1971. Deep in the Mojave Desert, occupied territory of the confederate angels, August is about to end. The girl does not tremble as she drops to her knees, nor does she pray. Sand cooks her skin in that resigned, obsequious kneel she settles into, staring at the firing squad of fallen messengers. There is no providence here, only an example to be made for all the other orphaned mortals who reluctantly call this facility home.

“Theft is a sin. Where were you planning on going?”

“Theft is a sin. Where were you planning on going?”

“Theft is a sin. Where were you planning on going?”

“Theft is a sin. Where were you planning on going?”

The angels—bearing dove-like wings but no halos on account of their secession from the Kingdom of Heaven—project the same sentence into August’s mind with a slight delay, like an obnoxious echo rattling around her head. The rifles poised in the brunette’s direction tell her that despite the appearance of their soft white down, this faction is not so doveish. She considers telling them about her sister again, but they always play dumb and tell her she never had one. Nobody has ever escaped this place.

Blood drops onto the sand, dripping down from that nasty wound in the girl’s right shoulder. Protruding from her sun-kissed skin is a metre long stretch of rebar hurled like a spear in her direction the moment she set foot into the morning sun. Attempting an escape at night would have been smarter in many ways, the desert would have been much cooler and the cover of darkness could have obscured her… except, it would have been too dark to spot the mines which lurked under the sand in unnatural dunes, like predators waiting to strike.

To August’s right sits carbon steel, moving with her body as it weighs her down and makes her grit her teeth defiantly. To her left sits the scrapheap it came from. Junk cooks in the sun, producing a scent that anybody would be hard pressed to call heavenly. Staring out at the girl, like a voyeur, is the cathode-ray tube television she threw onto the pile herself only yesterday morning. It was cathartic to dispose of the accursed thing; it always made August uneasy ever since that day. The day her sister went missing, that is.

“Go fuck yours—” August’s entire body seizes up as she braces terribly at that sharp metallic twang. Her pounding heart and heaving chest betray her defiant attitude. She’s scared out of her fucking mind. It takes her a few seconds to realise that her body has yet to play host to four fresh holes and the metal casings set to make them. Blinking her eyes open, August’s mind plays catch up and she realises that the sound did not come from her angelic jailors—turned executioners—but from that heap of scrap to her left.

The first thing to catch the girl’s eye is the television she’d had regular nightmares about for over a year. Despite being severed from its source of power, the stubborn thing crackles with an electric hum as black-and-white static dances across its glowing screen. August is so transfixed by the impossible showing before her that she does not notice the ivory blood spilling from her keepers’ mouths. No, she is left oblivious to their expiry until the moment their bodies sag and collapse down onto the selfsame sand that reddens her knees.

When the detritus settles, August’s widening eyes tear away from the TV and fix onto the angels’ corpses. Scrap metal protrudes from their backs, much the same as it does from the mortal’s shoulder. Effulgent white blood seeps out from their deep wounds, forming a glowing puddle on the ground that carries the stench of divinity; the reeking scent of cooking metals and plastics has been replaced entirely by that overwhelming, flowery smell. It’s suffocating, like attending a thousand overlapping funerals and being assaulted by the posies.

“Ahhhhh…” The TV sighs. August is too shocked to notice the strangeness of that crackly, static voice—too transfixed on the pungent corpses of the captors that fancied themselves caretakers, then killers. She wants to smirk and spit on their lifeless bodies, but finds that her body will not move. More of them will be out soon, and then her chances of escape will be dashed. And yet, she cannot move. Where were you planning on going? Her heavenly hosts had made a good point; August knew from the moment she packed her bag that she would die traversing the desert, there’s no civilisation close to this isolated facility. Like that matters. August would rather die in the heat, on her own terms, then slowly rot under such hostile care. She knows what she’s being kept here for; sunstroke and dehydration seem a mercy by comparison.

“You there, girl. Bring their blood to me.” The TV speaks. This time, August finds the strength—and the will—to turn her head.

“I… what?” The CRT glow seems to bore into her head the moment her eyes make contact with it, flooding her with calm that soon brings her heart to heel. “Okay… did you save me?” One leg at a time, the girl manages to stand. It feels like the first true miracle to ever be conducted on this consecrated ground.

The crackling static within the television set laughs, at least August interprets the warped noise as such. Left foot forwards, right following, the filthy brunette reaches the pool of iridescent white essence before suddenly remembering that terrible weight in her right shoulder. August collapses, catching herself with an outstretched hand that finds itself coated in angels’ blood. She winces both in pain and revulsion, but then the static grows louder once again and commands her attention. Like pulling a puppet by one of its many strings, August turns obediently to find that glow forcing her into calm once more. Her head becomes unnaturally cold in the middle of the Mojave, and August feels the mental equivalent of being drowned in ice cold water. Her thoughts near freeze.

“I haven’t, not yet. But once you save me I’ll return the favour. Give you purpose; give you power. You want that, don’t you? Bring the blood to me. Now.” It is not a command that a weak, exhausted mortal like August can resist. The girl swallows the spit in her mouth and shambles over to the scrapheap, walking with a slow lopsided gait and carrying pain she can barely feel while her head is being held under that immaterial water. There’s a calmness in drowning, she’s learning, a stillness that reaches out to your whole and steals the panic away.

