Tag: strappado

1980 07-01 Massively- (Magically-) Enhanced Interrogation
1981 07-01 What’s that on your cheek–oh, no, you bit right through it!
1982 07-01 Aww!  He looks so sad and pathetic!
1983 07-01 It’s a pity he only has one more to pop!

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.


1976 06-128 Channah & Rivqah show their cards… and their claws
1977 06-128 Nothing Gasparo Orseolo EVER hoped to see

1978 06-128 …and I bet he can take it all the way up to HERE
1979 06-128 Standing under a former Lord of the Night

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 3rd, 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.

1973 06-127 We’re gonna fuck you up so hard
1974 06-127 YES!  Keep screaming for us, little piggie!
1975A 06-127 Before: You’re just WOMEN!…
1975B 06-127 Before: Serious persuaders, ready to motivate
1975C 06-127 After: … for whom I have only the utmost respect!
1976D 06-127 After: Another successful conversion

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.


1968 06-126 Succubaean Strike Force
1969 06-126 We’re gonna avenge Tirtzah

1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment
1971 06-126 Rivqah prepares to carve monkey-boy like a holiday turkey
1972 06-126 Gimmee 3 steps: Stick-boy’s last stand

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.

1949 06-121 The Evil Queen Bee seducing Her retinue
1950 06-121 Let ME find the path for you, my pretties

PREVIOUSLY:  A traumatized Chastity and Penance, naked and vulnerable, are led by Channah into the honeycomb, a mysterious structure used by the demons for travel, finding it dark and silent and sterile enough to make them feel like they are being cut off from the world all over again.  NOW:

With her sixth step, the silent darkness ruptured, practically exploding into light.  Despite Channah’s warning, of course, they were startled and surprised.  Of course, they jumped involuntarily, causing her to chortle merrily, as images swam into focus around them—organic shapes of flora and fauna, geometric ones of geography and buildings, on each of the six walls of the room, with a seventh billowing from smoke into clarity above them, and even a flickering below them like the floor itself might start to resolve into something—

“No!” Channah gasped as if scandalized, covering their eyes with her hands.  “I saw you looking down, Penance Batonnoir!  You saw the floor spark, didn’t you?  Clever girl—too clever by half for your own good, isn’t that right, Chas?”

“Very much so, Domina,” Chas had to agree, sounding amused and bemused at the same time. 

“Don’t you dare look down, Penance girl.  Just one stray moment of curiosity—and I know you, you’re curious about everything—and gravity might drag the three of us straight down before I could even teach you about the sheets of the Honeycomb!”  She giggled.  “And since you have no business leaving my sheet, so to speak, that’s a skill you’ll never need anyway.  So… let’s spend this week exploring my sheets only, shall we?  In your own sheet, it’s simple:  Back and to the left is always home.  Always.  Back and to the right is where you just came from, unless that happens to be your home, in which case it’s determined like the other four faces,” she kind-of explained, turning them 150 degrees counterclockwise and guiding them—with her hands still over their eyes and counting:  “One.  It’s already gone.”  But she kept her hands on their eyes until she announced:  “Two.”  Then she brought her hands back down around their necks.  “Three.  Four.  Five.  Watch your pretty toes!”  And then she finished authoritatively, “Six!” drowning out the girls’ tentative “Seven and a half” (precise Penny) and “eight” (casual Chas). As well-matched as they were physically, there was little chance there was any actual difference to speak of between their respective strides.

“Now.  I need you to move just over here…” she guided them to the right, and then forward, maneuvering them around the outside of the glass cube.  They immediately noticed there were chains hanging from the upper rail and rings embedded into the lower rail, on this side.  “Now kneel down, and stay over here on the side, out of the main path.  You don’t want to get in the way of any important people.  And since everyone who uses the honeycomb is a succubus or accompanying a succubus, you can presume there will always be at least one person much more important than you, in here.  Got it?”

“Yes, Domina,” they chorused unconvincingly, getting what she was saying, but not why she was saying it.

“For the same reason, to make sure you’re in a respectful position if any of your betters come across you, I want you down on your knees.”  She was unfastening Chastity from the leash she shared with Penny as she spoke.  “Go on, kneel, I know the floor hurts a little but we have a strict rule, animals left in the honeycomb are always hitched.”

“‘Left?!’”  Penny asked, scared.  “‘Hitched?!’” Chas protested.

“Ohh… come on, Chastity!” she teased her, thereby easily ignoring Penny’s question.  “Who’s your cowgirl?”

“You are, Domina,” Chastity answered, embarrassed but also a little excited.  “See?” she kissed the back of her head as she pushed the girl down to the floor.  “What good little hucattle you two are.”  And with that, she locked each girl’s collar to one of the rings in the floor, Penny’s to the ring nearest the iron door, and Chas’s to the ring nearest the honeycomb, spacing them about six feet apart.

“Mistress?”  Penny squeaked.  “Domina?  Please, you aren’t going to leave us, are you?”

“Aww… my little poodle.  You’re a grown-up!  Don’t tell me you’re still afraid of the dark, darling?” she asked, managing to sound both sympathetic and irritated at once, as she pulled up on Penny’s bound wrists, hard, causing the girl to whine and shuffle her knees forward to ease the pressure on her shoulders, before using one of the chains hanging from the top bar to hold her wrists up and behind her in the strappado position. 

“Not the dark per se, Domina,” Penny squeaked, sounding a little whiny and pathetic, even to herself.  “But, it’s just—this—today—after the trigger—the honeycomb, Mistress!”

“Aww… does the honeycomb bother you?”  she pouted distractedly.

“It’s just… kind of upsetting, Domina…”  Chastity chimed in, her voice a little uneven, sounding even to herself like she had doubts about what she was saying.

“Oh, you poor little dears,” she said regretfully, locking Chastity’s arms into the strappado position.  “Unfortunately, I have to make an appearance here at Sademtsaowah.  Half an hour is  about the minimum I need to linger here to be confident I’ve given all—well, almost all—of the damned enough time to wrap their empty skulls around the fact they need to attend to me here.  Most of them react faster than that most of the time, but taken as a herd…” she shrugged.  “It takes time to keep the number of stragglers down.  Now,” she began, stepping over the bar into the cube, heading toward the iron door.  “You g—”

“Can’t we please come with you, Domina?”  Chastity pleaded frantically.

“Please, Domina, I promise we’ll be good girls!”  Penance added.

Sounding firmer, she emphasized:  “I have a great deal to do here and want to get as much of it done as possible, in those thirty minutes so I can give you sweet little love muffins mommy’s full attention on our honeymoon!”  They heard her turning and stepping toward the door.

“Please can you leave us with the guards Domina, please?!”  Chastity pleaded.  “We’ll be ever so well-behaved!”

“We—we’ll be a credit to you, Domina!”  Penny assured her.

She hesitated, and then turned back towards them, slowly, seeing the hunger in their eyes, not just for her, but for the light she was radiating.  A thoughtful, calculating look crept into her eyes, and just the hint of a smirk lifted the corner of her lips.  When she saw that both of her girls had caught the look on her face, and that it made them both quail like red-headed stepchildren, she bit her lip and pressed her knees together, sniffing deliberately and sighing with pleasure at their sudden burst of lambchop panic….

Literature Section “06-121 Led Astray”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 121 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1101 words—Accompanying Images:  1949-1950—Published 2025-05-20—©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.