ninja – The Remainderman (Frank Speech)

07-01 The Chamber of Torment III (abridged version)

2025-07-01 admin

*1980 07-01 Massively- (Magically-) Enhanced Interrogation*

*1982 07-01 Aww! He looks so sad and pathetic!*

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 07-01X The Chamber of Torment III at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah are interrogating Gasparo Orseolo in the Chamber of Torment, the nighttime nerve center of the Venetian Republic. In another part of the Palace, Chava waits nervously for further instructions with the ensorcelled child, Pen, trying not to think about how much time is passing. NOW:

“You evil little roach. You will be spending eternity with us, in hell.”

“No! No, I am a pious man! A churchgoing man! I was confessed just this morning!”

The two succubae laughed vindictively. “And you were torturing prisoners again before we found you tonight, weren’t you?” Channah observed. “Even under your church’s absurd superstitions, you are no innocent. You’re not even good.” She peered at him—into him and through him—with narrowed eyes, ignoring his blubbering protests, before nodding. “Damned as Judas, your filthy, tarnished soul is.”

“My priest—”

“Legerdemain!” Rivqah roared with amusement.

“Prestidigitation!” Channah concurred. “There are no magic spells that can save you from your Maker’s judgment. Your soul is as you have fashioned it. Old men in dresses, chanting and making hand gestures, cannot alter or hide the filth on it—within it—from God.”

“God is merciful!” This idea seemed to incense both of the succubae, but he was doubling down before he could even consider whether it was wise or not: “He will forgive me!”

After taking her own peer at his soul, Rivqah exchanged a wry glance with Channah. “I wouldn’t count on it,” was all Rivqah said.

“I’m going to ask Rivqah to come find you—what’s left of you,” Channah decided.

“Yesss!” Rivqah hissed, her eyes dancing with delight at the prospect.

“And then we’re going to hang you up again and have another little chat,” she nodded to herself, her voice dripping with malice. Channah laughed. “And down there, we can leave you in exactly this position as long as we want. You’ll never pass out or rest. Not in hell. I’m so going to hope you remember this. Enough of it, anyway, to appreciate how right I was, and how wrong you were. So I can really gloat and rub it in.” And seeing his frown of uncertainty and doubt, she shrugged. “It’s true! And quite irritating. You damned little ants can be quite disoriented and overwhelmed by hell. The red shades can’t remember anything specific about their lives. They’re consumed and defined by their lust. White shades,” she pointed to him helpfully “—that’s going to be you, loser—may remember a few details of their Earthly lives, sometimes many of them, or maybe nothing at all. That’s why I had to come interrogate you here, to learn what I need to learn before you forget it.”

“You’re mad! You can’t just—just question me, inside the Doge’s own palace! The guards—”

“Oh!” She and Rivqah smirked at one another. “I see.”

“Are you, perhaps, hoping for a rescue?!” Rivqah snickered.

Channah disappeared and reappeared a foot to the left of where she had been.

“Wha–?!” the Capo gasped, and even Rivqah—the swordswoman—was clearly taken aback by the sudden shift, although she quickly covered up that reaction.

And then, just as suddenly, Channah was standing two feet to the right of where she had been.

“I can stop time itself, Gasparo. And move through it.” And as she saw the hopelessness she had been looking for, creep into his eyes, she laughed throatily with satisfaction. “That’s right. We have all the time in the world we could ever hope for. But if you don’t cooperate with me, I won’t do that. I’ll loiter here, until another Lord of the Night or a night watchman appears with another prisoner to torture, and kill them. Who do you imagine would win, in a contest between us—your army and navy of Venice? Or my demon warriors?”

“Hail, Mary, full—”

“Oh, stop it, sinner!” she laughed, slapping Orseolo brutally across the face, more-than-incidentally pulling on his arms and eliciting another cry of agony from him. “You can’t very well be answering my important questions, when you’re chanting and whimpering, can you? No.”

And when he started up again, not quite rationally, she appeared thoughtful, moving counterclockwise around him until she stood by his left leg. With more force than Orseolo could have imagined, she twisted as hard as she could. With a scream ending in abrupt silence, Orseolo was knocked out from the pain.

He was awakened again, by a ladle-full of cold, stale water (again), hanging in the strappado—again—in the Chamber of Torment, wracked with pain. Again.

“I think we’ve established your leg isn’t dead yet,” Channah reminded him, as his eyes blinked and tried to refocus on the world around him.

“Not dead—what?”

And she barely poked it, eliciting another scream, this one not ending in abrupt unconsciousness.

“Your leg is still alive. But the tourniquet will kill it soon enough.”

“Tourniquet?!” he looked down and wailed again in horror at the rope constricting his left leg. “Oh no,” he gasped, panicking, head twisting back and forth, eyes rolling in his head. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no….”

“You won’t be bleeding out on us, Gasp-o,” she assured him. “Sorr—eee. But after we kill the leg, we’ll have to continue above the tourniquet. So….” She leaned down and tugged his chin to the left so he couldn’t avoid her eyes. She smiled brightly. “I’d best take advantage of your shattered knee right now, hadn’t I? How did you first come to suspect Anzola was ‘possessed’?” And then she dug her thumb in , shuddering with pleasure as she watched him cry and shudder.

Literature Section “07-01[X] The Chamber of Torment III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 01 of Chapter Seven, “Channah’s Slavegirls: Pawns of the Court of Lust”—Abridged 896 words::Explicit 1121 words—Accompanying Images: 1980-1983—Published 2025-07-01—©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.

Stories

06-128 The Chamber of Torment II (abridged version)

2025-07-012025-07-01 admin

*1976 06-128 Channah & Rivqah show their cards… and their claws*

*1978 06-128 …and I bet he can take it all the way up to HERE*

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-128X The Chamber of Torment II at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials who were supervising their torture of a Venetian prisoner in the Room of Torment of the Doge’s Palace. Now one of Venice’s 3 Capos—who rotate responsibility for day-to-day management of Venice—awakens to find himself bound and hanging by his wrists, which are tied behind his back, with his knee shattered, learning that his captors know him already. NOW:

“Finally. You find yourself in the place you most deserve, Gasparo Orseolo.”

The capo couldn’t conceal the uneasy alarm in his voice. “How—how do you recognize me?!”

