Return to the Featherlands: Chapter 15 (Patreon)

Morning came as a weary surprise to Silvia, a testament to how long she had been hanging in the Spinnerette’s nest after she had long since lost any notion of time. To her, the night had been an endless one, where hours passed in a retrospective blur of ticklish insanity. Pair by pair, the creatures came to indulge their hunger on her ticklish soles, her screams of laughter echoing out into the night and providing the entire nest with the Featherlands’s own tortuous source of nourishment. The beasts cackled and taunted the young queen. They came all through the night to taste her frantic ticklish laughter, teasing their clawed fingertips against Silvia’s classically sensitive bare feet.

By the time the sun began to peak over the horizon, Silvia’s body was drenched with sweat, the Badland dew to a grand feast. She barely noticed when the tickling even stopped, her mind having gone numb to any recognition beyond her own ticklish hysteria. Her hair draped down her shoulders in wet clumps. Her clothes clung to her body. Her arms became numb as her body shivered in the coldness of the night. Tears ran down her cheeks, draining more of her fluids as her throat craved nothing more than a short break and a cold sip of water. She heaved and gasped and fought for any breath she could gain, despite crying for the mercy of unconsciousness. It, unlike the dawn of a new day of tormenting possibilities, never came.

A rough hand grasped the queen’s hair in a tight fist. It pulled her head back. Her eyes fell open though little else than being too exhausted to fight them shut. Silvia stared back at the grinning grimace of Deborah. The spider beast stared back at her, her smile stretching from one side of her face to the other.

“My, my, I hope our great queen got some good sleep last night,” Deborah’s voice hissed. “Because I’m suddenly hungry again for that laughter, and when I’m done, I know the rest will be as well…” Silvia’s mind was blank beyond a dense influx of dread. She remembered wondering how it was that her sister had escaped Deborah’s hold, recalling that Lilly only mentioned a couple of the Spinnerettes and not an entire hive of the beasts. Such a thought brought her mind back to the weary corridors of the Badland Castle, where she remembered her own resilience against Ticklea and all of her menacing forces. Encouraging words would have reminded her that she was more than capable of withstanding Deborah if she could do so against Ticklea at a much younger age, but Silvia hung simply questioning whether or not she still had that resilience in her.

“P…. P….” Silvia tried to speak. The exhaustion combatted the general recollection of words in general, both becoming factors as her head swam with the promise of faint.

“What’s that now?” Deborah asked, leaning in. “Is that a ‘please’? Trying to beg for mercy, are you? Your sister did that a lot too. Such sweet music.”

“P… Pa-Pau….” Silvia’s lips quivered. She babbled softly, slight streams of saliva dripping from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes fluttered as she looked over toward Paul. Behind the tears and not having her glasses on her, she could just barely make out the shape of his body suspended where it had been. Though with no sounds coming from that direction, Silvia concluded that sleep had overcome him at some point, be it naturally or through means of thrusting him into unconsciousness.

“The boy?” Deborah asked, looking behind her. Her legs spanned outward in a colossal spread, the beast appearing bigger than any other Sivia had seen since Ticklea five years prior. “Oh yes, fear not. We’ll keep feasting on him too.”

“Let… hi-him go…” Silvia muttered quietly.

“What’s that now?”

“Let him… go…” Silvia said. “And I’ll… be yours…” Silvia spoke through a dream-like state of unconscious behavior. Her mind was unfiltered and her actions seemed as much beyond her control as anyone else’s. Silvia observed the world around her through the lens of a puppet, feeling everything and yet had long since lost all conscious autonomy, at least while she recovered. Deborah snickered. She looked deep into Silvia’s weary eyes once more, glaring intensely.

“I already have you,” said Deborah. “You still believe you have bartering power here, ‘queen’? You are mine and soon, you will be Nysadia’s, where you’ll wish you still belonged to me and my children, I imagine, alongside the boy.”

Silvia pushed back the ache of more tears beginning to surface. She sniffled and stilled her lip. She traced her mind for anything, any possible way, that she could use to escape. But her mind remained endlessly restless, turning over and over again the plight of her sister. Deborah cupped the girl’s face in one clawed hand, jerking her attention closer.

“Be grateful,” Deborah said. “You don’t need to worry about any of that anymore. Right now, there’s only one thing I need you to do…” Her hands trailed down toward the girl’s outstretched pits. Silvia whimpered, but had not the energy to struggle or recoil. Her body surrendered with exhaustion, thrust back into vicious squirming once the ticklish resumed by Deborah’s scratching fingers.

“Aahhhhehehehehehhahahahahaaaa!!” Silvia whined into a fit of laughter. Her head fell back. Her voice echoed with hopeless desperation, a laugh defeated into dreadful submission to her situation. Deborah snickered. She sneered and simply enjoyed the fallen queen’s reactions as her fingertips danced along the stretched, slick hollows of Silvia’s pits.