“Fine.” August mutters, unable to pry her eyes away from the curved glass that she had cracked with her elbow when delivering it to the steaming mass grave of plastic and metal it now appears to occupy like a throne. Her tone is not reverent, nor is it scornful; August simply complies with her given task.

Bloodstained steel drags across the sand, documenting August’s journey towards the scrapheap which somehow executed four undying beings. Given that they ceded their place by God’s side during this secession war, the confederate angels’ everlasting spirits have no doubt already been rejected in their trip back home and cast down into the great purging pits of Hell. Good fucking riddance. August spits onto the baking ground, lifting up her hand and pressing that ivory-coated hand—rife with floral, olfactory violence—against the hairline crack she’d made the morning before.

It seeps into the static immediately, pulled free from her hand like a glove until not a single trace of it remains on August’s sandy skin. The glow behind the glass grows more intense while the girl holds her breath as though she’s really being drowned—lungs filling with anticipation for her saviour to reveal themselves.

“Ahhhh… that’s better. Now for the rest.” The voice becomes much less crackly, as though the television’s antenna has begun to tune in to the right frequency. It sounds husky; female.

“Agh!” August stumbles back when she feels it slipping past her ankle: the remaining ivory blood, slithering across the small red trail she had made for it like a snake and disappearing up into the TV’s cracks. The girl’s legs fail her and she once again collapses onto the ground, staring up at the freshly sated something that cackles from behind its unassuming shattered glass confines. The being isn’t confined for much longer, two sets of fingers pushing through the cracks in the screen and tearing the heap of scrap into two clean halves.

“Don’t look away. Ah… I should say, be not afraid.” There is a hint of amusement in the unsealed creature’s sultry voice as it appears on the scrapheap, half-completed. The angel-blood is gathering at the places where the being has yet to rebuild its form, and August does as she is told, watching the entire grotesque scene play out in full before her dulling gaze. She’s been told not to fear, so the emotion kills itself inside her head.

“What are you?” She asks calmly, oblivious to the tremors in her flesh; her mind is still—head held firmly underwater—while her body shakes violently under the killing sun. Warmth tickles her thighs and softens the sand and soil below.

August’s saviour reforms into the image of a grossly pale older woman—at least twice the twenty-something’s age by appearance, but no doubt much older—wearing a fitted suit complete with waistcoat, tall leather boots and long, slick-backed hair that flares out at the back. All of these features are the same effulgent, pearly white as the blood that had formed them. In the confederate-killer’s eyes dances TV static, and on its face sits a satisfied simper. “Isn’t it obvious, August?” The human recoils, almost feeling that snuffed out fear rekindle itself in her heaving chest. She does not recall giving the creature her name. “I’m an angel, you can call me Hamaliel. I’m… with the union, see.” Hamaliel steps down from the heap and makes its way over to August. Where the girl had been anticipating that same saccharine whiff the dead confederates were giving off, she is instead greeted with the stench of whiskey, tobacco, and a woody, leathery scent that does not match its flashy, celestial appearance in the slightest. “So these defectors need to go.”

August tilts her head, chewing at her lip like a vulture tearing into carrion. “Aren’t… angels supposed to have wings… and, if you’re on the other side… a halo, too?” The smug, pitying look she is given in response to her question makes the girl feel stupid—and small. Hamaliel’s response only exacerbates these fragile feelings.

“Aren’t little girls like you supposed to be quiet?” The angel mocks with a surprising lack of humour in its voice, raising a hand and snapping its fingers to stir the surrounding scrap into action. Iron, steel, even gold—all metal can be controlled at the flick of the angel’s wrist and a crisp snapping of its fingers. In truth, the physical motion is just for show. August is once again made to watch in awe as sharp scrap metal from the heap is flung against yet another angel’s back, but this time it stops short of killing the being and instead flattens out into wings that spread into a moderate wingspan—imitating the dove-like wings the confederates she’d grown up with have always sported.

Next, she feels a strange vibration in her shoulder—in the wound that she no longer feels the pain of—before the length of spear-like rebar is pried out of her with the ease of removing a skewer from kebab meat. August slumps to her side, staring at the floating carbon steel which snaps apart until only a short length continues to hover, still dripping with blood. Hamaliel bends the rebar into a closed circle which sits above the angel’s head like a halo, drops of blood floating around it as the iron in them finds itself as suspended as the rest of the metal now adorning the well dressed scrap-angel.

“Are you satisfied now, girl? Say yes.” The angel makes its approach, scrap hovering over them and entering the facility to eliminate those inside—angels and orphans alike.

“Yes.” August focuses on Hamaliel—only Hamaliel, that overpowering white glow and searing confidence—to avoid tuning in to the howls of suffering, both mortal and otherwise, in the prison she’s called home for the better half of her life. At least the one person she cares most about finding and keeping safe has already departed. “Ah… I need to ask you something. My sister—”

“Say you’ll make a contract with me.” The angel interrupts without even seeming to regard August’s inquiry at all. Its voice is so cloying that the mortal girl cannot help but submit, her efforts to fight its pull only expelling more breath from her lungs. So much as thinking about disobeying this command makes her feel like she’s waterlogged.