The women laughed. “We don’t ‘recognize’ you,” Rivqah assured him.

And Channah explained: “We came for you. We picked a night when you would be on duty here. Because we want to know what you know. Well…” she exchanged an amused glance with Rivqah. “That’s half the truth. They say if you want a thing done right, you should do it yourself. But that’s why I keep charge of training my operatives: to make sure every one of them is trained right. If all I wanted from you was information, I could have sent any one of them here for you tonight. Instead of honoring you—and indeed, all of Venice—with my esteemed presence, and that of my Duchesses, in this little backwater.”

“Backwater?! Duchess—” the Capo looked genuinely incredulous and confused, as well he might. Venice was one of the brightest lights in Latin Christendom, and (in his relatively seasoned and well-informed experience) Duchesses were ladies rather than thieves and assassins. “But—what could you possibly want from me?!”

“24 Sha’ban, 921.”

“What?”

Channah made a circular motion with her hand. “Ahhh…” looking mildly frustrated, she shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter to us.”

“What you would call, um… Wednesday, October 3^rd, anno Domini 1515,” Rivqah clarified, with exaggerated formality.

“Thank you, my dear.”

Orseolo looked discomfited, nervous, and uncertain. “October… October two years ago….” His thoughts were slow, even stuck.

Channah let him fumble around for a moment, her eyes flat and hard. “This one, for your sake, I hope you can remember: Anzola Ipato.”

Orseolo gasped. “You—you are what, her sisters? I promise you—I swear to you in the Lord’s name, the Anzola Ipato I knew, she was not your sister!”

“Oh, yes she was!”

“No, I swear it—your poor sister had departed before I ever met her. The Devil had already taken her! Her body was a vessel for him when she was brought to me. I swear it! Three patricians swore it to me and I confirmed it.”

Both women were incensed, stepping forward, faces contorting with rage. “Liar! She was no devil!”

The Capo’s voice rose several octaves, as if they’d already castrated him: “I swear it! The Archibishop himself confirmed it! Her flesh was scarred by Holy Water—it evaporated on he—”

“You threw holy water on her?!” Channah’s hand shot out to seize his jaw and pinch it, hard, impossibly hard for what Orseolo imagined to be a frail woman.

He was baffled and scared; their reactions completely inappropriate, indeed illogical. “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m telling you—we tried to save her! We did everything we could to expel the demon from her!”

“You did expel the demon from her, exorcist! And with it, extinguished her ability to live and move in this world!”

“What–?!” No one had ever been more baffled than Gasparo Orseol was in that moment. “Praise be to the Holy Mother Church!”

“Fuck and damn the Holy Mother Church!”

“Who are you?!” He wailed.

And with a sly glance at one another, for his reward, they showed him.

It took him a moment to wrap his mind around what he was seeing, the horns rising from their foreheads, their teeth and fingernails sharpening and lengthening, their skin taking on a ruddy hue under the olive one, and even—though he didn’t spot them until later—their tails extending under their skirts to swirl and brush the floor. But as soon as he did begin to try and make sense of the insensible, to the succubae’s delight, Orseolo started quaking and blithering Catholic incantations: “Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art th—”

“You honor the mother of your lord by urinating?!” the demonesses laughed.

“Wh—what?” Orseolo looked down and sobbed to see the evidence of his own shame on the platform below him. Then he noticed a second puddle, much larger, and of a much darker and stickier liquid, on the same surface but much nearer to his head than his groin. What attracted his attention was movement, of another dark red drop plummeting past him to land in the puddle. Gasping with shock, before even thinking how much sudden motion would hurt him, he craned his neck to look up, his screech of pain turning into a prolonged scream of terror at the sight of his Lord of the Night hanging half a dozen feet above him by the very same rope.

The two demonesses chuckled and shook their heads. “We haven’t even started to torture him properly yet!” Rivqah clucked her disappointment.

The demonesses simply enjoyed his horror and shock, drinking it in and appraising it with experienced eyes for perhaps 2 or 3 minutes, until he came back to them, and to the room around him, well enough to start thinking and calculating and—this was the sweetest to them—hoping and praying as desperately as he was fearing and dreading, all at once plunged into a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.

As his eyes came back into focus on Channah’s, Channah asked him conversationally: “You’re an experienced torturer. What are the advantages of the strappado?”

“Wh—what?”

“Over, say… the Judas seat. Or…” she raised her hand, holding an exquisitely-detailed and -inlaid dagger with a radically curved blade. “a simple blade?”

“I don’t—I—I—”

“Oh, I am disappointed,” Channah professed, shaking her head and frowning. “First question, and a simple one. And not even a state secret, by any stretch of the imagination. And you can’t answer it. It’s so easy: Longevity. Specifically, yours.” She shrugged. “Relatively speaking, of course. You know you’re going to die where you hang, don’t you?”

“What?” he barked hoarsely, like a small dog kicked in the stomach.

“You’re never going to leave that rope,” she explained slowly, as if speaking to a small child. “Not inside your body, anyway. Never going to know another second free of pain.” She tut-tutted, as if there were something about the situation she regretted, rather than relished. “Never going to be happy again.”

“Hallelujah, I will when I join my Lord—”

And here both of them laughed, a sharp, mocking cackle with a supreme confidence that rattled the Capo. “Oh, is that where you think you’re headed?” Channah could barely contain her mirth.

Literature Section “06-128[X] The Chamber of Torment II “—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 128 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1087 words::Explicit 1200 words—Accompanying Images: 1976-1979—Published 2025-06-30—©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.

Stories

06-127 The Chamber of Torment I (abridged version)

2025-06-292025-06-30 admin

*1973 06-127 We’re gonna fuck you up so hard*

*1975A 06-127 Before: You’re just WOMEN!…*

*1975C 06-127 After: … for whom I have only the utmost respect!*

Explicit version containing graphic violence, gore, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-127X The Chamber of Torment I at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials and a Venetian prisoner being subjected to strappado, in the torture room of the Council of Ten. NOW:

The prisoner continued to moan and struggle, but the other sounds—sounds of movement and violence—abruptly ended. Channah had already begun to move to her left, keeping her arrow trained on one Venetian official while remaining mindful of the second official face-down on the floor before her with his arms extended to the sides. Cautiously, she darted a glance toward the middle of the room, nodding with satisfaction to see Rivqah was the only figure standing.

