InkQuillWrites
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- Apr 23, 2023
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Old Magic
Lauren stretched in her chair, bored. It was late afternoon, and she had been working all day in the cramped, dusty backroom of Old Magic, an antiques shop. Before working there, she had found it delightfully old-fashioned and quirkily romantic – unlike the modern shops in town, with bright lights and tinny music blaring too loudly, it had lots of small rooms, twisty staircases and curious old things strewn over every surface in no particular order. In the last month, her opinion had changed somewhat – she had spent much of that time cataloguing the stock by hand in a huge ledger, which is the sort of task that she thought would have been charming a month ago before she had to carry it out herself and found out how tedious it was. She had just reached the bottom of the pile she had brought through an hour ago. She knew she should go and gather up another, but she could get away with waiting a few minutes.
There were almost no customers - it was something of a mystery to her how the shop kept open, let alone paid for her wages. The owner was an old gentleman, Mr Kirkwood, who had been dozing in an armchair behind the desk which passed as a main counter at the other end of the shop. Her sense of duty put up some resistance, but laziness won, and even the stifling July heat of the windowless backroom wasn’t enough to force her out into the shop. Instead, she decided to have a poke around the room.
It wasn’t a big room, and the amount of clutter made it feel smaller. She had a small desk along one wall, which now had the thick ledger on it and a neat pile of bric-a-brac priced and labelled. On the opposite wall was a much larger desk, used as a workbench, very old and made of oak. The bench was cluttered with all sorts of tools and antiques in various states of repair or disrepair, along with several books left open. The remaining space was given over to random piles of what seemed to be mostly junk – broken statues, a bit of pillar, piles of moth-eaten clothes and worn books, and just about everything else.
She moved a few cloths around trying to find anything interesting. Underneath one was a mirror, and she jumped at a first glance until she realised it was just her reflection. She studied it for a minute, trying to arrange her messy, mousy-brown hair, hanging in waves to her shoulders and framing a pretty face. In the heat she was wearing a light sundress which left most of her pale arms bare – she avoided the sun, burning instead of tanning. It finished just above her knees, leaving her legs bare down to a pair of sandals. She was working here over the summer to help pay for college.
After failing to find anything interesting just lying around, her attention turned to the desk. She was under strict instructions not to touch anything on there, but curiosity had always been her weakness. Her attention was drawn to a collection of four identical bangles resting on an open book. They were bronze in colour and, looking around guiltily, when she reached out and touched them they were cool. She picked one up and turned it over in her hands. It was about an inch wide, and patterned around the outside with a series of bronze feathers, maybe half an inch long and slanted at forty-five degrees to the bracelet. On a whim, she slipped the bracelet over her hand, enjoying the coolness against her skin. She moved back to the mirror, admiring the bracelet. She picked up the other three and slipped one over her other wrist. She struck a pose in the mirror, and then sat down on the floor, took off her sandals and slipped the other pair over her small feet and loosely around her ankles.
Posing in the mirror once more, she laughed at how ridiculous she looked. As she laughed, she felt a sudden tingling from all four bangles. Running her hands over her wrists and ankles, she felt that they were now tight, lying against her skin and following its contours with barely room to fit even a fingernail between them. Puzzled, she tugged against them and gained no traction. She needed to remove them – there was no way to hide them and inattentive and absent-minded as Mr Kirkwood was at times, he couldn’t fail to notice this. Maybe there were some jewellery-working tools on his bench?
She sat down at the bench again, she properly saw the book that the bangles had been lying on. It was written in Mr Kirkwood’s precise hand, and included a detailed sketch of one of the bangles, surrounded by notes that were incomprehensible to her – full of abbreviations, symbols and diagrams with no explanations. Of more use to her was a jeweller’s eyeglass. Fitting it to her eye, she squinted close up at the bracelets. She couldn’t see anything of interest where it made such a close seam with her skin, but her breath was taken away by the level of detail on the feathers – each plume was perfect, with detailed barbs branching off the main stem and hundreds of tiny stems branching off the barbs, and the shaft coming to a sharp point.
