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The hothouse flowers who did not show themselves suitable, by aptitude or preference, for roles as mamluks, became something else.  Those obviously unfit as mamluks, like Chas and Penny, were groomed for something else from the beginning.  Those who had been offered, but failed, their test as mamluks, like Frances, were given the opportunity to accept this alternative station, although few of them could bring themselves to accept such a disgraceful alternative.

For six days and nights after Penny’s eighteenth birthday, years of careful preparation and planning were brought to fruition as Penny and Chas were guilted, punished, trained, seduced, subjugated, intimidated, cajoled, drugged, teased, confused, gaslit, sleep-deprived, tormented, and broken to the ultimate will of the succubae.  If not perfected—every soul on Earth remained a work in progress as long as it lived, such was the meaning of Earth—the girls were reincarnated, or evolved, into the advanced form the succubae desired them to assume. 

In human languages—which were all the succubae had—there were no names for precisely what they were being broken to.  And certainly, the girls’ succubus and human minders had avoided suggesting any.  Had they been biological females, in England, “second-class wives with a bit of indentured servant thrown in” would not have been too far off the mark.  (And some particularly-cynical women might have been heard to respond:  “oh, an ordinary wife, then.”)  But the truth was, if they behaved themselves after their hazing was complete, Penny and Chas had every chance of being treated better than many wives in England; and would certainly continue to enjoy a higher material standard of living.  Indeed, the Countess fully expected and intended to preserve their loyalty without the help of the human secular and religious authorities and traditions that supported husbands and buttressed the institution of marriage against unhappy wives of humans.

In Channah’s most-ancient palace in Cairo, and her primary Western palace in Constantinople, two cities where Channah had spent a plurality of her long life, the hucows had a word for female sex slaves of males that in the time of the Abbasids, correctly described the female operatives in this group:  jawari (in the singular, jariya)—slaves for entertainments and pleasures.  The succubae, being intrinsically female masters, with overwhelmingly male slaves, extended the term to describe all sex-and-pleasure slaves of all masters.  As with the mamluks, her operatives sometimes used local words, especially in cultures outside or resistant to the Muslim world, to label themselves—kunoichi in Japan, vishkanya in India, hetaira, in Greece, with varying degrees of accuracy.

Queen Channah and three of her Ladies of Court—Duchess Miryam (posing in human form as her Lady’s Maid Mary), Duchess Rivqah (her Lady’s Maid Rebecca), and Sultana Mayaam (adopting incubus form as necessary to play the role of Obedience, a model sisterwife to Chas and Penny) took turns and cooperated, with the assistance of all of their retainers at Fensmere Manor, to maintain the unrelenting pressure on Penny and Chas for 144 straight hours.  Because the succubae could reach the girls even in their dreams, their only independence in that time was for those few, minimal hours of dreamless sleep they needed to stay alive.

The succubae had been training and enslaving humans—and Queen Channah had been married to her primary (“Di,” or “Great Royal”) husband, Húanglóng—for millennia.  He had taken countless humans as his secondary (“Shu,” or “Royal”) sisterwives during his limited time on Earth.  Yet in all her time here, more than 250 generations, training tens or even hundreds of thousands of jawari, Channah had taken only 34.  Partly because there were few enough reasons to want them besides pregnancy, which held little enough appeal for her.  Channah had tried unsuccessfully to conceive with two of her wives, borne 9 children by 9 of the others, and gleefully kept the other 23 of her wives in chastity for the rest of their mortal lives while using and teasing them mercilessly.

As the culmination of their 144-hour hazing, she had taken both of these girls as her wives—Chas as her 35th, and Penny moments later as her 36th—in a relationship as thoroughly unequal as its human counterparts, if more explicitly so, and with the biological sexes reversed.  By the wedding rites of the succubae, she had yoked them to her will, spiritually and magically, becoming their Domina (head of household), while making them her sisterwives (housegifts).  She’d actually never had two sisterwives at the same time before; but the term was used, whether they had sisters or not, to reinforce her greater importance and superiority while diminishing them, suggesting they were fungible, and implying they would be expected to cooperate or bond in any manner she preferred, rather than acting as if they had personal agency or were in competition with one another.  Let alone with her husband.