The two of them remained motionless and silent, eyes on their respective prey, listening intently for any sound of alarm.

The Capo began: “What is the me—”

“Shh!” Channah hissed, with sufficient force, and a gesture from her bow, that the Capo fell silent while the interlopers listened for a beat, two, three, four, and five.

Channah flicked her eyes back to the middle of the room, meeting Rivqah’s, and raised her chin questioningly. Rivqah shook her head slightly in response, and both women relaxed.

“Stay still until we get to you,” Channah barked at the two men in front of her, watching the Capo’s eyes widen at the sound of her voice, while Rivqah sheathed her sword and returned to the wall, unwound the rope, and let the prisoner down. He groaned and wept in an odd, sobbing combination of pain, and much-greater relief from the weight finally coming off of his arms. Still holding the pulling end of the rope, she released the man’s arms from the hanging end, and helped him off the platform to a standing position on the ground.

“Thank you! Thank you!” the prisoner wailed gratefully. “My arms—please—for the love of God—” the man pleaded, sincerely, turning his back towards her.

Emotionlessly, Rivqah spun him to face her and pushed him backwards to the wall, where she tied the lifting end of the rope back to the ring in the wall, and then tied his arms to the ring, ignoring his sad and pitiful whimper. “Do. Not. Try. To. Escape.” She commanded, staring into his pain-wracked eyes with her own, ice-cold ones, satisfied by his brief nod and hanging head.

“You’re women!” the Capo cried out in surprise, and then humiliation immediately turning to a hard, contemptuous rage. “Just women!”

Rivqah had already moved to join Channah, stepping around the table and grabbing the Capo by the shoulder of his expensive robe.

Imagining he saw his chance, the Capo cried: “Let’s take them!” as he spun towards Rivqah, who stepped back—yanking him off-balance by tugging on his robe—even as she executed a side-kick into his knee, the Capo fell to the ground, never to stand again. When Rivqah pitilessly dragged him further towards her, to pull him out from behind his table, the twisting and turning of his ruined knee elicited a sharp scream and then silence as he became unconscious.

The Lord of the Night, gamely—or, perhaps, with a foolish, misplaced, misogynistic self-contempt—responding to his superior’s cry, pulled his arms and feet in towards his body, gathering himself to rise to his feet. His effort was killed instantly and decisively by Channah’s boot, which she raised and slammed down on the back of his head, knocking him unconscious, his arms and legs falling slack with the rest of his body as blood pooled on the floor.

Channah and Rivqah exchanged another glance and shrugged, like: “well, so much for them.” Then they both turned their faces toward the prisoner to make sure he wasn’t trying to take advantage of the ruckus to get loose. If he’d thought about it, maybe even tested his bonds in the initial seconds after the Capo cried out, he wasn’t doing so now. Now, he was looking towards them, appalled, his face whiter than the rest of him, shrinking back towards the wall as if it might shelter him.

When the Capo stirred back into consciousness, light reaching his eyes through his fluttering lids, he felt cold water rapidly warming on his face, the room swimming slowly back into focus.

Blinking, he found himself facing two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life. Despite the sweat on their faces; despite the tangled state of their black hair after peeling off their hoods and masks; and despite their middle age—thirties or forties, he guessed, although it was hard to tell precisely because their olive skin glowed with the vigor of youth, even as their dark hawklike eyes regarded him with the cold, acute scrutiny of the most hardened and wizened crones—the two of them were unimaginably lovely. So lovely, in fact, they made the most expensive courtesans and the most-desirable debutante noblewomen of Venice look common enough. “Angels…” he gasped before he was entirely alert, even as he was noticing the wood-paneled wall and the shocked, terrified prisoner pressing himself tightly back against the wall behind them.

Memory came flooding back as his body alerted him to the most extreme kind of pain, more than anything he had felt since he was shot fighting the Turks over a generation ago; more than he could have even imagined before that injury. His knee, shoulders, elbows, and wrists stung and burned worse than any sting or burn he could conceive of.

“It hurts! It hurts worse than I—” he screamed. And as full recollection reminded him where he was, he screamed again, twice as terrified to see the corners of the women’s mouths turning up, delighting in his cries.

“Angels…” the swordswoman, now holding an empty ladle, returning it to the water bucket near her feet, sneered.

“Of a kind,” the archer smirked. “You are surprised to be in pain? You know where you are, yes? Where we found you?”

“The Chamber of Torment,” he sobbed.

“The Chamber of Torment,” the archer practically purred. “But not your usual seat. Capo.” The word was spoken with all the venom and hatred of a viper.

“My arms! My leg—” and then he cried in horror, memory and recognition finally completely returned.

“I think you’re a little overdue for this chair, don’t you?” And with a vindictiveness that shook him even deeper: “And unlike the… I’m going to guess, thousands of others who came to sit here before you, you came into this room voluntarily, didn’t you? Like you knew you deserved to be here. Gasparo Orseolo.”

Literature Section “06-127[X] The Chamber of Torment I”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 127 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1067 words::Explicit 1173 words—Accompanying Images: 1972-1973—Published 2025-06-28—©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.

Stories

06-126 Death in Venice (abridged version)

2025-06-262025-06-24 admin

*1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment*

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-126X Death in Venice at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah are concealed on the stairway, just below the floor line of the interrogation room of the Council of Ten, seeing one of their primary targets—a Capo of Venice—and a Lord of the Night before them, but aware from the noise that someone was being tortured beyond their line of sight to their left. They have agreed Channah will break right and Rivqah, left on the count of three. NOW:

Three counts later, Rivqah exploded up and forward, Channah nearly on top of her, so close if either of them had slipped the momentum of the other would have taken them both to the floor. Other than their boots drumming on the wood, they remained silent until they were noticed. It was the Capo who, frowning with irritation wondering who would be barging into his domain creating work for him, flicked his eyes towards them first. Channah, her metabolism and nerves on overdrive, imagined she could actually see his eyes begin to widen as he saw her coming out of the darkness, barreling towards him, the plague-mask magnifying his shock and alarm, forcing him to deal with two different surprises at once.