While examining the left bracelet, one of the feathers came off in her hand. She cursed at her clumsiness, but used the opportunity to look at the bronze feather more closely. It was as intricately worked on the back, which was odd. Looking at the gap where it had come from, she couldn’t see any sign of how it was attached to the bracelet – underneath it was plain, featureless bronze. Spying a pot of glue, she decided to stick it back. She closed her right hand around the feather, afraid that if she put it down on the cluttered desk she might not find it again. As she reached out to the pot, she felt a sudden tickling sensation from her right palm, and opening her right hand she saw the feather standing upright, plume down on her palm. She tilted her palm, and the feather maintained its orientation, and even when she turned her hand upside-down it remained attached to her palm.
She pulled the feather off her palm with her other hand, and ran her finger over the tip. Incredibly, it felt fluffy; somehow, much more fluffy than an actual feather would be. It struck her almost as if the sculptor had captured her idea of a feather more accurately than the birds themselves. She dragged the feather over her palm, tracing the lines. It tickled pleasantly – again, far more than a real feather would– and she giggled. As she giggled, she felt the feather twitch in her fingers. Letting go, it continued to trace circles around her right palm. Enjoying the light tickling, she shut her eyes for a brief moment, giggling quietly to herself. After a few seconds, she felt another plume, this time tracing its way around her left palm. Opening her eyes, she saw that a second feather had detached itself from next to the first one and had moved down to her palm. As she looked at the gap the first two had left, she saw a third feather shudder into life.
Suddenly concerned, she clamped down on her laughter and grabbed at the third feather, pinching it between right forefinger and thumb. As soon as she managed that, the feather on her right palm stroked its way down to her wrist above the bangle, and she reflexively let go, allowing the third feather to take up the position on the palm while the first feather on her right hand shoot up her arm. She grabbed at it too late, slapping her own forearm but not stopping it on its path straight to her smooth bare underarm. She flinched and clamped her arm to her side, trapping the feather in place just outside her armpit, but that didn’t stop it from vibrating madly in place. She gritted her teeth and looked down at the bracelet – no more feathers had come off, and she concluded that they were somehow feeding off her laughter.
With her right arm clamped down by her side, she reached over and tried to grab the feathers on her left palm, but they were too quick for her, darting wildly around her fingers and over to the back of her hand faster than her stabbing fingers could keep up. She made one sudden lunge and moved her right arm slightly too far, just enough for the feather near her underarm to move the last inch into the centre of the hollow. The sudden attack on such a sensitive spot knocked loose a peal of laughter before she re-clenched her teeth, but it was enough for two more feathers to slide off the bracelet and dance their way up her left arm, almost reaching her left armpit before she clamped the other elbow to her side. Worse than the increasing number of feathers, the bracelet on her left wrist started to tug upwards and rise agonisingly slowly, forcing her arm with it and threatening the exposure of her armpit.
In real trouble now, she jumped up from the chair and ran towards the door, both elbows clasped to her side and her left wrist up at shoulder height, the muscles in her arm straining against the bracelet to hold her wrist down. Just short of the door, she lost enough ground in the fight with the bracelet to allow the two feathers access to her armpits, and they swept around in astonishingly quick circles. This forced another held laugh from her lips, and she was suddenly wrenched back to the middle of the room by the invigorated left bracelet, and then onto her tiptoes with her arm raised to the ceiling, armpit exposed. She was unable to hold back the laughter now, and more feathers were rapidly gaining life. She hung there watching the feathers slide down her arm to her armpit, swatting at them desperately with her right hand but making no impression. Her legs thrashed about wildly, but she was unable to pull her arm and the bangle down. She called out between peals of laughter “HELP! MR KIRKWO-HOHAHAHA-OD!” but nobody came.
She cast around the room, desperate for some idea. She couldn’t reach either desk, but she spotted a rag lying on the floor near her feet. Maybe, if her laughter was powering this... it might just work. With a supreme effort of will, she gained control over her thrashing foot, reached out and grabbed the rag with her toes, then bent her leg and transferred it to her free hand before stuffing it into her mouth, both biting down on it and holding it in place with her hand. This muffled her laughter, and she tried to gather enough of her distracted mind and take stock of the situation.
