fortunate they had been without it, and they began to feel the strikes of tiny grains of driven sand again, making their bodies long for the remembered peace of the upper atmosphere.

Their destination within the city seemed plain enough:  A single huge building, a castle, solid black—a rock-solid black granite, not the cheap gray pumice used elsewhere to fill out and replace stronger stones—right where the three roads met, with a wide strip of cleared space—a killing ground—separating its outer walls from the densely-packed jigsaw jumble of lesser structures surrounding it.  The only structure in each of the three killing fields was a single solid hexagonal structure in the very center of it.  The castle’s position, in contrast to the satanikoklus, was to no degree arbitrary.  It was exactly where the three roads met—their focal point, in fact.

The castle’s basic design was triangular, with the arriving roads connecting to the three angles where the walls met.  The outer walls—and even more, the monumental gateways at each corner—were massive, beyond massive, and several stories tall.  Within them were smaller walls, structural rather than defensive, and something they had not seen since coming to hell:  solid four-walled structures with proper terrace roofs and doors closing doorways.  At each corner, an actual metal gate served to exclude outsiders from the castle itself.  And immediately behind each gate a series of triangular bunkers provided a warren of passageways barely wide enough for a chariot to pass, between the bunkers and under arches riddled with murder holes.

Cannon and soldiers dotted the tops of the walls, illuminated, like the castle itself, by an intense cluster of the flares scattered at much lower density throughout the landscape.  This confirmed some shred of reason in the madness of this place, that the otherwise-unremarkable site had been specifically chosen for the castle, and thus the city, for an actual reason:  because of the concentration of naphtha seeps coming from the land here.

Inside the castle there were soldiers and servants, human in appearance like the one who had served them back at the satanikoklus.  Outside, prevented from entering by either by magic or the heavy gates, was a seething ocean of the crimson, almost tomato-colored red demons and devils.

“Why do you think they’re that color?”  Chas said, having to speak loudly over the wind flowing past them, but nothing like the clamor of the creatures at ground level. 

Penny frowned in thought, then made a face.  “No.  Oh dear.  It’s like… maybe it is, scar tissue?  Or—”

“Or even, open wounds,” Chas suggested with a similarly appalled face, imagining she was finishing Penny’s sentence.

But Penny clarified:  “Or the most intimate flesh.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—the lips.  The inside of the mouth.  The nipples and—”

“The rawest parts,” Chas finished.

“The most vulnerable,” Penny agreed.

“It’s like they’ve been skinned…” Chas swallowed.

“But no.  They can’t be,” Penny shook her head, perhaps trying to persuade both of them with the power of insistence.  “Devils are just red.”

But even that gory thought was not enough to keep their attention, not with as much of Channah’s hell-brewed spiked wine as they’d had, and even more, the constant barrage of fantastic and previously-unimagined sights bombarding their senses from every direction.  Even the maddening sand wouldn’t discourage them from trying to take in as much as they could.  Some few hundred yards from the castle, one of the red creatures had caught sight of them and its excitement, almost desire, spread like a wildfire from its origin to envelop the entire crowd in the same kind of frenzied, mad efforts to reach the chariot that had characterized their departure.

The chariot passed close over the three-story castle walls, close enough to make out faces watching them with enough wide-eyed interest to indicate flying horses and chariots were rare as eclipses even in hell.

The closer they got to the ground, the faster they seemed to be moving, vertically and horizontally, a kind of optical illusion that insisted to the senses they were accelerating (read: falling) in an uncontrolled descent, and thus to their deaths or at least grievous bodily harm.  It was a jangling alarm that sounded and reverberated through every nerve and sinew of their bodies, clang-a-langing like demanding children banging spoons on pots.

The three roads seemed to traverse the castle, passing through numerous gates and under several building as they did so, meeting in the center of an open triangle of red sand interrupted only by three seeps, the whole clearing perhaps 10 or 12 times the length from Fury’s nose to the stern of the chariot.  They were approaching it directly over the road to the satanikoklus, descending between three-story buildings lining either side of the road that seemed breathtakingly close at the speed they were rushing past them, with nothing solid to hold them up or in line.

Literature Section “06-62 Hella Honeymoon XVIII”—Part 62 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1079 words—Accompanying Images:  1593-1595—Published 2025-04-14—©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.

1589 06-61 What it means to be powerless, vulnerable, and dependent^
1591 06-61 Masterful Channah commands the very sky^
1592 06-61 Channah’s passion for the ride^

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 to reach their honeymoon destination.  But before they get there, she’s going to test their exhibitionistic limits.  NOW:

As Fury, Channah’s steed, powered the ascent of their chariot into the sky, the screaming of the demons and devils below rose to a new and more-frantic pitch and they began jumping and then trying to climb on top of one another as if to catch hold of a chariot rim or axle, even after it would have been clear to any rational mind that doing so was impractical.