“Ah… I… I’ll make… a contract. With you.” The instant August speaks these words, Hamaliel slits open its palm with a piece of stray, floating scrap and eclipses the mortal girl’s face with its bloodied hand.

The last thing she remembers thinking, as her tongue reluctantly slides out to taste the angel’s blood, is how red the cut appeared in the brief glimpse she was given between it being made and being thrust upon her to complete the contract.

And just like that, August became the property of the angel Hamaliel.

Better yet…

She became its starlet.

1888. In the district of Whitechapel, London, August is about to end. It’s the 31^st already, and in the dark of the early morning, Buck’s Row is far too crowded. A starlet tails an angel. An angel tails a serial killer. And the Ripper tails his first victim. Each of them is oblivious to the hostile presence at their back, save for August, who is all too aware of the claws in hers.

The well-trained talent reaches for the sanctified steel hugging her thigh, hidden well by the long petticoat that keeps her warm on this late night. Her attire is period appropriate, but not too gaudy so as to attract unwanted attention; a narrow day bodice with a simple layered skirt, and boots she can keep pace in.

August watches the halo-less angel—who dresses in a disguise much similar to her own, albeit with an overly indulgent white and gold chemisette—draw its weapon. Before her target can fire on its own mark, a soon-to-be serial murderer on the cusp of his first kill, August lets loose the ornate silver dress sword from her hip and watches it sail, silently, into the ill-fated assassin’s back.

“Confirm your kill, Virgo.” An order from set. August feels her blood dancing at the sound of Hamaliel’s voice in her ear, running the show. She’s so blessed to have it guiding her; without its presence she’d surely become confused again. Wasn’t she born almost six decades after these murders?

Watching the killer and his victim disappear into the dark ahead, August approaches her target with a ghostly, quiet gait. Her knee drops to the ground—a familiar place for the storied joint—and she curls her fingers around the handle of the small sword protruding from the dead angel like a grave marker.

“It’s dead, Sir.” Her voice is as calm and still as the overpowering blood her soul perpetually drowns in. Hamaliel’s contract is a curse that binds her will to the angel’s lest her circulation halt entirely. August smiles weakly, staring down at the corpse. Her 91^st kill. Hamaliel should be pleased, but August finds herself faltering again. She knows she is not meant to question her orders, of course, but something about this mission makes her uneasy. She’s doing good… she’s a holy starlet, chosen by Heaven to keep the world at peace… but wasn’t this traitor she killed attempting to prevent mindless bloodshed?

“Virgo.” Hamaliel’s voice stings inside her head. Its voice has become unbearably stern, and August understands immediately that she has overstepped in her private musings. “Let’s take a break for the day, it seems you need some reminding of your role on set.” The girl in the Victorian era dress hunches her shoulders, cursing her own self-doubt. She tries, vainly, to recall the time before she had Sir to manage her every move—her every thought—but all she can remember is the endless fucking sand, the unbearable heat, and the loss carved so deep into her chest she’d have accepted any outstretched hand to escape it. This is better; she’s useful here. Sometimes even happy when the ratings come in from up high and Hamaliel tells her that she’s gained popularity—and more importantly, Sir’s favour.

“Sir, I-I hope—”

“Stay still and be quiet, girl. I’m making sure you’re both in frame before extracting, so don’t move a muscle. Ah. That’s a good starlet.”

In a quick trick of live editing, the scene of August in Buck’s Row with her 91^st confederate corpse becomes nothing but a snapshot of a bygone era, sitting in the centre of a television set. The crew swarms onto the soundstage to remove the corpse and August stands obediently still, as she was ordered to. Her leg shakes lightly in nervous anticipation for the angel who rules her to appear and speak to her in that chastising tone, so the young star finds herself pleasantly surprised—and unfathomably relieved—to see that her owner is calm when it appears on the soundstage in a flash of bright light.

Hamaliel wears an unreadably placid smile, hands tucked into the trouser pockets of that fitted white suit it has worn since the day they met; again, August tries to recall the details, but all she can recall is the heat of the desert and the sensation of drowning. That, and the heady stench of cooking metal scrap. “You’re back on the air in an hour.” It speaks candidly, disregarding the way that August trembles in place as she stares up at her god—was it always so tall? On the dim stage, lit moderately for a nighttime scene, that dancing static in her Showrunner’s stare captures all of August’s attention and holds it hostage.

“Yes, Sir… can… can I take a break?” Her voice comes out like a sad discharge, all too meek and drowned out by the static buzz that steals her gaze.

“Before receiving your reward?” The angel cocks its head, and August follows the playful tilt perfectly without consciously meaning to. “For the clean kill. Here.” Its voice is a droning serenity, boring itself into the submissive starlet’s mind with the ease of a drill burrowing into sand. August’s parted lips finally stop quivering and she begins to salivate, cock tenting in her underwear and twitching against her petticoat.

“I uhm… well. You… I thought you were going to punish me, Sir… a-ah!” The startled starlet covers her mouth with her hands to silence her rude and unnecessary gasp, embarrassed at still jumping in surprise at her Showrunner’s whims after all this time. In a single snap, the angel had removed every layer of its property’s clothing save for the lace choker around her neck, which houses a crystal forged from the girl’s own blood—before it became tainted by her contract.