“It’s such a delight to have you back, little queen,” Deborah said. “I think you’ll serve your people far better this way than you ever had before.” Silvia twisted wearily in place. Her laughter poured from her open mouth. It fell with deep cries of hopelessness and dread, clashing against the sensations that she initially grew to love about the Featherlands. The playful tickles that she gave and received from the cute and colorful Featherland monsters had since been tainted by vicious strings of insidious tickles at the hands of some of the most merciless beasts that lurked in the shadows.

“Aaaaaaahhahhahahaaannnehehehhahahahaaaa!!!” Silvia's voice squeaked with laughter. Her throat had run dry and sore from the night prior, but the tickles that raged through her body flooded her senses without concern. The scribbling surged the devilish sensations from both sides of her figure. No matter how Silvia twisted or turned, she had no escape from Deborah’s skittering nails ravishing against her exposed, slender pits. The young queen cried out in laughing, ticklish anguish. Sweat and tears flung from her head with every rapid, violent shake. Deborah’s taunting voice in her ear only worsened her reception to the ticklish agony.

“Pity I must turn you over to Nysadia,” Deborah said, her nails scribbling into a fury against Silvia’s soft, slick hollows. “I’m quite tempted to keep you for myself.” The spider-beast chuckled as she skittered menacing tickles across Silvia’s pits. The small, frail girl squeaked tiredly. She flailed by natural impulse, further exhausting her already spent body. Silvia frantically racked her mind for answers, trying to find anything that she could say or do that would lend her some approximation of mercy. The tickles poured through her senses, rendering her mind almost completely useless.

“Staaaaahahahahahaaaaap!!!” Silvia could barely manage the word. The volume of her laughter waned from her own dwindling composure, yet the tickles themselves were no less unbearable save for the simple quality of having only one set of fingers toying with her senses instead of many. Still, the ticklish suffering continued. Silvia’s crying laughter bellowed through the trees. She longed for the innocent, playful tickles of her youth, her laughter reaching the woods and fields where she would play and giggle without a care.

“Once you’re in Nysadia’s care, I’d imagine you’ll meet many of your old friends, both as fellow playthings as well as those who long to take their own revenge on your untimely abandonment,” Deborah said. “You’ll do them all a great service, traitor queen.” Deborah laughed. Her nails dug and scraped against Silvia’s supple mounds, each little swipe bursting tickles through her already fractured sensory structure. Sweat trickled down her body. Her arms and legs trembled, the soreness in each resulting in an unpleasant numbness. Silvia had as many means to deal with the problems in each as she had in dealing with Deborah. All she could do was endure. Laugh and endure.

The surges of tickles ceased abruptly. Silvia struggled to catch her breath, sucking down deep wheezes and aching gasps. Through teary eyes, she could see Deborah recoiling to something below her. Her head fell to one side, getting a vantage onto the commotion stirring beneath. A chorus of cackling began building from the bottom of the trees. It grew into a wild array of mad laughter, the kind Silvia knew well from her time listening to the manufactured screams of those within the Badland Castle. Gentle pillars of smoke wafted upward through the branches. Several Spinnerettes climbed up toward Deborah’s web. She scurried over to meet them.

“What is it?” Deborah asked angrily.

“Feather Fire, down at the trunks,” one explained.

“Fluff!” Deborah exclaimed. “Did you see anyone?”

“N-no…” another said. Deborah snarled.

“Tell everyone to get to ground and spread out,” she said. “Find whoever did–”

A rapid whoosh cut through the air like a blade through cloth. It stopped against a nearby branch, catching Deborah’s attention. The tail end of an arrow stuck out of the wood. The body of the arrow was cloaked in a roaring pink flame. The fire glimmered and sparkled in the morning light, quickly latching itself onto the wood of the tree. The fire began to spread around the Spinnerette nest, invoking a dense cloud of smoke that exited through the canopies. Deborah quickly scurried to one side to see where the arrow might have come from, but the smoke that pillar from down below cloaked the entire forest floor in a thick, gray cloud.

“Get out!” Deborah barked. “Find them and bring them to me!” The other Spinnerettes fled the nest. More of their voices were caught down below, bellowing out wild fits of laughter.

Silvia recalled mention of the special kind of flame, but had never seen it in action. The flames spread like any other, engulfing whatever surface they could devour, yet the effects it had on living creatures was different and unique to the Featherlands. The pinkish flames began to spread around her. They traveled across the webbing with remarkable ease, quickly making their way toward her bound figure. She struggled and pulled, but was just as effective bound inside the tight tunnels of webs as she had been the night prior. The smoke began slipping into her frantic breaths. She coughed and squirmed, crying out for help along with the rest of the fiends and prey stuck in the trees.