By now, all of the thirty feathers on the bracelet had come free and were tickling all over her left upper body. Some had stayed on her hand and palm, some were circling the front and back of her sensitive elbow, many were focused on her smooth underarm, some had swept up her neck to torment her chin and even her ears, some were feathering down her cleavage, somewhat exposed by the low summery dress, and some had slipped between her breasts to get to her ribs, stomach, back and navel. Some were making slow, lazy circles and some were making long, fast sweeps across her arm and body. Some were soft and light and fluffy, others had flipped around so the hard, round, cold point of the quill made a maddeningly contrasting sensation. The makeshift gag had stopped any more being released, though. Her chest still heaved with muffled laughter, but she had stopped it getting worse. What could she do now? Her left arm was stuck up in the air, and her right was clamped over her mouth holding in the improvised gag – her laughter would dislodge it otherwise. Her feet were free, but there wasn’t anything useful in reach that she could pick up. She tried pulling sideways on the bracelet, towards the door, but it was fixed and immobile.
The impasse was finished a moment later as she realised she had been too late with her plan. With a creeping slowness, the right bracelet pulled up at her wrist. She fought it for a minute, but it was slowly gaining in strength from even her muffled laughter and eventually her hand came free from her mouth and her arm was forced out at right angles to her body. She tilted her head back in an attempt to keep the muffling cloth in her mouth, but her jaws felt locked open by the uncontrollable laughter and it was gradually working free. After barely a minute, it fell to the floor and her musical laughter came forth uninterrupted once more. The feathers on the right bracelet started to awake, more slowly than on the left, taking about ten minutes of torture before all thirty were feathering their way down the right side of her body. Like the feathers from the left bracelet, they focused on her most ticklish areas, her armpits, navel and ribs, but there were so many feathers that no spot on her upper body was neglected. Her loose summer dress gave no restriction to them, with easy access for the tiny feathers up the loose sleeves or between her breasts.
The right bracelet rose to meet the left above her head, and they turned together until she was facing the mirror once more. Through tear-streaked eyes she saw her dishevelled, sweat-slicked hair clinging to her face, beads of sweat dripping down her body making a slick surface for the feathers to dance across. Her legs danced wildly under her, hopping from one foot to the other, and her mad cries of laughter mixed with cursing and pleading went unheard.
Suddenly, as she kicked her left leg back, she found herself unable to bring it back down. “NO!” she screamed – she had forgotten about the anklets, and realised that while she had thought her torture had reached its worst, it was in fact only halfway there, and the worst half was yet to come. She felt a single feather slowly drag up her foot from the heel, along the arch and up to her toes. “NOnopleasepleaseno!” she burbled incoherently. She tried to kick but her ankle was fixed in place, so she settled for flailing her foot around chaotically, in a hopeless attempt to shake off the feather. Another joined it sweeping around her small sole and, if possible, her laughter increased in intensity. They sought out the most sensitive spots on her sensitive foot and found them, up and down her arch, around the bones of her ankle, and between her toes, a feather taking up residence between each, the wild flexing of her toes unable to dislodge them and simply making new tender skin available to them. As more feathers were released some swept up her leg as well, some fixing their attention behind her knee, others sweeping up to the edge of her underwear and tickling the soft skin at the top of thigh. Each additional feather took her further over the brink of madness, to the point where she barely noticed her other ankle lift up, swinging both her legs up behind her, her whole body comfortably suspended in the air by whether magic was driving this. The remaining feathers on the right slowly joined their mates, until both her feet were covered by a swarm of bronze feathers.
Time had no meaning for her, one frozen moment cast of the same bronze as the feathers, as all one-hundred and twenty trailed their way over her skin, some slow and some fast, some soft and fluffy and some cold and hard, some fixed between her toes and in her navel and in her ears, some tracing lazy circles or figure eights in her armpits or along her soles or behind her knees or along her ribs or around her breasts, some shooting up and down her limbs. Her lungs burned, her breaths came in gasps and sweat dripped off her body.
How long she hung limply there, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything but sense and laugh she didn’t know. Eventually, or soon, an eternity of seconds or a year in an instant passed and the door swung open. The coherent corner of her mind watched as the hundreds of feathers paused, then as one hurled themselves point-first at Kirkwood, standing in the doorway. A warning was working its way slowly through her treacle-filled mind when he roared an incantation and a hundred real, white feathers floated slowly downwards. She hit the ground before she realised the bangles, the manacles, were no longer holding her up and she lay, face down, spread eagled, exhausted.