August shudders on set. The girl, still staring up into her angelic saviour’s TV static eyes, takes solace in the knowledge that her reward is sure to stave off the chill of this moody soundstage once she gets going. Mounting Hamaliel’s white boot, angled perfectly for her to saddle up against like a Sybian—and sure to bring her to a much greater climax as she ruts her modest cock against the mirror-shined leather—August rocks forwards and hugs her saviour’s leg indulgently.

The angel laughs with a deep, throaty cackle; it sounds like little more than a sleazy older dyke toying with a needy submissive who can’t control her urges, but August knows that it’s so much more. It is one of Heaven’s greatest agents, working to end this war across time that was needlessly started by those who’ve insisted on interfering with mortal affairs. This confederation of watchers, as they’ve come to be known, believe that they must reduce the overall suffering in humanity’s past before the seventh trumpeter finds her breath. August finds it all terribly difficult to follow, and so clings to her owner with unabashed deference to avoid having to try. She knows that she has no love for the confederates, at least, having been raised since her early teenage years in a facility that coveted and harnessed the lifeblood of ‘maidens’, or to put it more bluntly: virgins.

“Mmmhhh… sorry for my bad thoughts, Sir. I love You.” August holds onto that proffered limb for dear life, lest her mind begin to spiral again. This is her reward—complete annihilation of her higher thought process for as long as her stupid rutting flesh can last—and she’s more than earned it. By not thinking about all the wrong things… Such as the way she’d been neutered in that facility in the Mojave, like a dog, then force-fed hormones to make her more aligned with the perfect image of a fair virgin—like the great Mother Mary herself. Spending myriad sleepless nightson her stiff cot, forced to question whether she’s more mutt or saint, August could only survive the early years on account of having something more important to safeguard than her own fragile ego. What… what was it, again?

“91 fallen angels, dead by your hand. Tell me, girl, do you feel proud of yourself?” Even through all the static, August can identify the assessing look that Hamaliel is giving her, its hand reaching down to rest under her chin as her lips part instinctively to take her master’s thumb. Oh, that’s right—Sir had asked her a question.

Relaxing into the other in that desperate, clingy manner that always seems to make the angel more endeared, August answers mechanically. “Pride is a demon, it doesn’t belong on this consecrated set.” Something about the words she chose makes the angel Hamaliel grin, like there’s an irony in her response she’s too clouded to understand. “We… we don’t tolerate sin like that, but… that man I saved today. He’s infamous. A sinner. So… so why—”

Before August can finish her sentence, she finds herself being choked by something cold and hard, ribbed metal snaking around her throat in a tight constriction that seals off her air passage. It’s Hamaliel’s steel halo, which has found myriad uses as a punishment tool in the months of servitude she has already endured. Weak fingers paw at the rebar, which bends so easily for the angel while proving far too sturdy for stupid, wasting little girls.

“You’re my starlet, yes, but you’re really a weapon, an asset of Heaven kept sharp by my hand. You do not have the luxury of questioning how I run the show down here, Virgo. Coercing my way back to this set after years of being bound and starved—sealed away and treated as commodity myself—was not all too easy.” Hamaliel almost scowls, but its mask of calm only falters for the briefest of moments. “The watchers I’m having you hunt would smell my kind coming for them from months away, so I have need for our contract; that does not mean that we are equals—doesn’t permit you to run your mouth like my orders need to make sense for you to follow them. You’re just a star, Virgo. Like those adorning the night sky that shrouds our Heaven from view. Stars are simple, reactive. They live their entire lives in violence and then burn out, or explode. They don’t ask, they do. But they can be harnessed.”

While the angel speaks, its noisy eyes flicker and broadcast footage of a space documentary that had aired just the week before, August absorbing the image of a pretty star fading into a white dwarf as it sheds its outer layers like the leading lady stripping down in her dressing room for the very last time. The planetary nebula formed in Hamaliel’s playback is so mesmerising to August, displaying a multicoloured ring that she imagines fixing atop her starlet head like a makeshift halo—cementing her as a true agent of Heaven.

“I’ll be your star, Sir. Please harness me!” Finally, that coarse thumb pushes between the girls lips to shut her up, and August squeezes her mouth around it like a moist, tightening cunt. The rebar halo-turned-collar locks her in place as she lubricates her Showrunner’s thumb obediently, and eagerly, feeling the blood rush around her head all wrong—keeping her dumb and docile for her keeper. Her cock rubs itself against the leather she herself had shined to perfection before her last excursion, August deciding—completely of her own accord—that all of this is okay. This is good for her; this is what a weapon needs: a firm hand to feed her comfortable lies, and a rough, battered love that feels so Heavenly when her body comes to match its tattered state.

Seeing how utterly gone its talent is after she’d been so troubled only minutes ago, Hamaliel feels a deep sensation of pride swelling in its pants. Pride’s a demon, eh? The angel can’t help but agree. It feels the overwhelming need to take today’s training a little further and set an example that will keep its little sun burning bright for it without ever coming to such lofty questions again. Perhaps, then, the time has come to be more candid with the girl—to finish the slow drowning of her ego it had started from the very moment they met.

August is snapped out of her light trance by something smacking against the side of her face. Something just as warm as her burning hot cheek. She pulls away from that thumb when she realises she’s now able to, reeling back with a rapid series of blinks. “Uwahh?”