“If your allies think they can cross the Spinnerettes and get away with it, I’ll have you all trapped in these webs forever!” Deborah fussed without a plan. She scowled and scurried down the tree, fleeing the rapidly burning web. She left Silvia and Paul hanging alone at the top of some of the tallest trees that Silvia had ever known within the Featherlands.

The flames crackled around the trapped queen. They inched closer and closer to her body. She continued to pull but could find no means of escaping the web. She coughed through the smoke. It stung her eyes and left her wheezing in place. The sparkling flames came closer still. They began enveloping the cocoons of webs around her ankles, housing her feet. The flames licked at her soles and confirmed her suspicions. Silvia felt no burn, no pain, but what was approaching, aiming to consume her whole body, was a feathery ticklish sensation.

“No!” Silvia shouted. “Someone help! Someone heeeeehehehehehehhahahalp!!” The flames came as the strokes of dozens of feathers against her skin. Where her body would have fallen victim to burning pain and an erosion of her skin by normal flames, the Feather Fire came with a complete ticklish engulfing of her senses. Before Silvia had recovered from the ticklish ordeal of Deborah and the night of endless laughter, she found herself thrust back into a new, restless fray.

“Gaaaaahahahahahaa!!! Staahahahahahaaaaa!!!” Silvia cried out through her laughter. She begged against the deaf strokes of the flames covering both of her feet with their feasting strokes. She twisted and pulled in place, coughing and crying endlessly. The flames covered both of her trapped, bare feet. They scratched at her soles and worked in between her toes. They traveled from the webbing up her bound legs. More flames encircled her from behind, aiming for the webbing at her wrists. Silvia squirmed and tugged at the webbing. She screamed with laughter against the cacophony of ticklish torment around and beneath her. The flames consumed more and more of the trees and the webbing around her.

“NAAAAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA!!!! HEEEEHEHHEHHHAHAHAHALP!!!” Silvia cried out. Once again, her feet had become the focal point of the tickles. Every flame licked at her hypersensitive nerves, every spark brushed a whirlwind of tickles onto her soles. She squirmed and thrashed in place, getting covered by the smoke of the flames crackling beneath her.

As Silvia screamed with laughter, a figure arose through the clouds around her. They fluttered upward through the smoke and flames, guided by a pair of rapidly beating, scaly wings. The wings shimmered with a colorful array, the figure’s frame boasting a petite, athletic physique. A bow and quiver clung to their back. They wore a pair of goggles and a hood, along with a mask around their nose and mouth. They reached out and pulled at the webbing holding Silvia’s wrist. They used a sheathed blade to detach the other before working on both of the tunnels holding Silvia’s feet. Before the young queen knew it, she was free from both the webbing and the ticklish flames. Once free, she collapsed into the figure, coughing and barely able to stand.

“No time to rest,” they said, a feminine voice cutting through the crackling flames. “We have to go.”

“N-no!” Silvia cried out. “P-Paul!”

“I have to get you out of here!” the figure said from behind her mask. She lifted Silvia up off of her feet with ease. Her wings beat quickly against her back, lifting her into the air.

“No!” Silvia said again. “Get Paul!” The figure paused. She emitted a low grunt.

“Y-yes, your majesty…” she said. She flew over to where Paul hung, still unconscious. As she began cutting him down, Paul started to wake.

“Wh… what’s…” Paul said, his head still swirly from the night before. His eyes opened to a burst of smoke. He coughed and struggled in the webbing that held him up. He struggled violently upon seeing the sparkle of the flames steadily approaching. “Wh-what’s happening?!”

“Hang on!” the figure said. “I’m getting you out of here!” She carefully cut Paul down from the webbing and helped him down to his feet. “Can you climb down?” She had to shout over the roar of the flames. Paul looked down. A pit bore a queasy hole in his stomach. He hesitated, but knew well how little time he had to consider his options.

“I… I’m gonna have to!” Paul shouted back.

“Follow me,” the figure ordered.

She held onto Silvia as she jumped down to a branch beneath them. She kept one arm around the queen while bracing herself with the other. Her wings beat to help soften her landings as she guided Paul through a stable path down the branches. One after another, she landed on a branch and looked back to make sure Paul was fine on the one prior. She kept a close eye on the boy while making sure that the queen was safe in her arms.

The forest around her was engulfed by bright pink flames. They ate away at the wood of the trees, yet left no destruction in their wake. Silvia could see many of the Spinnerettes caught in the fire, completely shrouded in the ticklish flames that left them shirking and cackling endlessly. Silvia peered through the smoke to see one much larger than the rest. Deborah remained pinned to a trunk of a burning tree, bound by coiled cable. She screamed and cried out with ticklish laughter, her arms and legs flailing as she suffered the devastating effects of the Feather Fire.