Lauren stretched in her chair, bored. It was late afternoon, and she had been working all day in the cramped, dusty backroom of Old Magic, an antiques shop. Before working there, she had found it delightfully old-fashioned and quirkily romantic – unlike the modern shops in town, with bright lights and tinny music blaring too loudly, it had lots of small rooms, twisty staircases and curious old things strewn over every surface in no particular order. In the last month, her opinion had changed somewhat – she had spent much of that time cataloguing the stock by hand in a huge ledger, which is the sort of task that she thought would have been charming a month ago before she had to carry it out herself and found out how tedious it was. She had just reached the bottom of the pile she had brought through an hour ago. She knew she should go and gather up another, but she could get away with waiting a few minutes.
There were almost no customers - it was something of a mystery to her how the shop kept open, let alone paid for her wages. The owner was an old gentleman, Mr Kirkwood, who had been dozing in an armchair behind the desk which passed as a main counter at the other end of the shop. Her sense of duty put up some resistance, but laziness won, and even the stifling July heat of the windowless backroom wasn’t enough to force her out into the shop. Instead, she decided to have a poke around the room.
It wasn’t a big room, and the amount of clutter made it feel smaller. She had a small desk along one wall, which now had the thick ledger on it and a neat pile of bric-a-brac priced and labelled. On the opposite wall was a much larger desk, used as a workbench, very old and made of oak. The bench was cluttered with all sorts of tools and antiques in various states of repair or disrepair, along with several books left open. The remaining space was given over to random piles of what seemed to be mostly junk – broken statues, a bit of pillar, piles of moth-eaten clothes and worn books, and just about everything else.
She moved a few cloths around trying to find anything interesting. Underneath one was a mirror, and she jumped at a first glance until she realised it was just her reflection. She studied it for a minute, trying to arrange her messy, mousy-brown hair, hanging in waves to her shoulders and framing a pretty face. In the heat she was wearing a light sundress which left most of her pale arms bare – she avoided the sun, burning instead of tanning. It finished just above her knees, leaving her legs bare down to a pair of sandals. She was working here over the summer to help pay for college.
After failing to find anything interesting just lying around, her attention turned to the desk. She was under strict instructions not to touch anything on there, but curiosity had always been her weakness. Her attention was drawn to a collection of four identical bangles resting on an open book. They were bronze in colour and, looking around guiltily, when she reached out and touched them they were cool. She picked one up and turned it over in her hands. It was about an inch wide, and patterned around the outside with a series of bronze feathers, maybe half an inch long and slanted at forty-five degrees to the bracelet. On a whim, she slipped the bracelet over her hand, enjoying the coolness against her skin. She moved back to the mirror, admiring the bracelet. She picked up the other three and slipped one over her other wrist. She struck a pose in the mirror, and then sat down on the floor, took off her sandals and slipped the other pair over her small feet and loosely around her ankles.
Posing in the mirror once more, she laughed at how ridiculous she looked. As she laughed, she felt a sudden tingling from all four bangles. Running her hands over her wrists and ankles, she felt that they were now tight, lying against her skin and following its contours with barely room to fit even a fingernail between them. Puzzled, she tugged against them and gained no traction. She needed to remove them – there was no way to hide them and inattentive and absent-minded as Mr Kirkwood was at times, he couldn’t fail to notice this. Maybe there were some jewellery-working tools on his bench?
She sat down at the bench again, she properly saw the book that the bangles had been lying on. It was written in Mr Kirkwood’s precise hand, and included a detailed sketch of one of the bangles, surrounded by notes that were incomprehensible to her – full of abbreviations, symbols and diagrams with no explanations. Of more use to her was a jeweller’s eyeglass. Fitting it to her eye, she squinted close up at the bracelets. She couldn’t see anything of interest where it made such a close seam with her skin, but her breath was taken away by the level of detail on the feathers – each plume was perfect, with detailed barbs branching off the main stem and hundreds of tiny stems branching off the barbs, and the shaft coming to a sharp point.