To further throw him off-balance, Channah let out a blood-curdling scream, echoed a second later by Rivqah. The Lord of the Night spun around to identify the threat, wide-eyed and empty-handed, just in time to offer his crotch to her. She accepted his invitation with alacrity, and with a violent kick containing every last bit of adrenaline and seething rage she was feeling. “Stand and surrender!” she demanded of the Capo, her arrow pointed straight in his eye, and he did, immediately, his hands shooting straight up in the air. Thus tamed, she looked down and kicked the howling magistrate: “Take your hands off your cock and spread them where I can see them on the floor!” And when he didn’t immediately do so, she barked: “Do it now, or I swear I’ll nail your head to the floor with my arrow!”

With a frightened wail, he extended his arms, not perfectly, but well enough.

While Channah had charged forward, Rivqah had pivoted to the left, immediately spotting more-or-less what she had surmised would be awaiting her: a big, burly, hirsute man with olive skin dangling from a rope tied tightly around his wrists, behind his back, dangling above a waist-high wooden platform spattered with blood and sweat. The rope went straight up to the high ceiling at right angles to the horizon, almost two stories high, then through a heavy iron ring embedded in the ceiling, and back down at an angle to where the other end was tied to another iron ring embedded in the wall at about chest height. His figure was sandwiched between those of two rough, thuggish, laughing Venetian soldiers, their red cuirasses set aside for ease of movement while they worked their prisoner over. One was hanging like a monkey from the long rope, near where it was tied to the wall, jumping up so that when he fell back down again, the weight of his body jerked the rope hard, making the prisoner cry out. The other was using a long staff to hit the prisoner whenever he saw a moment of vulnerability, adding a horizontal dimension to the vertical dance called out by his partner on the rope.

The two goons were clearly cannon-fodder, without any knowledge of interest to the succubae; and that near-instantaneous appraisal signed their death-warrants. With no value, they were only threats. And she saw no need to tolerate extinguishable threats.

Stick-boy was armed and standing, on balance, and thus the bigger and more-immediate threat. But she could hardly reach him without passing and exposing her back to unarmed monkey-boy; nor could stick-boy reach her for 2-3 seconds. Even if he was capering about idiotically now, monkey-boy would become a threat immediately if he could produce a knife from the back of his belt.

In any event, she moved to the left first, slashing monkey-boy’s neck and watching with momentary interest as his stupid grin collapsed into what Rivqah judged was a far-more-comical look of surprise. His last act, sitting dejectedly on the floor like a child’s sad, discarded, stuffed monkey, was to try and stop the blood pouring from his neck by clapping his hands over the gash in near-imitation of the Confucian maxim to speak not what was contrary to propriety. Sadly, it was a finale without an audience, because before he could complete the gesture, Rivqah was already turning and raising her blade defensively to meet the second soldier.

A bit slow off the mark, he had hesitated a beat or two as his mind tried to make sense of what was happening around him—precisely as the succubae had intended with their speed of attack and shrill battle cries. Rivqah met him halfway around the back of the dangling prisoner, seeing he had raised his stick over his head intending to bring it down on her head in a killing blow. Either he badly underestimated her, or the Venetians only used the staff as an implement of torture, for he was clearly not trained as a soldier to do battle with it.

She thrust her blade towards his heart, and he, to his credit, managed to check and reverse his forward momentum, even as he began turning the staff from its slow, clunky, all-or-nothing coup-de-grace position toward a more-convenient and better-balanced position that might actually serve him on both defense and offense. Alas for him, sound tactics had asserted themselves too late. Rivqah’s initial thrust having barely scratched his chest, Rivqah, snorting and spitting in frustration like a Tasmanian Devil, whipped her own blade back and, judging the guard’s stick moving fast enough to give him a good chance of protecting his neck or even chest, flicked the blade forward and in a downward arc, slicing open the man’s stomach.

Rivqah, something of a student of the human face—especially in battle and in sex—observed with interest as his face, too, began to transform in the moment of his mortal injury, from surprise and rage, to agony, fear, and perhaps just a touch of resignation. As if in slow-motion, his hands loosened and the stick began to drop out of his fingers as he reached to protect his belly, or perhaps to try and repair the damage she had done. A moment later, Rivqah slashed again, this time opening him up and watching with interest as he suffered the ignominy of slipping to the floor. Not to put him out of his misery, but to protect their mission and allow them to communicate normally, she stepped forward, sighing with irritation, and cut his neck wide open.

Just like that, the battle had ended as abruptly as it had begun a few moments before.

Literature Section “06-126[X] A Murder of Crows IV”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 126 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1072 words::Explicit 1163 words—Accompanying Images: 1968-1972—Published 2025-05-26—©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.

Stories

06-125 A Murder of Crows III

2025-06-252025-06-24 admin

PREVIOUSLY: After eliminating the guards in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Channah and Rivqah race along the loggia towards their assigned entry door near the front of the palace. Chava and her little boy separate from them near the middle of the palace, while Miryam remains behind in disguise, in place of the dead guards. NOW:

Channah and Rivqah didn’t pause until they reached the double entryway to the Stairway of the Censors. Checking quickly for any sign of movement or human presence, and detecting none, Channah pulled open one door even as Rivqah tumbled through it, landing on her feet on one side of the door while Channah tumbled to the other, both of them trying to minimize the time they would be framed in silhouette against the lesser darkness of the courtyard.

After a tense moment, scanning the darkness as quickly as possible—ideally, before any Venetian guards spotted them and attacked—they relaxed as soon as they determined they were alone here and undetected. The palace seemed quiet and deserted, except for muffled cries coming from somewhere up the stairs.

With a glance, Rivqah transferred her crossbow and bolts to Channah, drew her sidearm in her left hand, a falchion with a short curved blade, and darted up the right side of the stairway. Like most of Channah’s operatives based in the West, she was most familiar with the curved swords that dominated the wealthier, better-educated, more-civilized Muslim world most of them occupied. Channah herself was considering relocating from Cairo back to Constantinople; and normally used a shamshir. But the sight of such a blade would have attracted attention in Venice, so Rivqah carried the ancient Greek falchion, undergoing a revival in Italy and other parts of Europe. She had been trained in a wide variety of swords.