“NAAAHAHAHHAHAHHA!!!!” Deborah screamed. “MAAHAHAHAHAAAKE IT STAHAHAHAHAAAAP!!” The tickling flames attacked every inch of Deborah’s body. Silvia had not the energy to gloat, nor the manner to find joy in her tormentor’s suffering. She held on tight to the figure, keeping a close watch on Paul carefully descending with them down the tree.

Once they hit ground, the figure set Silvia down. The forest floor was still raging with the pinkish flames, the light enveloping every direction around them. Silvia gasped upon placing her foot back down into the fire, catching the same ticklish effects as before. The queen, however, had little time to endure more of the ticklish flames as the mysterious figure pulled her by the wrist through the burning forest. She raced as fast as she could. Her bare feet hardly had enough contact with the ground to feel the ticklish effects. Silvia panted and coughed through the smoky flames. She glanced back behind her to see if Paul was still there, but the flames trailed her too closely to tell.

Silvia stumbled as she tried to keep up. The stranger pulled her to a small clearing, far enough away from the flames. It was an open field of tall grass, shadowed beneath the pillaring clouds blocking the morning sun. Once she let go of Silvia’s wrist, Silvia tripped and fell to her knees over a slightly raised root. She panted and reached up to wipe her head. She looked back into the flaming trees behind her, keeping a sharp eye out.

"Paul…" Silvia muttered. "Where's Paul?" When she received no answer, Silvia turned back around. The mysterious savior left no trace, save for a single trail in the grass where her boots had pressed a small, petite imprint in the ground. The girl had vanished. Silvia looked to the sky, making out the fleeting beating of her wings fluttering through the air, but saw nothing of the lone visitor.

Silvia took a step toward the clearing, followed by another. She came upon a stump next to a log, a fallen tree isolated from the rest. Sitting atop the stump was a small collection of familiar items. A pair of glasses. A bag. A dagger. She reached for the glasses and put them up onto her face, discovering them to be hers. Remarkably, the rest of the items fell into the distinction of her and Paul’s belongings as well. She recognized Paul’s bag, along with replacement boots and articles of armor. She noticed the dagger, the same one that she had taken from the Featherland Assassin. Silvia reached down to pick it up, examining its markings.

A sharp series of huffs from behind caught Silvia’s attention. Paul stumbled forward, heaving and breathing heavily with his hands on his knees. Sweat dripped from his moist hair. His face was a deep shade of red, his brow stoically cocked downward.

“Paul…” Silvia said. She set the items down and rushed up to the boy. She instinctively threw her arms around him, pulling him in for a tight embrace.

“Are… are you okay?” Paul asked. Silvia had to think for a moment. A dozen thoughts came to mind, all emphasizing how not okay she objectively was. But Silvia knew the moment was not one for deep reflection. She pulled back and sighed, nodding swiftly.

“Yeah, are… are you?” Silvia asked.

“I’m fine,” Paul said dismissively. He looked up, his own eyes droopy and tired. “Where’s… umm…” Silvia turned to the sky. She swallowed as her thoughts began to catch up with her.

“I… I don’t know…” Silvia said. “She just… took off.”

“Right,” Paul said. He thought for a moment, his mind still racing from the ordeal. “She… she had wings, right?”

“Yeah,” Silvia said. Paul paused.

“Fairy wings?” Paul asked again. The image was fresh on Silvia’s mind, but the implications behind which steadily surfaced.

“Y-yeah,” Silvia said, still catching her breath.

“You… you don’t think that was…” Paul began. Silvia thought for a moment before her eyes began to water. Many conclusions came to mind in the moment, but without clarity, none of them settled well on the girl’s mood. Her lips quivered. Her throat ran dry. More questions weighed on her mind, none of which had answers that were readily satiable.

“We can’t stay here,” said Silvia, trying to change the subject. She put on the boots and threw Paul his. She pocketed the dagger and threw the bag up and over her own shoulders. Paul readied himself to move on and the pair continued Eastward, aiming to just reach a place far enough from the flaming trees where they could comfortably rest. Their footsteps crunched through a field of tall grass. The blades reached to tickle their skin, but neither made a sound or so much as a conscious acknowledgement.

The two walked in silence, leaving questions stirring in Silvia’s mind that tickled worse than Deborah or Ticklea or any other force that she could imagine. With no answers, she could only hope against the repercussions of Paul’s inquiry.

‘It’s not her,’ Silvia repeated to herself. ‘It’s not her. It can’t be her.’