“Funny thing about pretty starlets like you, kid,” Hamaliel begins, watching with light amusement—and an arousal it had kept well at bay until now—as August’s mindless rutting slows down and unnecessary thought begins to plague that silly head of hers once again, “is that they don’t tend to get very famous without earning the favour of those with the power to make them real stars. You can possess all the talent in the world and yet, none of that matters if you don’t learn your place. Pleasing your betters—the ones whose attention you’re inevitable to draw in like fat, hungry sharks—that’s just show business.”

August feels doubt crawling over her back, a creeping sense of unease telling her that Sir’s mask is slipping. By choice, no less. She cannot complain, staring into the footage of her own private changing taken only the other day and conceding that yes, with a body and a face like that—chiselled into perfection by Hamaliel’s training regimen—she must surely be asking for it. No… no! That’s horrible, that’s…

“Your mind’s awfully noisy for a weapon.” There it is: the smug that Hamaliel had always kept in check before today. Its face is darkening red with lust, and August’s mind is just about clear enough to realise this time just why that should bother her.

“Y-You’re not an angel… Sir… what are you doing? You c-can’t just-gghk—”

The rebar constricts again, and August’s eyes fix on that demonic slab of meat hanging before her face—so close that her eyes lightly cross. Her heart pounds violently, like it means to attempt a prison break, and the girl feels fear and coldness grip her in one last dunk.

“None of that matters right now, pretty. It’s my turn to get off, only fair given all the times you’ve rode my leg like an excited puppy. Fortunately, the rules of your subsidiary sainthood—the thing that makes you conducive for the purposes of devils and angels alike, and helplessly weak to our control—make it clear that you’ll remain a virgin in the eyes of Heaven so long as you don’t engage in penetrative sex, or oral. Pretty convenient, because pleasure’s such an effective way of keeping pent up maidens like you in line. You like the boot, don’t you?”

Shamefully, August nods. She wants to ask more questions but… none of that matters. She just needs to listen… be a good star. The chill of fear she cannot mentally access still saps her body of its strength, her comparatively smaller cock shrinking and growing limp as she stares—entranced—at Sir’s growing stiffness. When she realises the fake angel is waiting for a verbal response, August clears her throat and speaks with a serene tone that tells the other she’s firmly under its spell again.

“I liiiike the booot…” Humiliation burns in the corners of her mind, a peripheral shame that August tries her best not to look at, redoubling her efforts to centre herself with the sight of Hamaliel’s exotic, leaking erection. She never imagined seeing such a thing.

“You’ll learn to like my cock, too. The way it strips your pride—like a Red Dwarf’s metamorphosis—of all those unnecessary outer layers. I’ll take all the responsibility you still currently cling to even after all the conditioning I’ve given you, and I’ll make you too ashamed of yourself to question right and wrong ever again without looking to me for help. Your tiny hand reaching for mine and revelling in the way there’s never any question. I’m better than you, bigger than you. You exist in my orbit, little star, conquered by a gravity too great to deny the pull of.” Hamaliel crouches down, pushing its hips out until August can feel her Showrunner’s unflinching steel against her limp, virginal cock. “Get hard for me, Virgo. You’re an actress, aren’t you?”

Hamaliel is not an angel; it is sleaze and lust incarnate, barely concealed in a suit so white it blinded her. August knows that it doesn’t matter what Sir is; it’s still her owner regardless, she’s bound by contract to be little more than property. The talent feels a rush of blood between her legs and gasps, realising too late that Sir is using its mastery over metal to force her into full mast again.

“Hahhh… that’s… wh-why’re you—”

“Hush now, what did I say? None of that matters; obeisant little sluts like you don’t ask questions. You’re nothing without me, Virgo. Nothing but an extension of my will.” Both the angel and the starlet’s shafts rush with blood, pressing together with enough heat you’d be forgiven for anticipating sparks when they begin to rub. The friction makes August squirm, but the difference in size is what she zeroes in on most. She shouldn’t care, but… Sir wants her to feel small and it is inarguably succeeding in its goal. It’s like her underwhelming sex is all she is right now, a simulacrum of the self by which her ego is pried apart by the larger mass that dwarfs it. “Like a limb, or a cock. I demand you to perform and the good starlet acts her damned heart out.” The shadow of Hamaliel’s throbbing desire eclipses Augusts’s twitching selfhood, the two continuing to rub against one another with a swelling depravity. The act is far too animalistic for an angel and its actress, but more than fitting for a devil and its dog.

“A-ahhnn… Sir…”

“I forget, sometimes—that you’re still just a virgin at the end of the day. This must be the most intense sexual encounter of your life, pushing your tiny neutered prick against my godhood and succumbing to the overwhelming gravity. It’s adorably pathetic, dear, that you’d become this much of a mewling wreck at such fledgling contact. We’re only getting started, see, so I’m doing my best to imagine what sort of obscene, pornographic sounds are going to escape that chaste mouth of yours when I bring you up to the edge.” Hamaliel’s degrading words are a kind sort of mockery, giving August just enough resolve to hang on to her cracking ego and not melt into a puddle at her master’s feet. She felt a static comfort in grinding against the boot, because she was always in control—even if she often gave in to baser urges and faded for a time. Here, the control is ripped from her like wings torn from an angel’s back. Hamaliel dictates the pace of both her torment, and her pleasure. Her emotional stability, too, is just a dial to be toyed with on Hamaliel’s whim. In a sense, it’s comforting—in the same way that drowning can be. There’s a relief in being swept up in a tide you can’t fight; you no longer have any cause to keep on struggling.

