The Silver Threadle
[Fair warning: This story is inspired by Kkatman's unique style of femtorture drawings and contains scenes of extreme, if over-the-top and cartoonish, erotic torture. So the reader is very much advised to both 'cave' and 'at' before they emptor.
If you read this story despite this warning and feel troubled about the contents, just picture John as a scrawny coyote (subspecies Sadisticus Cartoonius) who gets his paraphernalia sent to him in big wooden boxes with the word 'ACME' stamped on the sides.]
=== Chapter 1 ===
John had captured his muse the previous night and now he had her imprisoned in a steel cage in the basement. She had been careless with her reflection and he had glanced her briefly in the monitor. He had hit her with his coffee mug and dazed her before she could fly away.
After he had locked her up, John had gone to bed. He had been tired and the muse's tirade of threats, curses and expletives had grown wearisome. Now he that was rested, showered and caffeinated he was ready to consider the possibilities of the situation.
"I brought you coffee." John turned on the lights in the basement and sat down on the wooden stairs to watch his muse rouse. She groaned and squinted against the harsh light, momentarily unconscious of her surroundings. Apparently, his muse wasn't a morning person. That figured.
She uncurled from her awkward looking lie on the floor and got to her feet. She blinked a few times before her eyes would focus properly and she could stare back up at John, glumly and defiantly. John smiled and unscrewed his thermos bottle as he studied this unearthly creature in his cage.
Her head was like a sheep's, but with eyes that were much more expressive, and her body and arms and legs were covered in thick, curly wool. On her head and hands her wool was short and black, but a rich, bluish black that didn't belong on any terrestrial sheep and elsewhere where the wool was thicker, it was an almost too-perfect white. She had large, feathered wings, deep blue in colour and too big for the 5' tall cage. She had to keep them folded and still she had to lean awkwardly to the side so the top of them could jut up between the bars.
She wore a black length of cloth for modesty. It was tied around her neck and cut to show just a hint of her substantial breasts, then tied again about her waist and the remaining length hanging down to around mid-thigh. It was no doubt very practical with her wings, but it couldn't leave much to the imagination from behind.
John smiled and by twirling his finger in the air, instructed her to turn around.
"Fuck you." Her voice was unearthly too, a quiet, dancing whisper, like a mountain brook off in the distance. It was musical, even when the current message was one of discord.
John laughed and got up. He walked over to the cage, opened the thermos bottle he had brought and poured a cup of coffee. His muse's nostrils flared at the smell, and she suddenly seemed more attentive.
"It's not scalding, so don't waste it by throwing it in my face," John told the muse and handed her the cup. She glared at him and bared her teeth in an expression that had nothing to do smiling, but accepted the cup.
"So what's your name?" he asked, watching her drink which she did in a strangely human fashion, putting the cup to her lips and sipping. He only received another glum stare.
"I hope you like jokes about fig leaves, because if you don't tell me I'll just have to call you Ewe."
His muse winced and dropped the empty cup to the floor with a snort. "Astrid."
"Anything to avoid a bad pun, I take it."
"Let me go." The words were curt, authoritative.
"No." John smiled.
"If you don't let me go, you'll never write another word on your novel. You'll never have another idea in your life. You think you've had writer's block? Hah! If you don't release me your novel will never be finished. It will..."
"My novel?" John interjected. "You mean 'The Dragon Madrassa'? It is a piece of shit. You know it; I know it. It's derivative, generic and inane. Writing on it has just been a way to while away the hours. It's drivel, and bad drivel at that. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that."
His muse's eyes widened at his words, perhaps as much from his profaning the art as from the realisation that she didn't have the emotional leverage she had thought she had.
John smiled and let her think on that for a moment while he rummaged through an old cupboard to find some leather thongs. "I suppose could say that if you had been a better muse, you wouldn't be in this position. Now, give me your hands."
His muse crossed her arms defiantly over her chest and stared back at him, doing a half decent job of hiding her nervousness.
"Now, now. You're my muse. I think you know the kind of ideas I have about making you do what I say."
She shuddered, the feathers on her wings rustling faintly. "You wouldn't," she said, but with little conviction.
"'The Silver Threadle'," John stated, a grim smile on his lips, "For three years that story was all I could think about. I thought about that it when I lay in bed, when I was in the shower, when I was driving, and I had tons of ideas: great ideas, fun ideas -- it was everything my current novel isn't. But as soon as I got out my laptop or sat down with a notebook and tried to actually _write_ anything, I just ended up staring on the blank screen for hours. Not one single one of the ideas stayed."