Channah waited, scanning and listening, until Rivqah reached the tenth step, then began moving up the left side of the stairs after her. Rivqah peered carefully around the landing at the top of the staircase, waiting tight up against the right-hand wall at the base of the second flight, while Channah reached the landing, sweeping broadly to the wall on the opposite side of the stairs and slipping along it to the far corner, crossbow trained on the top of the stairs, where the low flickering light of candles or torches coming from somewhere further on gave them the advantage, down in the darkness of the stairwell.

Rivqah then began moving again. As she approached the top of this staircase she moved to the left, motioning Channah to the right as she remained on the top stair watching to the left. When Channah reached the top of the staircase, she saw what Rivqah had seen: a third, short and much narrower stairway to their left. From here, the cries were much louder, and between them lower groans of pain were now audible, overlapping with two other, impatient voices demanding information and cooperation between the screams.

Channah slipped to the right, across the landing in front of them, crossbow aimed at the top of the third staircase. With another glance, and a slight nod, Channah raised her crossbow to the ceiling while Rivqah crept up the third staircase. If she fired into the stairway now, the only thing she could reasonably expect to hit would be her own sister. She moved to the bottom of the stairs, keeping only her eyes trained at the third floor. Rivqah ducked as she approached the top, stopping in a crouched position with her eyes barely above floor level as she scanned what she could.

With a glance back, she signaled 2 to the right, unknown to the left, suggesting she didn’t have a direct line of sight to the left without exposing her position to the two on the right, but there were voices coming from that direction. Not the best situation to face; but on the bright side, it wasn’t like they were interrupting a church service. The occupants of this room were torturing another human being, without any effort to muffle their screams. In her experience, most humans who hadn’t become completely inured to torture preferred to move out of earshot whenever it occurred, because they found it unpleasant. And the minority who enjoyed it were drawn to it like flies to manure; they’d be in the room, almost on top of it. All of that gave the succubae a lot of latitude for making noise. They could, quite literally, scream and still blend. Well, more or less.

Missiles? Channah signaled.

None to the right, unknown to the left, Rivqah responded.

Considering the width of the building, Channah couldn’t imagine there was too much open distance to the left. Still… She crept up behind Rivqah, pressing up against her back to see nearly what she saw in the crowded space at the top of the stairs. On the right was a long desk, three chairs wide, closed in front, with a candelabra sitting on it to provide light. Behind the desk sat a gray-haired man in elaborate robes of expensive fabric, talking to an equally gray but otherwise lesser man—in proportions, in status, and certainly finery—who wore a neat but simple and unexceptional robe, standing with his back to them.

The seated man, she knew immediately, was the Capo, a member of Venice’s ancient and privileged patrician class, rulers of the Republic for the better part of a millennium. Knowing from her mission planning, exactly who he was, she felt the faint ache of her horns, claws, and fangs straining to erupt, an instinct she was barely able to restrain in the nick of time.

The other man would have to be, she thought, the Venetian Lord of the Night for San Marco—night commander, judge, and all-purpose representative of the Venetian state in this district of the city during the hours of darkness. He had five counterparts in the other districts of the city; and some nights their business brought them together here. But evidently not tonight; if it had, they would all be gathered around that table, or outside the torture chamber altogether. If she’d seen this fellow on the street, she would have guessed he was a shopkeeper or clerk, perhaps a merchant on the make but not yet worthy of consideration for marriage into or other admission to the ruling class. She tended to doubt the Venetians would tolerate giving anyone other than a patrician the title “Lord.” So perhaps he was of an ancient family that had fallen on hard times.

Both of the men were old, for humans; and would be unlikely to pose a grave threat. They were both examining a parchment as they talked, so their attention was focused elsewhere. She doubted the standing man could turn around before she was upon him.

Leaning into Rivqah’s neck and enjoying the smell of her, she whispered “I’ll try to take both of them alive. You take the left; I doubt any of them will matter. If you need me, shout at me to turn.” Rivqah nodded her understanding, managing to tickle Channah’s cheek with her hair. With a final “on 3,” Channah slipped back to give her room.

Literature Section “06-125 A Murder of Crows III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 125 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1150 words—Accompanying Images: 1964-1967—Published 2025-06-25—©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.

Recap

06-124 Grimm Transformations VIII: Child-Soldier of the Succubae

2025-06-242025-06-23 admin

*1960 06-124 Pen imagines he is searching the secret archive with Chava*

*1962 06-124 The Choking Torture of Anzola Ipato*

PREVIOUSLY: By trickery and deadly threat, eight-year-old Pen has agreed to help the succubae until dawn, as they raid the Venetian capitol late on a storm-torn night of floods, seeking to destroy what the Venetian spy service has learned about the succubae and to release an imprisoned grandfather and a young girl accused of witchraft. Pen has now been geased to compel him and spelled to trust Channah and believe she is by his side. NOW:

Pen, bound as a safety net by a leash attached to a harness, and following Chava’s reasonable suggestions and whispers, crossed the hallowed space, picked the lock (under a minor delusion that he was simply unlocking a difficult lock using several keys at once), opened the door of the archive, and crept inside to access the secret files of Europe’s, and perhaps the world’s, most-extensive and most-advanced spy agency: The Council of Ten of the Serenissima.

Within the windowless archive, with Chava’s guidance and encouragement, Pen found and raided the Venetians’ magic books, written in Latin, the language of religion and science in Western Europe, which Pen read and spoke fluently, along with his aristocratic caste’s language of Norman-influenced French, and his local language of English. He read all their titles for Chava, setting aside for Chava’s review the very, very few Chava didn’t already possess or hadn’t already known of, or that were so rare they would be difficult or impossible for the Venetians to replace. Although the books, collectively, contained many grains of truth, they also contained falsehoods and honest misapprehensions which the Succubae valued, not to keep their own magical primacy over humans, but to help them predict the actions of the humans who hunted them and the other creatures of hell.