While examining the left bracelet, one of the feathers came off in her hand. She cursed at her clumsiness, but used the opportunity to look at the bronze feather more closely. It was as intricately worked on the back, which was odd. Looking at the gap where it had come from, she couldn’t see any sign of how it was attached to the bracelet – underneath it was plain, featureless bronze. Spying a pot of glue, she decided to stick it back. She closed her right hand around the feather, afraid that if she put it down on the cluttered desk she might not find it again. As she reached out to the pot, she felt a sudden tickling sensation from her right palm, and opening her right hand she saw the feather standing upright, plume down on her palm. She tilted her palm, and the feather maintained its orientation, and even when she turned her hand upside-down it remained attached to her palm.
She pulled the feather off her palm with her other hand, and ran her finger over the tip. Incredibly, it felt fluffy; somehow, much more fluffy than an actual feather would be. It struck her almost as if the sculptor had captured her idea of a feather more accurately than the birds themselves. She dragged the feather over her palm, tracing the lines. It tickled pleasantly – again, far more than a real feather would– and she giggled. As she giggled, she felt the feather twitch in her fingers. Letting go, it continued to trace circles around her right palm. Enjoying the light tickling, she shut her eyes for a brief moment, giggling quietly to herself. After a few seconds, she felt another plume, this time tracing its way around her left palm. Opening her eyes, she saw that a second feather had detached itself from next to the first one and had moved down to her palm. As she looked at the gap the first two had left, she saw a third feather shudder into life.
Suddenly concerned, she clamped down on her laughter and grabbed at the third feather, pinching it between right forefinger and thumb. As soon as she managed that, the feather on her right palm stroked its way down to her wrist above the bangle, and she reflexively let go, allowing the third feather to take up the position on the palm while the first feather on her right hand shoot up her arm. She grabbed at it too late, slapping her own forearm but not stopping it on its path straight to her smooth bare underarm. She flinched and clamped her arm to her side, trapping the feather in place just outside her armpit, but that didn’t stop it from vibrating madly in place. She gritted her teeth and looked down at the bracelet – no more feathers had come off, and she concluded that they were somehow feeding off her laughter.
With her right arm clamped down by her side, she reached over and tried to grab the feathers on her left palm, but they were too quick for her, darting wildly around her fingers and over to the back of her hand faster than her stabbing fingers could keep up. She made one sudden lunge and moved her right arm slightly too far, just enough for the feather near her underarm to move the last inch into the centre of the hollow. The sudden attack on such a sensitive spot knocked loose a peal of laughter before she re-clenched her teeth, but it was enough for two more feathers to slide off the bracelet and dance their way up her left arm, almost reaching her left armpit before she clamped the other elbow to her side. Worse than the increasing number of feathers, the bracelet on her left wrist started to tug upwards and rise agonisingly slowly, forcing her arm with it and threatening the exposure of her armpit.
In real trouble now, she jumped up from the chair and ran towards the door, both elbows clasped to her side and her left wrist up at shoulder height, the muscles in her arm straining against the bracelet to hold her wrist down. Just short of the door, she lost enough ground in the fight with the bracelet to allow the two feathers access to her armpits, and they swept around in astonishingly quick circles. This forced another held laugh from her lips, and she was suddenly wrenched back to the middle of the room by the invigorated left bracelet, and then onto her tiptoes with her arm raised to the ceiling, armpit exposed. She was unable to hold back the laughter now, and more feathers were rapidly gaining life. She hung there watching the feathers slide down her arm to her armpit, swatting at them desperately with her right hand but making no impression. Her legs thrashed about wildly, but she was unable to pull her arm and the bangle down. She called out between peals of laughter “HELP! MR KIRKWO-HOHAHAHA-OD!” but nobody came.
She cast around the room, desperate for some idea. She couldn’t reach either desk, but she spotted a rag lying on the floor near her feet. Maybe, if her laughter was powering this... it might just work. With a supreme effort of will, she gained control over her thrashing foot, reached out and grabbed the rag with her toes, then bent her leg and transferred it to her free hand before stuffing it into her mouth, both biting down on it and holding it in place with her hand. This muffled her laughter, and she tried to gather enough of her distracted mind and take stock of the situation.