And yet, feeling that this could really be her last chance to hold onto anything real about herself, August kicks figurative legs against imagined water and tries—one final time—to come up for air.

“S-Sir!” She chokes, trying not to fixate too greatly on the arousal that floods her like a poison, or the musky scent that tempts her hips into action with every deep inhale. August’s fight or flight response is urging her, desperately, to take Hamaliel’s threat seriously. Never question anything again? Isn’t that exactly the sort of overbearing, dehumanising control she had meant to flee from on the day she decided she’d rather die in the desert heat than as an angel’s battery? Isn’t it her duty to endure—to weather the storm of abuse while holding onto her hate so that she can keep her sister safe?

Her what?

“Ah. You’re ready.” Hamaliel smirks, intending to breathe in August’s second wind just as she finds herself on the cusp of reclamation. It’s terribly calculated, and cruel, but the Showrunner knows just how to break its bitch in for good. No more confusion; no further distractions. It needs a weapon, not an insubordinate chatterbox who thinks she has a right to ask after motives, or dead little sisters.

“R-Ready? I’m not. I need to find my—”

“Sister? Are you blind, girl. She’s right here. Has been the whole time.” That husky older voice is laced with a smug so sick it’s assuredly incurable. Hamaliel rests two fingers under August’s chin and lifts the girl’s head, tenderly, to have her look upon that terminal simper. When the girl’s eyes adjust to the bright white of the false angel’s visage, August feels her entire body seizing up with a terror she cannot fully process; if she were permitted to lose her erection, she would.

“April?” August’s voice croaks out small and quiet, her eyes widening with a clarity that poorly complements her complete lack of understanding. Her mind is a mental fog of paradox and panic, those fingers under her chin tightening their grip until they’re firm as rebar.

“Time moves faster in Hell, just as it flows more slowly up in Heaven. Not that it matters; now that this body is mine, I can present as any age I like if I had the will to change this current form. It’s rather striking though, isn’t it just? She was so small when I took her.” The nuances in that aged voice begin to seep through the cracks of August’s soul and confirm what she already knew. Her vision blurs, but her head is held in place by those sturdy, immovable fingers.

“H-Hell?” August swallows drily, recalling those recurring nightmares that became her only constant companion in the Mojave facility once her sister disappeared. She would rise from her cot, in the dream, and wander over to the common area she and all the other orphans shared. Her steps were soft, quiet, because she knew that she was not permitted to get out of bed so late and feared the punishment if she were caught. Still, August always proceeded, because her sister’s cot was empty; because she could hear the sounds of their brand new television blaring out into the dark well past curfew.

“You remember, don’t you? I thought I felt another’s presence when I nabbed the brat.” Hamaliel’s eyes flicker and broadcast an image of the desert facility’s common room, from the perspective of the TV. How strange—like being on the other side of the glass.

August is still reliving the past, trapped inside her old recurring nightmare and the memory it was based on. Hurried footsteps dash into the common area in a frantic effort to prevent her sister’s inevitable punishment if she continues to watch television past curfew, August entering the dim room to find the younger girl awash with cathode-ray emission. The light blankets April in its unassuming glow—just as an angler fish’s bioluminescent lure draws in its prey—and August cranes her neck to see the innocent scene hiding behind the glass, laying in wait.

“April, you shouldn’t be up past your bedtime!” August hisses across the room, breaking her sister’s strange trance and causing the girl to look back over her shoulder.

“Huh? Augu—”

It happens so quickly that August almost misses it in her blink. The puppet show on the television screen claims April like an alligator snapping its jaws, a blood-red hand puppet reaching out past the glass and snatching the girl through its deceptively malleable veil.

“I was going to starve in that thing. Binding an archfiend’s soul to a physical object in the mortal realm is nasty fucking work. Ours aren’t removable like your mortal ones, least not without a contract like the one we have.” Hamaliel brings its face closer, giving August a good view of April’s future that never was. “I was trapped in the layers between, my form made immaterial in the slice of abyss I govern. If it weren’t for that hellion sister of yours—a slow meal I sustained myself with, a hair’s breadth away from the Dissolution of the Damned—I’d have never been able to save you.” The demon cackles, scrap-metal wings wrapping around to cradle the girl, who squirms against the other helplessly. She hates how hard she is even now, and how turned on her sister’s cock is still making her. Shame burns across her face, immolating the indignation that should be rocking her. Hamaliel was right, she’s falling apart against such revelations—against a superiority too immutable to deny. Her guilt is a bullet. “All those years spent wanting to protect your little sister, then those you wasted wanting to find her. Save her. When all this time, she’s the one who saved you. We’re one now, and you’re free, in a sense. Free to choose a master.”