They were married in what had been the Defalaises’ private chapel at Fensmere, now desecrated into a satanikoklus, the hellish analog to a church or temple.  In the satanikoklus, the shroud between Earth and Hell was thin and porous.  From the moment Penny had been brought there, she had seen, heard, smelled, and felt the hot, humid air and burning red sandscape of the Hell of Lust all around her, recognizing it for what it was, and the succubae and incubi and damned there, for exactly what they were.  It was a thing not many living humans could see, her clearer sight a reflection of both her intelligence and her sensitivity.

The succubaean ceremony itself was ancient, its eight elements familiar or at least recognizable to most humans, comprising indenture (betrothal), veiling, invocation, exchange, cursing (blessing), indignity (affirmation), breaking (celebration), and seclusion (honeymoon).  Of course, it was the sisterwife who was veiled, and then tested.  The vows and rings they had exchanged were unequal, befitting their new positions:  Pledging to take her sisterwives in hand and dominate them, Channah had used her deceptively cute fingers and wicked-long fingernails to chastise them with her Svadhishthana Cages, Persian Gate for Chas, Byzantine Mural for Penny.

And as she did so, she had explained, condescendingly and embarrassingly, that as a succubus, she lived primarily off the virility and vitality of men, by drawing it from them and devouring it.  Whereas she had chosen them as ideal consorts precisely because they were not virile or manly to start with, and by chastising them she had rendered them as harmless and impotent as empty bladders.  “As long as you wear my cage, your virtue is safe.”  As she had explained more precisely to their mamluk foster brothers and longtime bullies when they celebrated with her, penetration was the real risk.  If they penetrated any part of a succubus’s body, it sapped the man’s vitality.  The body had a certain resiliency, of course; and could largely recover from limited contact with a succubus, although even a single encounter could result in feelings of lethargy for hours or even days.  But burn the candle any faster than that, and their life would drain away, swiftly and unrecoverably, even as the succubus’s victim thanked his lucky stars for her, one moment of bliss at a time.  “Which is why your Svadhishthana Cages will likely never, ever come off during your lifetimes.”  She mock-pouted at them:  “I have to protect you, my sweet darlings!”

Laughing at how uncomfortable and scared they already looked, she twisted the knife even harder.  She had done this to so many biological males, in so many conservative, judgmental societies, they had no chance to avoid her manipulations.  Their cages, she noted, would also perform one of the succubae’s favorite tricks, showing their partners whatever sex they expected the girls to have—and helping their partners act in a manner that confirmed and reinforced their expectations into convictions.  Giggling at their expressions, now of terror and horror, she explained how important that made it for her to choose pretty, slight, effeminate, and convincing girls like Chas and Penny to train as her jawari in the first place.

“The Mural is a crown of walls, and the Gate is a mountain pass.  This ring,” she lied evilly, “is a clever design of my own that destroys the testes slowly.  And until they’re completely gone, my victim lives in an agony of arousal.”  She chortled, loving their fear and sorrow as her broken males, and let them know in a sing-songy voice ending in a cackle, that that was as much as she was prepared to tell them about the metal devices she had locked around their most-vulnerable and -important boy parts.  They would simply have to wait and see what other effects they might have. 

Poor Penny had already discovered one power her Byzantine Mural had, that Chas’s Persian Gate apparently did not.  It had happened the first time Penny had been used and teased and ignored until she was out of her mind, and every time thereafter she had been brought to that state.  The succubae had been doing everything possible to simultaneously shame and excite her while locked.  At the crucial moment, it had whisked her joy away and transferred it to Channah and her other partners, multiplying their pleasures and leaving Penny in a state of desperation, longing, sorrow, and misery.  As long as the ring was on, her partners—no matter who they were—would enjoy the force of her pleasure on top of their own, while Penny would feel only the bitter disappointment and the eventual ache of losing out on one of the most  pleasant experiences in this world.  She had cried out and wept, bitter-astringent tears, every time the Mural had taken her joy during the ceremony.