"But that was Lilla! I didn't have anything to do with it!" Astrid protested, "I've been your muse only for a couple of weeks! I'm new. You're my first assignment!"
"Maybe so, but I am more than ready to take out my ire for the institution on whoever the current representative is. Your hands."
Astrid's eyes flickered nervously, but seeing no escape slowly put her arms out between two of the bars. John tied them together at the wrists and elbows, pulled a cloth bag over her hands and tied it in place.
He got her out of the cage and tied her legs in the same manner, with one thing around her ankles and one around her knees. Astrid squirmed and kicked as he worked, but he had wilder calfs than this one in his time, and it didn't take him long. He thought about tying up her wings as well, but with arms and legs tied and the cellar door locked, he decided it didn't matter.
John left her hog-tied on the concrete floor while he went to the back of the room to rummage through some old chests. It took him a while, but in the end he found what he was looking for: the old electric shears from when this place had still been a farm.
Astrid lay where he had left her, staring sullenly at a point on the wall, trying to suppress her mounting fear. He pushed her over onto her stomach with his foot, then sat down across her legs, pinning her in place with the weight of his body. She hadn't seen the shears, and when he turned them on her she began bucking and flailing her wings, perhaps thinking the shears were something worse.
"Lay still. I don't want to nick you," John said. He grabbed one of her wings and bent it to the side, both to control the muse and to get the wing out of the way. He started to shear away the thick wool on her lower back and buttocks with long swipes of the shears.
He was a little rusty. When Astrid seemingly relaxed and then suddenly bucked again, John wasn't quite quick enough on the shears and they bit down into the flesh of her buttock. John swore, the muse let out a sharp, loud cry and the shears buzzed a shrill, electric complaint at being jammed.
"I told you to lie still! Now I've cut you," John exclaimed and jerked the shears away. He turned them off and put them on the floor. Still cursing, he pushed the wool away with his hands to check how bad the damage was. To his bemusement he found the muse's with not even a scratch. Peering closely, there was perhaps a very faint darkening of a bruise, all but invisible on the naturally black skin. Puzzled, John picked up the shears and started them again and deliberately pushed them down against her skin in a place he had already shorn.
Astrid screamed again out and tossed wildly under him, but although the shears bit deeply the teeth just jammed on her skin and didn't cut. There wasn't as much as a nick.
"Well, well, well," John said and ran his hand over where the shears had bit, "So sticks and stones won't break your bones, is that how it is? I suppose that makes sense, after a fashion. This creates some really interesting possibilities." Judging by the scared whimpers coming from his muse, she had seen the same possibilities.
He sheared the rest of her back, mostly resisting the temptation to keep nicking her with the shears. He pushed her over on her back, got rid of the cloth she was wearing and started on her front. The curve of her breasts made for tricky work, and even if he had still tried to be careful he would probably have ended up nicking them once or twice. With things being as they were, it was a wonder the electric engine on the shears didn't burn out.
"All done." John turned off the shears and looked down at his handiwork. A little patchy perhaps, but his muse looked a lot more naked without her wool. And a lot more vulnerable.
"Bastard," came the whimpering response.
John shook his head slowly, turned the shears over sideways and pushed the unmoving steel teeth in between her labia. He held her teary and fearful eyes for several hour-long seconds before he said, slowly and clearly, "If I really were a bastard, the I would have turned the shears back on."
"sorry." Even chocked with tears and brimming with fear, the muse's voice was the soft whisper of wind across a rocky beach.
There was a sudden electric whine and a long, unearthly scream.
"Don't be. You had a point."
=== Chapter 2 ===
"'It was a dark and stormy evening'?" John looked at what he had just typed and just shook his head. He had taken the laptop into the basement and cleared a small study at the old woodworking bench. Now he sighed and looked over at his muse.
"Would you concentrate, please? We are not trying for the Bulwer-Lytton award here."
His muse was standing behind a shiny pole of copper pipe he that had erected in the middle of the room. Her breasts were wrapped snugly about the pipe and then tied painfully tight together with metal wire.
