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.