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.

PREVIOUSLY:  Penny is isolated without being able to sense anything about space, time, the world, or even her own body.  She is so isolated she wonders if she even existed or if her memories are the imaginations of a momentary consciousness flickering in nothingness.  NOW:

The first moment was overwhelming.

As everything returned, she felt completely overloaded by light, sound, smell, taste, feeling, gravity, movement, her frantic heartbeat, her panicked breath.

Data crashed in, fired like musket balls and flung at her like buckets of scalding water, crushing her from all directions at once, as if her entire existence was being obliterated by fire.  There was so much of it that when the assault began it meant everything and nothing at once. 

She had been searching for a whisper or a flutter of distant candlelight, any tiny thing to break the nothingness.  And instead, she had been hit by thunderous screaming and a burst of direct sunlight straight in her eyes.

It all happened so fast, after the utter stillness of before.  But it took a moment for her brain and body to accelerate and re-synchronize with the raging torrent of water and the speeding avalanche of life.  She experienced that glacial moment as forever, and it would stick with her always, even as she struggled to remember already, what the utter stillness and absence that had preceded it had really been like.

Then her body and mind started processing data again, remembering they had once done so normally and routinely, and falling back into their well-worn tracks to move forward.

She felt the sharp tug at her bottom and then the gentle, warm hand between her legs removing it and casting it away, as the last of the wicked plug left her behind, ending her total violation and occupation, even as it allowed her to start trying to process what she had been through, in a way she hadn’t been able to reach when she was… gone.

Next, seconds and minutes later, she started making sense of everything else.

The smell of frankincense, myrrh, opium, and the very very essential and musky scent of one unique woman, maybe even something too deep for conscious awareness, embraced Penny with the certain knowledge of where she was, fundamentally and totally:  Domina!   She was with, held close and tight by, her Domina.

That was the essence, the meaning, of everything.  Of being back:  She was safe, back in the arms of her Domina.

She moued in joy and relief and safety and love.

From that core of certainty, her awareness felt secure enough to widen back to something like normality. 

She was lying on her back on a soft, warm bed, cradled in her Domina’s warm, gentle arms.  The air was hot and moist—hell insistently reminding her where they were, even before the low, distant roar of a thousand worried voices and the clanking, booming jangle of the band faintly sounding at the very threshold of perception, told her she had not moved too far.  Persuading her she had not been away for too long, no matter that it felt like a lifetime, the wall between before and after that… whatever it had been, so massive and high she could not even see back over it to gauge how different her place was now.

She felt her Domina’s cheek against her forehead; Channah’s reassuring arms and breasts cradling her neck and shoulders; Channah’s silky smooth dress against her bare flesh; Channah’s legs wrapped protectively around her bare ones; Channah’s boots resting on Penny’s bare feet and ankles, possessing her in a profoundly comforting way.

She was safe in the arms of her Domina, and to Penny, in that moment, they were nothing but loving and assuring and inspiring and protecting her, like a mother and wife and nurse all wrapped up together as one.  Then her brain sighed, putting all the comparisons together:

Duh.  Like an angel.

No.  Not just like one.  Whatever had happened to her, however she had fallen, Channah was an angel, and no one had ever felt that truth more strongly than Penny did in that moment.  Penny’s heart leapt as she realized she, literally, had a guardian angel!  Penny felt the full and wonderful import of that now, a feeling of peace like she had never known before.

“Domina!”  Penny sobbed, immediately crying, finding her arms and using them to roll slightly to her right.  With her left arm (her right arm trapped between them), she hugged her angel with desperate joy.  She wanted to wrap all her limbs around her Domina, but after what she had been through, the fact Channah was controlling her and constraining her—and Penny could feel her mastery—was the most reassuring and wonderful feeling in the world.

Limitations of any kind were real; they were the certainty confirming she was not alone and nowhere.  She could remember their absence from her banishment, more keenly than she could remember anything specific about what the banishment itself had felt like.  But that—that horrible interruption in her existence—was the last thing she wanted to think about now.

She broked down and wept, chest heaving, wracked with sobs, in Channah’s arms as her Domina wrapped and swathed her reassuringly, comforting her with her warmth, and her protective envelopment, and her throaty murmurs of reassurance:  “It’s okay, baby.  It’s all right.  You’re back here with me, darling.  That’s all that matters.  My sweet girl.”  She kissed the top of Penny’s head, sliding against Penny’s hair and the sense of softness from her lips even touching Penny’s skull.  She had one arm under Penny’s head and shoulders, and Penny burrowed her face into the crook between Channah’s breast and arm, staining her beautiful brocade with Penny’s salty tears, Channah not caring in the least about clothing no matter how precious, when her little girl needed to be comforted and welcomed back.  And Channah’s voice and manner and words and gestures and even excited heartbeat, everything about her, confirmed that, how true her compassion was.  “My little honey bear.  Oh… ohhh, my little darling.  There, there.  You’re safe.  You’re safe in my arms, sugar.” 