Astrid was balancing on the tips of her toes, straining to stand as tall as possible. From this angle, John couldn't see the punji stick that angled up into the more delicate parts of the muse's anatomy and made it ... harsh for her to push her pelvis away from the copper pipe, but he could see the faint blue glow of the Bunsen burner that was heating said pipe.
"Just remember: when I'm writing, I'm not thinking of ways to torment you. Let's try this again, shall we?" John chuckled and went back to his word-processor, secure in the knowledge that there was more than one way to get inspiration from a muse.
=== Chapter 3 ===
John saved the file and closed the laptop. Almost twenty thousand words. Not bad for a single charge of battery. It was a little annoying to have to work off the laptop's battery, but necessary. Yesterday he had become so engrossed in writing that he hadn't even noticed the low battery warnings before the screen suddenly went black. If he had been running on net power, he might well have quite forgotten to both eat and sleep. So it was safest to keep running on battery, although somehow he doubted his muse would try another ploy like that. He smiled and swiveled the chair around to watch her.
She was strapped down on her back on a workbench, her arms tied under her. A couple of old pulleys had been hooked to the walls on either side of her and used to pulling Astrid's legs as far apart as possible -- and then an inch or two further.
To make sure she was comfortable, John had placed an old pillow under her head, but she wasn't using it. She had her head raised and held the end of a thick rope clenched between her teeth. The rope went up to an eye-bolt in the roof and down again to about a meter above her knees. There it had been tied around the head of a 50 pound sledgehammer.
The sledgehammer hung horizontally in the air, the end of the handle fixed to some ad hoc scaffolding with a swivel joint. The joint was placed some distance above the undefended, pink folds of the muse's exposed pussy. To be precise, the swivel joint was placed exactly one sledgehammer length above them.
Astrid made a desperate, pleading whimpering and John met her eyes for a moment.
"Oh, don't give me that look. This one you actually did bring on yourself. Besides: it's not like I used a pickax." John shook his head with a smile and left, locking the basement door behind him.
=== Chapter 4 ===
John took the Saturday off. Well, off what concerned writing anyway. He still put in some hours on ... related projects. First he tidied the basement, clearing a path to along the length of the room. He mounted a pipe in the ceiling above the path and added a runner that could slide freely along the whole length of the pipe.
Next, he strung a single line of barbed wire through the room, fastening it in the end walls at about waist level. He made sure the wire was as taut as possible, and that one end was fastened a couple of inches higher than the other, giving the wire a low end and a high end.
Next came the most irksome part of the project: to glue a slow-burning fuse along the length of the barb wire. It was meddlesome work, and too finicky for heavy gloves, so it earned him some nicks and scratches on his hands, but he figured the end result would be worth it. He gave it an hour for the glue to dry and for his muse to pace her cage and grow more and more apprehensive.
He dragged his muse from her cage and tied her arms together behind her back, and looped a length of rope around her back under her shoulders. By now she was scared enough that John had to exert a little bit of physical encouragement as he dragged her over to the low end of the barbed wire and hoisted her to her feet.
He tied the rope under her shoulders the runner, long enough that it wasn't taut when she stood, but short enough that she had to stand and couldn't fall. Next, John got out a bundle of gauze and soaked it with something from a bottle. With a little more physical encouragement he made Astrid stand still so he could insert the wet gauze into her pussy.
It cost him a knee in the face to get one of her legs over the barbed wire, but once she was straddling it she got much less interested in making sudden movements. John could hobble her without problems, tying her ankles together with about two inches of slack.
He straightened and faced his muse with a small smile. He pointed down the length of the barbed wire. Wide-eyed, Astrid shook her head, barely daring to do even that the way she was standing.
An end of the slow burning fuse, about two feet, hung from the end of the barbed wire. Jon picked it up and got out a box of matches from his pockets.
"That is kerosene on the rag, by the way," he said. Astrid didn't even whimper. She just stared pleadingly at him with her dark eyes. John smiled and shook his head. And lit the fuse.
After forty minutes and two thirds the length of the barbed wire Astrid lost the race.
=== Chapter 5 ===
Four productive and, for some, painful weeks later, John was nearing the end of his novel. The second last chapter was just finished and all that remained was to tie up the a remaining threads of plot and find a good sentence to end with. He rubbed his eyes and looked up at his muse.