Turning to the written records of the Council of Ten, even though they were written in Venetian (rather than Latin), a language Pen had only first been exposed to when his Aunt brought him to Venice earlier in the year, his Latin and French allowed him to read the spines, introductions, and section titles in the books well enough to locate what the succubae wanted most: The records of the interrogation, conviction, and execution of Anzola Ipato, by one Gasparo Orseolo of the Council of Ten, who had been burned at the stake on Wednesday, the 3rd of October, 1515. Morally, exposing an eight-year-old with even partial literacy of Venetian to such material was one of several testaments given during the course of the evening, to Chava’s limitations as a surrogate mother-figure. Technically, the very existence of the record was a testament to the efficacy of the Venetian secret service, which had accomplished something very few humans, human governments, or even human civilizations were ever able to achieve: identifying, capturing, and questioning an actual demon of hell: Tirtzah the succubus. After weeks of agonizing tortures, including especially vile and inhuman tortures methods devised by the Inquisition that were not normally performed by the Venetians (who relied heavily on the strappado), her mortal form, and thus her ability to visit Earth, was destroyed by fire, possibly the most agonizing form of banishment from the Earthly plane.

Chava had persuaded Pen to push, pull, and drag the heavy folio volume back across the church to her position in the Venetian Senate Hall. There, with Pen nestled on her lap, she read and carefully edited the record, using her magical powers and her great manual skills, to alter—as subtly as possible to try and evade any Venetians re-reading it from suspecting it had been changed—the text. As much as she estimated she could get away with, she replaced information learned about the succubae with inaccurate information that would be less helpful, or even self-defeating, the next time the Court of Lust tangled with the Serene Republic. Chava’s focus was on things Tirtzah had said that might hint at or reveal anything the succubae perceived as a potential weakness or exploit. Then she had made Pen reverse the difficult process of moving the volume back into the library. And because Pen lacked the strength to lift the folio-sized hardbound volume over his head back up to the high shelf he had pulled it from, she had him pull down all the nearby volumes and pile them up with the altered volume somewhere in the middle.

Pen also found and recovered for Chava, Tirtzah’s magical ring, which the Venetians had taken from Tirtzah. Ultimately, they had not been able to make much out of it since capturing it. By recovering it, the succubae ensured they never would.

Finally, Chava had tried various ways to help Pen make sense of a section of books written—and even labeled on their spines—with lines and geometric combinations of lines that Chava suspected was a Venetian code. This, neither she, nor any of the succubae, had anticipated: volumes so secret, they were encoded when written and kept within their very fortress and capitol?

In the end, she decided against doing anything with them, at least not tonight. Even if the boy started with the last volume and worked his way backward, dragging every single volume out to her, it might take him hours to bring her the volumes covering 1515. If, indeed, she could even identify which ones those were. And then to repeat her work on the Venetian-language records, she would have to decipher the code well enough not only to make sense of the text, but to try and replace existing words with credible substitutes. The only other option would be to burn the lot; but in addition to being a terrible and unnecessary loss of knowledge—a possibility she loathed on principle—it would be pretty clear to the Venetians someone had been in their secret archive and was trying to destroy at least something the Venetians had learned and hidden there. Chava couldn’t even be sure what the coded—or cuneiform, for that matter—books were, let alone whether they actually recorded anything about Tirtzah, which seemed unlikely. If they did, keeping a copy in Latin would rather tend to defeat the purpose of keeping a copy in code. And because Anzola Ipato’s trial was only two years’ past, thus alerted to an effort to tamper with their institutional memory, they could and probably even would reconstruct much or all of it—accurately—from living memories, which would completely reverse Chava’s efforts to destroy the Venetians’ Latin record of their recently-acquired knowledge of succubae. Destroying a vast knowledge without helping the succubae, and thereby making it unlikely she would destroy the limited knowledge actually harmful to the succubae? That would be the worst of both worlds, and she decided against it.

In the end, Chava—with Pen’s semi-witting help—completed her mission before Channah and Rivqah finished theirs. Instead of risking Pen coming out from under her influence while he was in the secret archive, and thus beyond her physical control, she brought him back to her and, inspired, decided to make the most of the opportunity by influencing Penny to do whatever he could, to save himself. Chava warned him he literally could not escape the succubae until dawn, and must avoid crossing Channah, or if possible even attracting her attention again, in the meantime. But once he saw any part of the sun, he should immediately, or as soon thereafter as possible, slip away when neither Channah, nor Rivqah, nor Miryam was watching him, and run for his very life. When Pen protested that Chava should come with him, or that he wanted to see her again, she promised that if he obeyed her like a good boy, she would visit him again in a week. Finally, still concerned that she had not impressed the danger upon him sufficiently, or persuaded him that a 5,000-year-old succubus didn’t need an eight-year-old boy to protect her, and having already used him to cross the sanctified church and plunder the secret archive, she added the force of compulsion to ensure his commitment.

Literature Section “06-124 Grimm Transformations VIII: Child Laborer or Child Soldier?”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 124 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1264 words—Accompanying Images: 1960-1963—Published 2025-06-24—©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.

Recap

06-123 Grimm Transformations VII: The Red Beasts and the Little Boy

2025-06-23 admin

*1956 06-123 Chava tries to shield Pen from Channah*

*1958 06-123 Kill ’em all. Let Channah sort ’em out*

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.

Recap

06-43 Grimm Transformations VI: Sexual Sorcery (abridged version)

2025-03-272025-04-02 admin

1532 06-43 Channah addressing her mamalik in her Cairo palace

EXPLICIT VERSION AVAILABLE AT https://patreon.com/TheRemainderman

continued from 06-42[X]

Her bridegirls, on their knees before Channah’s elevated throne, had together placed a fine silver chain around her left ankle, symbolizing her power over them, from which she hung the magical keys to their Svadishthana Cages, as they watched from inches away.