August bucks and groans, wanting to pull away but finding herself unable to on account of the sharp metal digging into her back like claws. “I-I uhm… oh g-g-god, I—”

“Oh, Virgo. Just shut your mouth and think about cock. That’s my gift to you. Her gift to you. Enough depraved lust to drown yourself in, so that you never have to resurface again. Never having to face the truth staring you down and let it wound your fragile little heart.” Hamaliel pushes closer, smothering August’s sex with its undeniable mass. Temptation twitches and spurts, August chewing through her lip as she tries her best to understand the new contract being drawn up.

“I… April… what are you saying?”

“Lose yourself in the role. I’m offering escape from all that trouble making an ugly fucking mess of your pretty, starlet face. Your despair is as streaking makeup. I’ll take it all away, make you so small against my might that questioning me feels like giving backchat to a bona fide god. You’ll be happier. Too wrapped up in a comfortable blanket of shame to ever face the sad nature of your reality again. Happy in the fantasy, the roles you play, embodying the characters you’re cast as perfectly. My good actress dolly.” The static eyes begin to intensify in their white noise again and August can barely find a spare moment to think, her hips autonomously pushing up into the other’s girth as her chin drips with blood from her punctured lip.

“No, but… you’re my…”

“Or, you can walk away. Pull away from me now and I won’t stop you. You’ll return to reality; you’ll be all on your own again. Lost and directionless in a world in which your sister is no more and you’re some sad sack survivor. Not a scrap to her name save for stories of her long abuse and a list of regrets even longer.” The angel… devil… god… caresses August’s cheek with its hand softly, and the girl leans into it weakly. She hasn’t the strength to resist the offered comfort and finds herself toxically grateful for the tenderness, even while such terrible manipulation is being laid bare. That’s… a lot to think about. Too much to think about. It might be nice, it might be better, even, if she never had to face such complicated and depressing realities again. Right?

“Who are you?” Her tiny voice asks, as she leans more freely into the image of her stolen sister. A girl who she now knows was eaten whole over a span of several years.

The archfiend grins, though it looks upon its victim warmly. Its cruelty is not present on its face—only everywhere else. “Do you really want to know that, girl? I could be one of the seven princes of Hell, an abyssal grand duke who keeps mortals like you stupid and pacified—made passive by the tempting distractions I offer, like your favourite late night entertainment or a sister you’d thought long lost.”

August’s face lights up with understanding. If she chooses to succumb to this, April will be right by her side. That memory of the common area in the Mojave will remain nothing but a nightmare. In a meaningful rutting of her hips, the tired human gives her answer.

“Then you need not think of me as anyone but April.” August’s big sister smirks, wiping the blood from the trembling mortal’s chin and tasting it. “You don’t have to open your eyes to the truth ever again, little sister. This second civil war is as pathetic an attempt to overrule Heaven’s dominion over Earth as ours was, but it’s keeping us well-fed and well entertained. The damned need distracting too, stops them from melding into more competition in our shitty little democracy.” April cocks her head, grunting as she starts to rub against her sister’s smaller cock more intentionally again. “Hahh… nothing they love more than watching angels sink like stones in a river, well, save for one other thing. Wanna keep your ratings up, weapon?”

“Y-Yeah… yes sis… ehe…” August is intoxicated by the olive branch she’s been given, her mind no longer caring how weak the logic is. An excuse not to trouble herself is a kind gift indeed; it would be the height of ingratitude to reject such a present in favour of her sordid past.

“Atta girl. Then let’s give the dead a show to make the living jealous. You’ve proven to the denizens of the abyss what a good killer you are, but you’ve yet to show off what a sweet whore you make. Time to fix that, eh?” The devil in sister’s clothing chuckles drily, and August finds herself enamoured. The performance that was the angel, Hamaliel, has disappeared entirely, giving way to a scumbag older sister August’s fractured, overstimulated mind cannot help but swoon over.

Before August can so much as give a pathetically craven—or enthusiastic—affirmation, in response to her big sister’s mocking rhetorical, April’s TV static eyes suddenly tune in to a new channel. The soundstage shifts in tandem, reflecting the new scene April’s eyes have tuned into: they’re in the centre of a battlefield, dressed in olive drab military uniforms. Artillery shells pound the dirt behind August’s big sister as the Showrunner pushes her smaller prey—weak in body and mind—onto the soil at the centre of no man’s land and straddles her comfortably. The wings she had fashioned from scrap metal now break apart and snap to August’s limbs, curling around them and digging into the ground to keep her held firm in place.

“Smile, dear, you’re on television.” The older woman once again smothers August’s stiff cock with her own, immediately pulling her little sister back into its orbit. The brunette, dressed up in a soldier’s garb in some perverse re-enactment of the first world war, gives an obedient smile. The performance is masterful. In another blink of April’s devilish eyes, they’re on the dance floor of a nightclub, in the middle of the 1980s. April’s dress is a dazzling silver that mesmerises the shrinking soul beneath it which groans when she feels her length being pushed to the side by her relentless sister’s mounting effort to get herself off. Still, August was told to smile. Tiredly, she continues to do so, face speckled with glitter; lips smeared with gloss.