Her legs were tied to an old water faucet, about a meter up on the wall, while her hands were shackled to bolts on the floor, about four feet out from the wall. She arms had started to bend, but she was still holding herself up away from the the bear trap John had placed under her, but her breasts were swaying dangerously close to the trigger already. Maybe putting that forty pound sack of cement on her back had been excessive.
John shrugged and looked back to his laptop. Although the chapter had been written, it still needed proofreading, so he wasn't quite finished for the day yet. A few sentences later a sharp metallic twang and a reverberating scream of pain almost startled him.
When he had finished the proofreading and saved his work John put on a pair of heavy gloves and went over to his muse. He undid the shackles on her wrists and untied her legs. He ignored her renewed cries of pain and pulled the sack of cement off her and rolled her over onto her back. He pried open the bear trap, secured it and put it aside.
John waited until Astrid had recovered enough to focus on him through her tears. "Do you remember that I said I have something special planned for you for the last chapter? Something particularly cruel?"
A flicker of her eyes told him that, yes, she did remember and no, she wasn't looking forward to it.
"I finished the second last chapter," he said. Another fearful flicker at those news. John brushed the short-cropped wool on her head; an unexpected gesture which didn't serve to calm her at all. Astrid shuddered and shut her eyes, still crying.
"W-what?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," John said, petted her head once more and got up. He left Astrid untied on the floor, got his laptop and went upstairs without locking the door behind him. In fact, he didn't even close it.
=== Chapter 6 ===
When John came back to the cellar the next day his muse had, quite literally, flown. He nodded to himself, maybe a little wistfully, and sat down at the workbench with his laptop and started his word processor. Just one more chapter to write, the finishing touches. He stared at the blinking cursor until the battery ran out. The words didn't come.
The next day was the same, and so was the one after that. On the fourth day he was distracted from his no-writing for a while when FedEx came round with a package for him, but no words came to him after they had gone again.
It was so tantalisingly within reach. He knew there was a perfect way to tie everything up, hanging there just outside his reach. He could see it, and feel it -- he just couldn't put it down into words. Just a couple of pages left, a few hundred words -- but words he couldn't find.
More than two weeks after his muse had escaped John still doggedly went down into the basement every day with his laptop and his thermos of coffee and tried to write. The battery was down to one third capacity. John frowned, and carefully pecked out a word with his index fingers. He shook his head, deleted it and stared at the blinking cursor again. A smile crept slowly onto his features and he typed the word again. Nodding, he leaned forward and started writing.
=== Chapter 7 ===
"And they all lived happily ever after ... give or take." John leaned back in his chair, stared at the last sentence he had written for a long moment. Then he pressed enter twice and added "The End."
He saved and closed the laptop. The basement seemed empty, but he noticed that door to the cage had been closed and padlocked. It had stood open since his muse left. He went over to it, rested his hands against the bars and smiled to the empty cage.
"I know you're here. Lilla, wasn't it? Your replacement tried the invisibility thing too once or twice. It doesn't work. Do you see that yellow gizmo next by the sink? The one that looks a little like a vacuum cleaner? That's a high pressure steam washer and I think you have a very good understanding of how I intend to use it if you don't show yourself."
Nothing happened for a couple of seconds, then a muse suddenly appeared inside the cage. This one had a head like a horse and was covered in a shiny black coat of short fur. She didn't have wings on her back like Astrid, but thin membranes of bronze coloured skin running between her arms and legs, like a flying squirrel. She lay on her side in the middle of the cage, hog-tied and with her muzzle tied closed. She glared up at John. He couldn't read her eyes as well as he could Astrid's, but her body language suggested more than a little apprehension.
"Glad we could get that cleared up," John said and smiled down at his old tormentor. Next, he turned and looked at the apparently empty stairwell, "And you: go wait in the bedroom."
A blink of an eye, and Astrid had appeared on the stairwell, wringing her hands and not quite his eyes. She had found a new piece of cloth to hide behind and her wool had grown out a little since last John had seen her.
"But, I thought... She would... You'd have enough... That you..." Her voice jumped all over the place, like rain whipped around by the wind.
"I'm sure you did. But go wait in my bedroom. I won't be very long."
Astrid retreated backwards up the stairs, hesitated a second in the doorway and with a last, nervous glance at John that almost met his eyes, disappeared further into the house.
"So, then." John opened the door of the cage and pulled the black muse out onto the concrete floor. Astrid had tied her up with her arms behind her back, so John just hauled her up against the cage and and tied her in place by looping rope under her armpits and around the upper bars of the cage. He considered using the remaining barbed wire for that, but that would mean finding his gloves again. Rope would do for now.