PART 5 OF STORY RECAP

Literature Section “06-42 Grimm Transformations VI:  Broken Sissies”—Accompanying Images:  1519, 1521, 1523, 1525, 1527, 1529Abridged 1619 words::Explicit 1697 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.

The Countess of Warwick

When the Countess married the Earl, and moved to Fensmere, she had brought her own entourage with her.  These included those she called nieces (Eleanor, Frances, Jane, Chas, and Penny), nephews (Roger, Cutter, Isaac, and Martin), and staff including her Lady’s Maids (Mary and Rebecca), carpenter Big George, and the children’s governess Sindonie.

Years later, came the day—Penny’s eighteenth birthday—when the Countess found out:  That the Defalais sisters knew her nieces were transgendered.  That Penny was teaching the girls even when they were being punished.  That in addition to Latin and religion, she had been continuing to teach them the subjects their mother had wanted them to learn, but Anne had forbidden to them, like grammar, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, philosophy, math, geometry, astronomy, and heretical ideas from Germany about the Church.  And that she had even let them dabble in some of the secret subjects Anne Batonnoir taught all her lost boys and girls, like fighting, spy craft, and the principles of magic.

She burst into Hellinore’s closet, finding Mary, Catherine, Beatrice, and Hellinore there.

“Hiding.” she growled. 

“With boys!” she raged. 

Of… lower… station,” she spat in contempt.

“Aunt Anne!  I’m not a boy!” Chas began, looking stricken and betrayed, almost crying, and completely missing the point, bless her heart.

Penny looked guilty, ashamed, scared, a little relieved, and almost… almost, the tiniest bit proud, apologizing profusely and trying to explain she hadn’t meant to sleight her guardian, but only to help the girls, and pleaded to be allowed to continue.  It was a pronouncement as honest, and in its own way as misplaced, as Chas’s.

The sisters mainly looked terrified, as well they might have, although Hellinore, now 11, stoutly volunteered that when she found out Penny was transgender she had threatened to tell the Countess what they knew if Penny wouldn’t keep teaching.  It was a quarter-truth, at best, but strayed from the truth for loyalty’s sake, and would have been dead on-point if the Countess had been interested.

The Countess’s retribution was terrible and swift.  The five girls were birched in the Great Chamber, out of line of sight from the upstairs kitchen but in hearing range of half the house proper, to humiliate them as much as possible without allowing any of the servants ideas or feelings above their stations.  Of course, every decent or sensible servant but one fled the house the instant the birchings began, but the point was made, the girls embarrassed, and the stories spread.  Only the Countess’s carpenter, Big George, remained in the house, installing locks on all the girls’ closet doors, securing them against escape even while imperiling them from any fire or other calamity should one overtake the manor.  Then she locked her stepdaughters in their closets for days, having her lady’s maids supervise the servants who brought them food and water and changed out their chamber pots, to prevent them from showing the girls any additional or emotional kindnesses.

While the Countess herself, focused on attending to those she regarded as her own.  As always, the lowest in rank suffered the worst.  Even though, in this case, “lowest” was a relative term—at least as importantly, the three remaining offenders were from the Countess’s household, utterly beholden to her, with no other sources of support or care, nothing else to turn to, nowhere else to go.  They were all members of the gentry, the lowest rank of the English nobility, as far below the Defalaises as they were above the rest of the population.  But she had facilitated Sindonie’s escape, kept Chas from the orphanage, and bought Penny outright.

From the sisters’ perspective, they disappeared for days; and when they finally reappeared, the girls, at least, were subdued, almost timid, and in some kind of shock, more distant from everyone and everything around them, than they had been before.  If it had been secretly suspected in certain quarters on the manor estate before, that Penny and Chas were not quite what they appeared, it now became more or less an open secret that Penny and the tutor occasionally seen slipping to and from the manor to Cambridge—which did not allow women—were one and the same person.