One hand held Penny’s shoulder firmly, while the other patted and stroked Penny’s back and side.  Meanwhile, Channah’s booted feet wrapped themselves around Penny’s naked ones, her upper heel hooking around Penny’s ankles and gently pulling them on top of her other leg.  Penny leaned in harder to her, face buried completely in Channah’s breast, wrapped in and enraptured by the sweet, distinctive perfume of her amazing body, the totality of her presence, the bliss of being in complete communion with her. 

Channah’s dominance over Penny, in every category that might be compared—spiritual and physical, emotional and rational, sensory and force of personality—was total.

And Penny knew it, deeply, profoundly, and intensely, in that moment.

Physically, as an angel, Channah was unnaturally strong and magnetically attractive, while Penny was, ultimately, only human; something paler and less than the stuff of heaven itself.

Mentally and emotionally, in addition to whatever undoubted angelic or demonic superpowers of hypnosis and seduction Channah had, she had hundreds of human lifespans’ worth of experience and practice, versus Penny’s worldly body and single life that were only just getting underway in earnest.

And Channah was in her own element, one she had centuries of familiarity with; while Penny was just returning from a place more distant than she could have conceived of before, a place that made Fang’s heteraslakos in the Hell of Lust, seem as familiar and nostalgic and homey as the half-remembered, more-imagined gentle Buckinghamshire countryside where the person Penny had once been, innocent little Pen, lived with his parents before their deaths.  Before Cambridgeshire and the manipulative demons, before Venice and his cold aunt, there where he had been whole, a child cared for as a child actually should be cared for, with the parents every child should have.  After what she had just been through, in the preceding moments, and even in the past days of her hazing, lying here in sweet Channah’s arms truly felt like the soft, pastel imagamemories of early childhood.

Situationally, of course, they were in Channah’s world—literally, an entire world owned and ruled by her—whereas Penny was not merely lost, not merely out of her bailiwick, she was outside of the very world she had grown up in.

Channah had brought Penny here, surrounded her by what Channah wanted surrounding her, even dressed her—when she had still been dressed, and in a way, now that she was completely vulnerable and naked—exactly as Channah wanted her to be.  This place, that Channah seemed to know well—to thrive in—that was somehow very important to the succubae, could not have been more alien, or less comfortable, let alone natural or connected, to Penny.  It jarred with her soul like a sword being scraped blade-edge-down against a stone.  In sum, Channah had Penny exactly where she wanted her and how she wanted her.

Channah was even fully-dressed, assertively to match her personality, whereas Penny wore nothing, as naked and vulnerable as a newborn baby in her mother’s arms.  Well, Penny wore nothing that could protect her or strengthen her or help her; she had only Channah for. that.  The only thing on her body was her master’s tiny cage, binding her and marking her as Channah’s virginal property.  And there was the only thing, the terrible thing inside her, which her mind could not even bring itself to think about but she felt as a great unsettled discomfort, reminding her of her vulnerability:  Channah literally held her and controlled her, inside and out.  As she had definitively demonstrated by sending Penny away from everything with an embarrassing and uncomfortable, but ultimately simple, plug.

Channah and Penny were so connected, so completely bonded to one another, that they seemed to feel it rising, not merely simultaneously, but together, as one:

Even as Penny’s heart leapt with the urge to kiss her Domina, she felt the hand that had been soothing her back brush lovingly across her ribs to take her chin, and gently, gently lift her face to Channah’s, giving Penny’s abashed eyes time to gather their courage and rise, until…

Their eyes locked, their hearts and breaths synchronized, and while Penny’s mouth opened in wordless,  silent, passive amazement and awe, Channah spoke and acted assertively, for both of them, as seemed only right and natural from now on, whispering:  “Oh, my rhythm.  My basis.  My love.”

Then, turning her head as she leaned forward, Channah crushed her lips against Penny’s and pressed her tongue inside Penny’s receptive mouth, just enough to make it clear she could and did rule even that place.

Literature Section “06-89 Channah & Penny 4ever I”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 89 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1754 words—Accompanying Images:  1799-1802—Published 2025-05-11—©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.