Across from the cage, a few meters away, stood the FedEx delivery he had received almost two weeks ago. It was about the size and shape of a large washing machine, but with an odd tube protruding on the side facing the cage. John walked over to it now and began to work the controls.
After a while he looked up and studied the tied-up muse for a moment. She seemed to be as much confused as she was scared.
"No, I didn't think this idea was one of yours. It's an automatic bowler. Cricket players use them to train batting against. Like a tennis ball machine, but with a little more ... oomph."
John pressed a button and a red blur shot from the machine with the whoosh of compressed air. There was a meaty 'thack!' as the cricket ball struck the muse in the stomach with great force. The ropes around her muzzle didn't do much to dampen the her screams, John noted.
"A little too low," he said, and adjusted the protrusion on the machine front a little and stepped back to press the button. "Let's try again."
A second cricket ball shot from the machine. This time it glanced the side of the muse's breast and upper arm and and smashed into the iron bar of the cage with a thunderous clangor.
"Closer. Just half a click to the right."
The third ball struck true: right on Lilla's right breast, practically on the nipple. John was glad the basement had been soundproofed. If she kept up that volume he wouldn't get any sleep tonight.
"Well, that should do it," John said and set about making some changes on the control panel. "There's eighty balls in the magazine. I'm setting it to one bowl every five minutes. That should last you a while."
Lilla sounded like she was trying to tell her something, but John didn't feel like deciphering her desperate mumblings and didn't bother to look up. He had one more adjustment to make. Now where was that button? Ah, there it was. John pressed it and the numbers on a small digital display started to climb. 40, 41, 42, then faster and faster until they finally stopped at 99, blinking. To the right of the display were three black letters "mph".
"And some people think cricket is boring," John mused as he walked upstairs. As he locked the door there was a sharp 'crack', almost as of wood against wood, and a long, agonized cry.
=== Chapter 8 ===
Astrid was waiting in his bedroom. She stood in the middle of the room, shifting her weight from leg to leg and nervously pulling at the short wool on her hips with her hands. When John approached she shrank back and backed away until she bumped into the foot-end of his bed. She shuddered when he took away length of cloth she wore.
He was not gentle.
She curled up and cried afterwards, but with her face against his shoulder and she didn't shy away when he touched her.
When her sobs had quieted, he helped her to her feet and guided her over to one of his wardrobes which he opened. Inside he had built a cage, with steel floor and ceiling and iron bars on all four sides. It was taller than the one in the basement, the full height of the wardrobe, but in cross section it was less than two feet by two.
Astrid whimpered when she saw the cage and made the tiniest shake of her head.
"But I thought... now... maybe... that you... we..." Her eyes darted to the rumpled sheets on the bed then looked up at John, pleading, questioning.
"Sssh, I know. I do; we are. Even so."
With a suppressed sob Astrid walked slowly into the cage. She tried not to cry, but the tears came anyway.
John closed the door behind her and locked it with a heavy padlock. She turned around to face him again, and John reached into the cage and caressed her cheek gently.
"Will..." she whispered, chocked.
John placed his hand on her neck and gently guided her head towards him.
"Always. You're my favorite." He touched his lips lightly against her muzzle for a second before he stepped back. Astrid sniffled and slumped against the bars, the cage too small to sit down.
John went over to the door and turned off the lights. There was a new switch next to the one for the lights. He turned that one on. There was a brief, blue flicker inside the switch.
Astrid screamed, the roar of a waterfall as it thundered down the mountain.
John walked over to his bed and turned on the nightlight. His muse was standing wild-eyed and shaking in the middle of the cage, straight as a ruler and with her wings wrapped about her to keep them away from the electrified bars.
He glanced at the clock and then back at Astrid, studying her for a moment. He had gotten quite good at estimating her endurance. By the looks of it, the next time she screamed for real it would be about time to refill the automatic bowler in the basement.
He met her eyes for a moment and smiled at her. Then he turned off the light and crawled in between the rumpled sheets. They were still warm and smelled of him and of her and of magic. He drifted off to sleep with ideas of a thousand stories floating in his mind.
And they all lived happily ever after... give or take.
The End.
[This story is released into the public domain. Woe to the public. They never had a chance.]