Around the same time, the residents of the manor learned the King was planning to visit, a fairly rare event this far East.  Perhaps it was the stories of the progressive home built by three generations of Defalaises that attracted him.  But more likely, according to rumors that eventually even reached the older sisters’ ears, were that something else might have lured him here.  The same thing that had so impressed and befuddled the Earl and most of the young men in the county.

The Queen of Lust

Chas and Penny had been carefully selected for their respective adoption and purchase by Channah, the Succubus Queen of the Hell of Lust, who in her human guise had lately adopted the name Anne Batonnoir, married the Earl of Warwick, and now was slowly draining his wits and life away.  Since acquiring her wards, she and her vassals and collaborators and minions had worked together, like an orchestra, to mold and condition and train the boys—now girls—for the special purpose for which they had been recruited.  It was the same with all the thousands of the Queen’s wards, nephews and nieces alike, here in Cambridge today, and in innumerable other cities and villages and campsites scattered across the world since humanity had begun.

The succubae and their incubi had started the game with… certain advantages.  Reading and manipulating humans wasn’t just something they did, it was what they were.   And with every round of the game, every human soul they worked on, every human lifetime of experience they gained, they had continued to pull further ahead of their human prospects.  They could, literally, seduce and drain humans of their very life without even waking up.  How much more were they capable of wide awake in the flesh? 

Before they even set hands on the children—or occasionally adults—they wanted, the ancient, eldritch Queen and her Court had used their powers to discern things in their hearts and minds that neither the children nor any adult caretakers understood.  She did not adopt babies, but young children.  They were not just raw material like clay, indifferently mined from acres of the same ore to be given form by the succubae.  They were raw puppets, picked out from shelves stuffed to the brim with the world’s unfortunates, already animated by birth, already endowed by early childhood with the basic shapes Hell required.  All she and her servants had to do was to finish them, polish them, and set them on their paths.

PART 3 OF STORY RECAP

Literature Section “06-36 Grimm Transformations III:  The Evil Plan”—Accompanying Images:  1514-15191115 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.

adventuresofradicalprovocateurs tudor england renaissance venice operative spy espionage succubus orphan adoption prisoner escape rescue fugitive escape smuggling street troll guardian ward olivertwist dickensian

Everything began the autumn of the haunting.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, fortune beamed on the Defalais family with a generous light reserved only for the luckiest.  Lord Robert, the Earl of Warwick, was one of the most powerful and prominent men in England, politically astute and well-esteemed by King Henry VIII.  Lady Margaret Mordaunt’s grace, charm, and beauty had been celebrated even before her debut at court, and even before tragedy and piety had cleared a path through her six older sisters to her marriage.  Her family’s title had gone to her younger half-brother; but she had brought estates of her own to join those of her husband’s.  Both families had joined the Tudor pretender at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and been richly rewarded with the plunder despoiled from those who had kept their oath. 

The couple’s courtship had been the talk of the court; their wedding, the event of the season; and their affection manifest, in the form of seven accomplished and (mostly) proper daughters:  Margaret, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine, Adelais, Beatrice, and Hellinore.  The eldest were well-wed, the middle children hopeful, and the youngest naïve.  They enjoyed the best tutors their mother could arrange from among the faculty of nearby Cambridge University.

The family dwelt in splendor at Fensmere Manor, a newly-built seat ahead of its time, more luxurious and pleasant country estate, than drafty fortress for hiding in.  Blessed with health, wealth, education, position, strength, and even family, which all considered their birthright, their destiny was to blossom and grow, crowding out the needs and ambitions of lesser bloods.