Smirking, she had then leaned forward and secured her second rings around their necks: their Vishudhha Collars. They appeared to be very similar to one another: thick straps of soft white leather decorated with brass studs, each having a brass heart-shaped slave tag with their full name—Chastity and Penance, respectively—on the front, and the legend “Property of Countess Anne Batonnoir, Fensmere Manor” on the back. Chas’s was slightly wider than Penny’s, while Penny’s had a gold chain decorating its lower edge. At the ceremony itself Channah had laughingly declined to explain what the collars did, cautioning only that if they didn’t obey her, they would regret it. But afterwards, while holding Penny in an uncomfortable and embarrassing position beneath her, she had explained this much:

“The Byzantine Mural is yours. I made it, so it will always tie you to me, but it’s yours, defiled to you as part of our wedding ceremony like the anklet and ring you gave me. And to the rest of the world, it’s cheap cast-iron. The leather collar, like Chas’s, is also yours, with the usual powers. What looks like a gold chain, however, is something altogether different. But you knew that, didn’t you?” He nodded quietly, having seen—and felt—the great sapphire set in the heavy gold collar stretching from the upper part of his neck to the tops of his shoulders. “The Yoke and Star of Bethlehem are mine. They are always connected to me, and always in my consciousness. When I call to them, they call back; and they burn like the sun to me no matter how far away from me they are. So I can always find them, and I will always be able to find you. I am dressing you up in my property like a lord dressing his servants in his livery, or a pet owner dressing their pet. The Yoke is as much my property as you are. I am merely storing it around your neck, little girl, and letting it provide magical shelter to you, the same as my hamper offers you your bed when I send you to it. Do you understand?”

“Ye—yes, Domina,” she answered, nodding earnestly and nervous lest Channah might suddenly pinch or throttle or otherwise assault her with her hands. “I understand. Thank you, Domina, for lending me your shelter.”

“Good answer, girl. This,” she flicked the brass heart engraved with her name, “Cheap brass, is yours. Entertainment. Obviously not a part of my masterpiece. Like the mural, like all my magic, my collar conceals itself to all but my courtiers. But by my command, the secrecy of the collar goes further. It can only be seen for what it is, by the five of us: me, my two most loyal Duchesses Miryam and Rivqah, the metalsmith who forged it, and you—the person who has the most to lose by revealing its existence to anyone. Others will see it as just another service collar, when they expect to see you collared—probably, when I or one of my servants has you on a leash. And they will see it as a girl’s choker, or even a tight necklace, when they don’t expect you to be collared. Fortunately, your neck is feminine enough there’s no need for it to cover your Adam’s Apple, so I don’t need to worry about that.

“The Yoke will not protect you, or any part of you, from harm by misadventure. You can be hurt or killed like anyone else. If someone outside my Court, or even outside the five of us, were to learn about it or get the idea whatever they see around your neck is valuable, say, from you—can you imagine how quickly they would turn on you for the most-precious stone in Christendom?” She smiled with satisfaction, seeing she had understood the moment she was collared. “And like your chastity, it can’t be removed by natural means or by other people. Only supernatural means, by me.” She shrugged. “Or, since it doesn’t protect you, of course, by anyone on the planet willing to saw your head off. So, I think you understand how very, very vital it is that no one ever get any idea of what you’re wearing?” He nodded urgently, but silently. “Good. If I were you, I would also stay very close to my protectress. The one person powerful enough to protect you if word of what’s around your neck were to get out. The one person who can remove the collar without removing your head, and who actually finds you useful enough to lend her collar to.”

“Yes, Domina, thank you, Domina,” he dared to answer.

“It will prevent aging, and provide you safety from disease, infirmity, and the ravage of time, for as long as you’re useful enough to me to let you keep it. Meaning your clean, tight, hairless skin will remain as vibrant and beautiful in a dozen years, even a hundred if you’re useful enough to me that I want to keep you in it that long, instead of moving it to a more-useful courtier. Meaning you can remain as part of my court on Earth, as long my Ladies’ Maids. Even as long as me. IF you make sure to remain useful. IF you apply yourself to every task I set you, for me. IF you use your skills to serve my court.” She snickered. “So naïve, I can see you’re still as angry with me as you are fearful. Doubtless you’re telling yourself you’d rather be free than immortal. But I’m patient. Sometime—not long from now, even in human terms—you’ll find you’ve become accustomed to the idea of living forever, even as a eunuch who suffers for his Domina. And you won’t ever want to take it off. I know you’ll want to remove the Byzantine Mural—of course, who wouldn’t? But not this. Eventually, you’ll do whatever I say to keep it on. Eventually, you’ll do whatever it takes, no matter how repugnant or vile the task, to keep it. Eventually, my Court and the other denizens of hell will be your only peers, because you will have outlived everyone and everything you know in this world.” He shivered involuntarily at the thought. “And then, little girl, you will be my perfect little pawn. Allll mine.”

In exchange for her collars marking them to the world as her owned wives, the girls had knelt before her again and each given her a silver ring—actually a fine chain, soft and accommodating as they were expected to be—and placed it on a toe of their Domina’s left foot, symbolizing her superiority to them.

Their third exchange was in some ways the most intimate: As they continued kneeling before her, heads bowed, each of them offered her a tiny silver-mesh globe like a miniature tea-infuser, as she cut a lock of each of their hair, enclosing it in the silver-mesh globe and hanging each girl’s egg from her waist chain, where they joined 34 others, each given to her by a previous sisterwife, and each of which, by giving her a part of their flesh, gave her the power to ensorcell them at any time or distance. In exchange, she presented them with their Muladhara Twisters, or Intimates: the special tools of behavior- and body-modification unique to them, that only she or—with her permission, as part of their play group—her friends would ever use on them, and that would only ever be used on each of them. The first was a long, wicked, black wooden paddle, the black sticks upon which she had based their human surname. Chas’s was engraved, “Chastity’s Lover Boy,” and Penny’s “Penance’s Bull Daddy,” prompting a round of guffaws and jeering comments from the assembled succubae, incubi, damned, and operatives watching the proceedings. She also produced mysterious, elongated, jewel-encrusted gold ornaments—Chas’s diamond-studded, Penny’s ruby-studded.

For the breaking phase, rather than breaking a glass, while the girls were held down on the floor, Channah trampled them. When Penny passed out from the pain, Channah rolled her eyes with a snort of disgust and sent her bridegirls to bed—that bed being her dirty-clothing hamper, which had to be forced closed by the men who escorted them there, for it be latched shut with the two of them crammed in it on top of her dirty laundry.

Channah and her Court then celebrated together all night long. The next morning, and for most of the remaining two days and nights of the hazing, Channah put her housegifts through the Seven Indignities. These began by familiarizing them quite intimately with their Intimates as she gave each girl a paddling.

By the end, she had reduced them to the most pathetic kinds of broken, simpering sissy sisterwives. And the Star and Yoke of Bethlehem had begun to manifest their power, with intended and side effects alike. Not the least of which, Channah suspected, was how it had permitted her to really feel, for the first time, the submissive joy of releasing all control. And which she blamed for gentle Penny’s sudden, shocking, and thoroughly discombobulating outburst from his knees before her, in the final moments of their ceremony, that he loved her.