“G-God… that feels so gooood…”

“My, what an exhibitionist slut you’ve become. If I told you how many were tuned in right now you’d probably shut down even further than you already have. Not that I’d let you; I have you in the sweet spot right now—exactly where I need you to be. Dumb and docile and doting. Utterly despondent when faced with a reality that makes you feel like you’re drowning. A-Ahh… you’re a good lay, for a virgin…”

April blinks and the channel switches again. August shudders at the snow melting against her back as her sister’s cock pins her to Everest’s peak and has her dribbling with a hot ooze of ejected self-confidence and respect. It feels good to lose, August concedes, swallowing the saliva building in her mouth repeatedly as she savours the feeling of all her old concerns and pride leaking out of her cock and lubricating the shaft. Without skipping a beat, April takes advantage of this newfound slickness to speed up her wanton grinding, causing the mountain-bound girl to writhe in an agonising sort of pleasure as the ice burns her skin.

Another blink, they’re in the Halls of the Damned, the biting cold replaced with a burning heat that reaches further than your body. It is a fiery temptation that tempers August’s cooling conscience—courage—and lets it burn away as she’s pleasured by her master. At this point, even the degrading aspects of this treatment only serve to help her get off. Losing feels good.

“You make a good pornstar, which is impressive given you’re still a virgin in the eyes of god and you’re not… well, physically impressive.” April gives a coy little smile that August cannot help but fall in love with, despite its caustic nature. “You make up for it with how endearingly pathetic you’ve become. Wholly deferent, reverent, just an obedient fucktoy weapon in the shape of a girl that once was. Ain’t that right, Virgo?”

August ruts against her master’s cock as she would the boot, chestnut brown bangs matting to her forehead and lilting gasps escaping her tight little throat. The girl deposits her years into the stuffy air of Hell itself, giggling like a dullard as her past is made into a meal for the Prince of Sloth. “Yes! Y-Yes! I’m… wh-whatever you say I am, uhm, okay? Hahhh…”

“That’s my starlet.” April grunts, enveloping her talent’s prone form like a blanket and overwhelming her with heat and weight and—“Ffffffffuck!” Something hot and wet spurts onto April’s sheer black dress, staining it from the navel to the keyhole opening at her chest. It takes the dumb, rutting bitch a good handful of seconds to process what just happened. Owner came on her. The thoughts come in simple, seeping into her head like the semen dripping onto her naked tits through that window of fabric. Simple thoughts. She made April ejaculate—no—her sister used August’s yielding, erotic flesh to get herself off. Used her. Came on her. Bigger cock eclipsing her like a great wyrm devouring the sun. August’s a good star; she’s a little star. She’s no match for hungry dragons that spit hot magma onto her chest as it fixes its jaws around her well-harnessed mass. The sticky, demonic seed brands a tattoo of shame onto her body—which is indistinguishable from one’s soul in the abyssal plains—and August tosses, and turns, until the next blink from her beloved master has her falling silent and still.

1971. Deep in the Mojave Desert, occupied territory of the confederate angels, August is about to end. She’ll become something lesser. Something leashed. And eventually, once she’s ready to be torn apart and reconstructed into a star so bright it blinds itself, she’ll never have to engage with her own suffering again.

“This is where they bound you. Gorged themselves from steady drips on the cherry red, maiden blood pumping through your veins. Fucking wasteful. I freed everyone here, sister mine, except for one.” Glossy red crawls across the dormitory floor and kisses August’s back, a slew of once familiar faces—made still by the scrap—watching along with the rest of the dead as April leans in close, wordlessly teasing her pitiful wretch of a sister into parting her lips for a kiss that could well stop her heart.

“Show’s over, Virgo.” April spits onto the sweaty, puckered face beneath her own and revels in the way it only makes August’s floundering cock throb more violently against her superior’s. The poor girl’s eyes almost roll. “You’re nothing without me now. Less than nothing. And you even get off on your own pathetic dependency on your mean, older sister.” The larger woman’s hand seizes August’s face, pushing her cheeks in as she spits again, this time directly against the back of her mewling, powerless sister’s throat. Without thinking, August swallows—like the good plaything that she is. The girl works herself up, breathlessly, bucking her hips in an erratic motion that almost takes her over that climactic edge right until—

“No.”

The blood stops flowing. August feels her flaccid cock limply drooping to the side and whines like a petulant child at the realisation that she has been denied the relief her big sister used her to attain. It only takes her a moment to correct that disobedient pout, staring up into stern eyes and shrinking beneath them with a cowardly, amicable smile forced onto her lips.

“S-Sorry, sis.”

“It’s okay, but that sort of thing just isn’t for you. It’s one more difference to remind you of the distance between us.” April manipulates the scrap metal around them to form an iron cage that secures itself, carefully, around August’s chaste little cock. “I use you to get off, not the other way around.”

“But… before… w-with the boot—”

“You were managed by a benevolent angel back then, honey. Then you went and ruined it for yourself by questioning me too many times. It’s your fault that you don’t get to come anymore. Remember that.” Showrunner April blinks, and the soundstage returns to its dormant state, in the centre of an unassuming television set.

“Yes, April.”

The metal bindings recede, April removing her weight from August with an air of nonchalance that leaves the tamed creature below feeling winded. Staring up at the overhead studio lights, the brunette expels the air from her lungs in a long, heavy sigh. She’ll have to kill again soon. For April. A smile touches upon her lips, and August ends.

This is the life.