Or so it appeared, until a tragic fall robbed the Countess of her life, the family of its joy, and England of one of its most precious gems.  The daughters lost their role model, their most ardent advocate, their fiercest defender, and their loving, attentive mother.  The Earl was distraught, distant, and thoughtless in his own grief, practically a second parent lost to them even as he lost his own way, leaving his daughters in the capable but uninspired hands of his servants.

Then SHE appeared:  Anne Batonnoir, a Lady of obscure family origins but great charity somewhere far to the West—Devon, Cornwall, or even the Pale.  Her brother Jerome was a Herald of Arms in service to the King, and she was well-respected throughout the English clergy as a charitable woman who helped them care for orphans of quality and piety.  Jerome had slowly achieved some minor influence at the royal court, and now she quickly achieved even greater influence at the Earl’s. 

None could deny her extraordinary beauty, magnetic charisma, or easy self-assurance.  Her spirit, body, and manner were indisputable evidence of her gentle birth and high prospects.  And men not inclined towards the counsel of their mothers pursued her with as much focus and intensity as their mothers displayed in trying to steer them towards more-eligible, less-interesting women like the Earl’s daughters.

Her first appearance in Cambridgeshire, like Lady Margaret’s final tragedy, coincided with an autumn of ill winds, momentous storms, and inexplicable losses.  As the weather grew colder, crops wilted; cattle were mutilated; people disappeared; and rumors spread, of fires spied and chants heard deep in the woods.  Of remote dances and orgies on the darkest nights, and unholy ceremonies when the full moon was in zenith.  Tales of demons and witchcraft rattled the unsteady and inflamed the superstitious.  And some—among them, it must be said, the most jealous and least charitable of women—whispered that Robert’s alacritous courtship of Anne was more than unseemly:  it was unnatural.

Still, less-suspicious women, and virtually all men, took one look at Lady Batonnoir and dismissed supernatural explanations.  Not that the men were likely to share those thoughts with their wives, but they did with one another.

If Lord Robert’s first wedding was a fairy tale, his second was a delicious scandal; and definitely the subject of as much gossip as his first.  Soon after they took their leave of the celebration, the guests near the stairs to the Great Chamber became excited, drawing other guests to them.

From above came the unmistakable sounds of a very passionate woman, being aroused and then, in turn, bitterly disappointed by her groom.  Within ten minutes the gentry of the whole county, and those few of their peers from elsewhere who had been able to attend the quick ceremony, learned not only that the new Countess was as expressive and hard-working as she was attractive, but also that the Earl was a quickjack who had already been accommodated twice today by his energetic new wife before their marriage was thirty minutes’ old.

As best the attentive crowd could gather, he had attempted to defile her just before the ceremony, only sparing her wedding dress by ruining his own breeches before he could get them off.  Even so, he had just barely and technically managed to consummate the marriage by penetrating her (ineptly and painfully, it seemed) before spending himself.  The guests, embarrassed, scattered to report their news to everyone they might come across, carefully avoiding the Earl’s mortified older daughters who were struggling to maintain their dignity in the presence of their father’s vassals.

The Hell of Lust is home to the succubae, the incubi, and their slaves, the human damned (dead) and collaborators (still alive).  The land is hot to the touch, a burning red desert with beds of bone-dry red sand interrupted by outcrops of black igneous rock.  The air is humid, hot, and dark, with patches of steam fog floating listlessly through the still air.  Being sunless, it is lit only by flames from burning naphtha seeps and tar pits, from pools of glowing magma, and to a minimal extent, the luxury of candles, lamps, and wood torches taken from the Earth.

Because it is sunless, rainless, and windless, its denizens live in the open air.  The ruling, predatory demons enjoy walls for privacy, but rarely roofs; and comfortable matresses and pillows to insulate them from the heat and hardness of the ground.  Human slaves rest and make do as best they can, tormented by perpetual hunger and–above all–thirst.  Every slave of the succubae and incubi is permanently chastized, released if and only as long as it entertains their masters.

The damned cannot learn new languages, but are limited to the languages they spoke on Earth.  There are no native demon languages.

TM, © 2025 by The Remainderman