As the chariot surged and rocked, the girls screamed, braced themselves harder, and began gulping wine.  Sipping proved impossible because they knew they daren’t risk spilling wine on their gorgeous white dresses, so they had to wrap their lips firmly around the bottlenecks before tipping them up.

The chariot was almost immediately the height of three men above the ground, then six, then nine, then quickly a height greater than either of the girls had ever experienced or even imagined.  With a wide-eyed slack-jawed glance at one another they raised their bottles for another drink.  Penny was hardly able to open her eyes, and yet at the same time unable to resist the queasy thrill of taking in the dramatic scene unfolding beneath her.  As they rose in the air it seemed to grow slightly less rotten with brimstone and the sand, mercifully, seemed to have been left behind closer to its home in the shifting dunes.

Everything grew smaller and quieter below them, and soon they were able to see a greater distance, down and from horizon to horizon, than their eyes had ever encompassed before.  The sheer dimensions of it were overwhelming enough by themselves.  Channah’s realm was revealed as a burning red desert of such scale the mind wanted to reclassify the fantastical and utterly-unique volcanic rock formations that punctured the sanguine powdered sea as commonplace and fungible; a set so numerous, surely not one of them could be truly matchless.

The black rocks now looked like holes through the floor of hell into a bottomless black pit below, distinguished only, if at all, by their outlines.  At the same time, almost every feature within the glowing burnt-orange sand flattened and blurred until it looked like an endless and monotonous moth-eaten rug thrown over the abyss.  The tiny red figures shrank and merged until they were only visible where they clustered around the satanikoklus, and then the figures themselves were lost behind the waning light of their torches.  Then the stone walls and the activity within them became a mere abstract pattern of whites and crimsons interrupting the bloody endless orange, with the ruler-straight stone road like a latitude line under them, pointing the way for Channah and Fury.  As they got enough distance, the girls realized the main road did not end or even bisect the satanikoklus.  Instead, it passed some distance, perhaps leagues, from the satanikoklus, to and from destinations unknown in either direction, with a shorter road of slightly-brighter (new?) stone connecting the square in the settlement to the main road.

There came a point when the ground seemed so far away, so remote and unreal, that the fear of falling subsided.  It wasn’t imminent or even tangible enough to register as a real thing, and so it became a mere idea.  Even though they could feel the rapid motion of the chariot, it didn’t correspond to any infinitesimal change in their position above the landscape, and this detached their senses from the earthbound world below, bringing them into another:  the serenity of space.

They kept expecting to reach the stars and perhaps the moon.  Surely they would get close enough to them to really comprehend them and study them in detail, up close.  But no matter how high they rose in the hellish sky, there was nothing to see.  Not one thing, not a star, not a reflection, not a half-sensed motion detected from the corner of an eye, to break or even vary the endless inky blackness, leaving it without form or dimension.  The mind—or was it the body?—even yearned for the maddening sand to hit it again and help make things more real.  The moment the ground ceased to be relevant and real, acrophobia was replaced by a weird stomach-churning juxtaposition of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, their physical forms unable to tell if they were alone and separate from everything in a petrifying unreachable nothingness, or drowning in a terrifying, unrelenting, crushing ocean of darkness.

They had no reference-point, no reality, except the hollow chariot they sat in, one another—who they could bond with in mutual fear—and the self-assured woman riding her horse in front of them, leading them without any apparent hesitance or doubt to the safety and certainty of her chosen destination.  Between draughts of wine, they held hands for comfort, daring to allow a few inches of space between their bodies and the firm chariot walls so they could feel the comfort of one another’s hips, sides, shoulders, and warmth.  And their eyes locked on the woman—their woman, their Domina—they knew and understood and, well, trusted with their very lives, wishing she were sitting here between them with her arms around them, laughing at the pliant and accommodating world she seemed to live fearlessly in.

They were so disconnected from the landscape below that at first they didn’t even notice their Queen was leading them back down into hell.  Chas squeezed Penny’s hand firmly, bringing her attention back to her own physical senses, and startling them into realizing they had actual, useful information for her again.  Penny swallowed and looked backwards, daring to move despite her body’s demand for the security of perceived stability, and could not recognize anything behind them except the white line of the road disappearing into sand, long before it reached the horizon. 

As the desert shrank before them, and its features expanded and swam back into focus, they immediately distinguished a pattern of stone and fire and eventually movement up ahead of them, at the point where the direct line of the straight road from the distant satanikoklus ended, before splitting like a “Y” and proceeding at different angles to the horizons ahead of them.

Literature Section “06-61 Hella Honeymoon XVII”—Part 61 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1026 words—Accompanying Images:  1589, 1591-1592—Published 2025-04-13—©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.