By now, all of the thirty feathers on the bracelet had come free and were tickling all over her left upper body. Some had stayed on her hand and palm, some were circling the front and back of her sensitive elbow, many were focused on her smooth underarm, some had swept up her neck to torment her chin and even her ears, some were feathering down her cleavage, somewhat exposed by the low summery dress, and some had slipped between her breasts to get to her ribs, stomach, back and navel. Some were making slow, lazy circles and some were making long, fast sweeps across her arm and body. Some were soft and light and fluffy, others had flipped around so the hard, round, cold point of the quill made a maddeningly contrasting sensation. The makeshift gag had stopped any more being released, though. Her chest still heaved with muffled laughter, but she had stopped it getting worse. What could she do now? Her left arm was stuck up in the air, and her right was clamped over her mouth holding in the improvised gag – her laughter would dislodge it otherwise. Her feet were free, but there wasn’t anything useful in reach that she could pick up. She tried pulling sideways on the bracelet, towards the door, but it was fixed and immobile.
The impasse was finished a moment later as she realised she had been too late with her plan. With a creeping slowness, the right bracelet pulled up at her wrist. She fought it for a minute, but it was slowly gaining in strength from even her muffled laughter and eventually her hand came free from her mouth and her arm was forced out at right angles to her body. She tilted her head back in an attempt to keep the muffling cloth in her mouth, but her jaws felt locked open by the uncontrollable laughter and it was gradually working free. After barely a minute, it fell to the floor and her musical laughter came forth uninterrupted once more. The feathers on the right bracelet started to awake, more slowly than on the left, taking about ten minutes of torture before all thirty were feathering their way down the right side of her body. Like the feathers from the left bracelet, they focused on her most ticklish areas, her armpits, navel and ribs, but there were so many feathers that no spot on her upper body was neglected. Her loose summer dress gave no restriction to them, with easy access for the tiny feathers up the loose sleeves or between her breasts.
The right bracelet rose to meet the left above her head, and they turned together until she was facing the mirror once more. Through tear-streaked eyes she saw her dishevelled, sweat-slicked hair clinging to her face, beads of sweat dripping down her body making a slick surface for the feathers to dance across. Her legs danced wildly under her, hopping from one foot to the other, and her mad cries of laughter mixed with cursing and pleading went unheard.
Suddenly, as she kicked her left leg back, she found herself unable to bring it back down. “NO!” she screamed – she had forgotten about the anklets, and realised that while she had thought her torture had reached its worst, it was in fact only halfway there, and the worst half was yet to come. She felt a single feather slowly drag up her foot from the heel, along the arch and up to her toes. “NOnopleasepleaseno!” she burbled incoherently. She tried to kick but her ankle was fixed in place, so she settled for flailing her foot around chaotically, in a hopeless attempt to shake off the feather. Another joined it sweeping around her small sole and, if possible, her laughter increased in intensity. They sought out the most sensitive spots on her sensitive foot and found them, up and down her arch, around the bones of her ankle, and between her toes, a feather taking up residence between each, the wild flexing of her toes unable to dislodge them and simply making new tender skin available to them. As more feathers were released some swept up her leg as well, some fixing their attention behind her knee, others sweeping up to the edge of her underwear and tickling the soft skin at the top of thigh. Each additional feather took her further over the brink of madness, to the point where she barely noticed her other ankle lift up, swinging both her legs up behind her, her whole body comfortably suspended in the air by whether magic was driving this. The remaining feathers on the right slowly joined their mates, until both her feet were covered by a swarm of bronze feathers.
Time had no meaning for her, one frozen moment cast of the same bronze as the feathers, as all one-hundred and twenty trailed their way over her skin, some slow and some fast, some soft and fluffy and some cold and hard, some fixed between her toes and in her navel and in her ears, some tracing lazy circles or figure eights in her armpits or along her soles or behind her knees or along her ribs or around her breasts, some shooting up and down her limbs. Her lungs burned, her breaths came in gasps and sweat dripped off her body.
How long she hung limply there, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything but sense and laugh she didn’t know. Eventually, or soon, an eternity of seconds or a year in an instant passed and the door swung open. The coherent corner of her mind watched as the hundreds of feathers paused, then as one hurled themselves point-first at Kirkwood, standing in the doorway. A warning was working its way slowly through her treacle-filled mind when he roared an incantation and a hundred real, white feathers floated slowly downwards. She hit the ground before she realised the bangles, the manacles, were no longer holding her up and she lay, face down, spread eagled, exhausted.