PART 6 OF STORY RECAP

Literature Section “06-43[X] Grimm Transformations VI: Sexual Sorcery”—Accompanying Images: 1532-1534. Abridged 1593 words::Explicit 1917 words—©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.

Recap

06-41 Grimm Transformations IV: Master Killers

2025-03-252025-03-27 admin

1520 06-41 Channah’s Thuggees in Karnata Vijayanagara kneel to their goddess^

The Queen and Her Operatives

Always, she chose her orphans from among the most vulnerable, although the vulnerabilities she valued, like their strengths, varied depending on the purposes she had in mind for them. The most sensitive, the most brutal, the most brutalized, the most desperate, the most desperate to please, the most isolated, the most social, the most insecure, the most self-confident, the most angry, the most calm, the most self-aware, the least self-aware. Every human was endowed with some free will, some bit of conscience, some sliver of the holy ghost that could never be extinguished but only banished from this world by death.

Some of those she chose—bullies and lizards like Cutter, Martin, Isaac, and Eleanor—were already far down the path to hell, as close to being destined for her Queendom as they could be on Earth because they felt nothing for others, couldn’t bear the successes of others, wanted to hurt others, or even wanted to obliterate everything. But such people could only help her so far, with some things.

Many tasks could only be accomplished with empathy, reason, wisdom, and self-awareness. Those possessing such traits, the hothouse flowers, were the most difficult ones to raise successfully to their purposes. It had taken centuries for the demons of hell to fully appreciate that no matter how much fun it was to wind up and unleash raging, violent sadists, narcissists, lunatics, and golems on the world, they could only advance the cause of reaping souls so far. Faced with obvious threats to their communities, most people tended to come together, care for and protect one another, even sacrifice themselves for others. Bringing out the best in people was the last thing they wanted to do! Those were outcomes that hindered, rather than helped, the demons in their ultimate aims; however much fun it was to cause chaos. What the demons needed were more insidious threats to humanity. They needed threats that people could rationalize away or ignore, until it was too late and they were already being gobbled up by voracious hell.

Rather than creating the savages who worked so well as their kapos in hell, and trying in vain to rely only on them in the more nuanced environment of Earth, the demons realized they would be better served by investing the significant time and empathy required on the front end to raise operatives with the abilities they needed. No matter how challenging a skill it was for a demon to learn. No matter how much patience they had to find. It was something not every demon was capable of. In all the demon realms of hell, it tended to absorb their brightest and most capable, those from their higher ranks. But there were also individual differences within demon castes. So the members of every Court charged with wrangling the hothouse flowers included a mix—a handful of the lower demons, a larger share of the middle, and a heavy dose of the highest ranks.

And so it was that Queen Channah herself was involved with this project, especially when—as in England, in the 1520s—the succubae were establishing a new colony. Partly because founding the cadre that would establish and give the colony its start was a particularly crucial step in setting it on the right path, but also because new colonies were only created when there was a particularly pressing reason for doing so. Cambridgeshire had become her operating base, for now; joining the ancient colonies in Constantinople and Rome, and the medieval colonies in Vienna and Madrid, as the fifth in Europe. Like most colonies, this one began at the outside and worked its way in to the heart of the Kingdom. When it was time, when her agents were deeply embedded, their covers and legends secure, its focal point would move slowly, agent by agent, from Cambridge to the Royal Court in London. But for now, they had only a limited, secondary presence there, which relied on Cambridge for its roots and legend; and behind that, vague stories about coming from the West.

It was the Star of Bethlehem that had decided Channah in favor of England, prioritizing it over Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, Stockholm, and the other rising cities of Northern Europe, an area which had never been worthy of organized demonic focus before. Gemstones, like certain other objects, held energy because they focused so much human passion, ambition, interest, and naked greed. Their interaction with people, tending to draw out the worst of humanity, cursed them to become fell instruments of power. The largest, which could become the focus of terrible violence and every kind of sin, were often legendary. Like the Star of Bethlehem, the largest sapphire in the world, that had been “lost” at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Any object could become a magical fetish if humans imbued it with enough of their hopes, fears, ambitions, wants, needs, and desires. But almost none were more likely to do so that large gemstones. Such naturally-occurring fetishes could be the most powerful substrate for deliberate ensorcelling, because if the sorcerer endowed them with a purpose congruent with their energy, it would add to or even—in the case of a deeply-cursed stone like the Star of Bethlehem—multiply the power imparted to it by the caster’s spell.

Revelation and Reckoning

To build their cadre, and later grow their colonies, the Succubae divided—or, they would claim, allowed their operatives to sort themselves by their choices and actions in response to tests (the most-critical of which they never realized they were being given) into two groups, which became formalized into assigned social roles upon their eighteenth birthday when they left childhood behind. The rough boys—including all of the pathological future kapos the demons loved so much, and about half of the hothouse flowers—joined a class that would be identifiable across many human cultures, although only formalized and systematically sanctioned in a few: Mamluks—slave-soldiers groomed for loyalty, command, and the exercise of power on behalf of their masters. Depending on the cultures in which they were raised and operated, they might be called, or call themselves, local terms that were not a close match, but that captured at least some of the more-distinctive features of their caste or at least their skills, like ninja in Japan, Thuggees in India, and Hashshashin in Iran.

The flowers chosen as mamluks (never called “flowers” in front of humans) as cadres to establish Channah’s English bureau included Roger and Eleanor. On their 18^th birthday they either washed out or proved themselves and graduated into their adult role by the ultimate test of violence: homicide. The pathogens, like Martin and Cutter, took the same test, of course; but for them it wasn’t much of a test. The real question was often whether they could contain themselves until they were ordered to kill, or whether—like Isaac—they would distinguish themselves by killing on their own, before anyone suggested them to do so.

PART 4 OF STORY RECAP

Literature Section “06-41 Grimm Transformations IV: Master Killers”—Accompanying Images: 1520, 1522, 1524, 1526, 1528, 1530. 1162 words—©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.

Tag: ninja

The Queen and Her Operatives

Revelation and Reckoning