Cursed, he thought. It was a trap for thieves, not a legitimate work of magecraft waiting for someone named Timala ghe Sulahi to come pay for it. It had protected him from the new scorpion, or so it had seemed in his haste, but who knew what else it would do to him before he could find a mage who knew how to get it off him?
Mahal slithered through the narrow opening that he’d widened over the last couple of days. He didn’t use a light; he was wearing a monocle that let him see in the dark, a tool he’d found in one of his earlier scavenging expeditions. Although he did have a light-talisman with him, in case he ran into creatures that would be more frightened than attracted by light, a real possibility in this old ruin. But a quick glance around, as he pulled the rest of his body through the aperture, didn’t reveal anything so obviously dangerous that he’d have to back out right away. There were small scurrying sounds from the corners, probably just ordinary rats, but he couldn’t rule out new creatures of about that size but much more dangerous.
People still called them “new creatures,” even though they’d been around longer than Mahal’s grandmother could remember.
This building, a mage’s home and workshop, had been buried by a landslide during the big earthquake the same year the new creatures appeared, or so Mahal surmised from the stories his grandmother and other old folks told. The mage had been on a journey at the time, and had never come home, probably a victim of the widespread chaos that followed the appearance of the new creatures and new people. The house’s exact location had been forgotten, or it would have been dug out and looted by now, but recent erosion had partly exposed a window, and Mahal had discovered it late in the afternoon a couple of days ago. He’d tied a rope to a nearby tree and dangled it into the window, long enough to reach the floor and help him get back out if there weren’t any other handholds on the inside.
Jumping down to the floor, he spoke the word that would make the monocle reveal magic, and saw he was in luck. Multicolored auras sprang up around not one or two but over a dozen of the things scattered around the large space.
What the things were, he wasn’t sure. There was a thing with large wheels, for instance, probably too complex to be a simple vehicle — the blades protruding from the front were perhaps intended to clear brush and small trees from the path, so it could go through wilderness as well as on roads. Or maybe it was a fancy plough? It was much too big to get out the way he’d come in, as were most of the enchanted objects he saw. If he could figure out where the doors were relative to the hillside, and excavate an opening in front of them...
He ignored, for the moment, all the things too big to lift, and focused on a cabinet, through the door of which he could see several distinct aural glows. It was unlocked, he found, and contained several shelves on which were a number of small objects, seemingly an eclectic mix of tools and jewelry and toys. About a tenth of them were enchanted in some way; he scooped them into his bag, along with anything that looked like gold, and was left with one slightly larger enchanted thing: a folded bundle of cloth on the top shelf.
As he took it down and started unfolding it, a slip of paper came loose and fluttered to the floor. He picked it up and tried to puzzle out the writing; he was literate, but not bookish, and failed to recognize several of the words.
“—— armor —— for Timala ghe Sulahi, —— most damage and speeds up ——”
He put the slip of paper in his bag and finished unfolding the silk armor. It didn’t look like armor; it seemed like an ordinary woman’s robe, except for its reddish-purple aura of enchantment. With his current dark vision plus magic vision, he couldn’t be sure what color it would be in daylight. It felt incredibly light. It was described as some kind of armor, and he was pretty sure the word before “most damage” meant something like “prevent” or possibly “turn away.” He hoped, but wasn’t sure, that the word at the end would mean something like “healing,” or perhaps “reflexes.” He took out his knife and tested it, poking the sleeve of the robe gently and then harder, and making no tear. It was a lot tougher than it looked, then.
He was about to put it in his bag and look around a little more before leaving when he heard a heart-stopping sound from somewhere deeper in the building, around a corner from the room he’d entered. Some sort of chittering, clattering sound, coming closer.
On some of his earlier scavenging trips, Mahal had fought off some of the smaller and weaker new creatures, as well as natural creatures like wolves, but this sounded like it might be too big for him to handle. On impulse, he slipped his arms through the sleeves of the robe, then held his knife at the ready and sidled toward the window and the rope, keeping an eye on the doorway to the next room. He was halfway there when he saw the creature come around the corner into the room. It was something like a lion-sized scorpion, although its tail fortunately wasn’t as long in proportion to its body as a natural scorpion’s, and it had fuzz like a bumblebee or moth on its central body. It didn’t seem to notice Mahal at first, but when it did, the reason for the shortness of its tail became apparent. A silent beam of light shot out of the tail-tip and struck the wall near Mahal, making a loud crack as the top layer of stone crumbled away. The next shot struck him directly on the side (he was running by now), but he barely felt the impact; it was like being bapped by a kitten’s paw. He was struck twice more as he scrambled up the rope and wriggled through the window. Moments later, he was out, crawling onto the hillside above the long-buried building.
He was pretty sure the new scorpion was too big to fit through the aperture, but to be safe, he scrambled to his feet and started running, not bothering to take off the robe or retrieve his rope. When he paused for breath after crossing a stream to confuse his trail, he checked the trees above him for new creatures with the monocle and then leaned against one, took off his monocle and looked down to what the robe looked like in daylight. It was a pleasing orangeish-pink, with the collar and cuffs hemmed in teal. There were also delicate traceries in yellow thread over it, forming large and small spiral patterns, which he hadn’t noticed when using the dark-vision monocle.
It was really pretty, he decided, but he’d look a bit silly wearing it back into town, even if it had saved his life. But when he tried to untie the sash, his hands kept fumbling clumsily and he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. Wait a minute — he’d been in too much of a hurry to tie the sash, he’d just put it on and run! He tried a different way, trying to pull his right arm out of the sleeve and the upper part off his shoulder, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip on the fabric when he tried to do that.
Panic was starting to build, but he didn’t give in yet. Next, he tried to take hold of the lower hem of the robe and pull it over his head that way. At first, he felt a twinge of relief as he pulled the hem up past his waist — but lost his grip once he tried to keep going and pull the whole robe off. It came loose from his fingers and fell back down to his ankles. Determined, and starting to hyperventilate, he bent down and pulled upward on the the hem again. Again, he lifted it far enough to expose his trousers as far as the waist — where the sash was tied, inside the folded robe — but once he tried to lift it farther, he lost his grip and it draped down again.
Cursed, he thought. It was a trap for thieves, not a legitimate work of magecraft waiting for someone named Timala ghe Sulahi to come pay for it. It had protected him from the new scorpion, or so it had seemed in his haste, but who knew what else it would do to him before he could find a mage who knew how to get it off him? At least the magical tools, toys and jewelry he’d collected would probably pay the consultation fees for two or three mages — unless they were all cursed, as well.
Besides embarrass him, of course. He sighed and started trudging home.
* * *
Three days later and thirty miles away, Mahal stood still inside a magic circle as Ghalu, a mage nearly twice his age, peered through a framed sheet of glass at the robe Mahal wore. He was starting to get stiff from standing for so long without much room to move when Ghalu finally said, “All right, you can step out of the circle.”
Mahal gratefully did so and stretched his aching muscles. “What did you find out?”
Ghalu had interpreted the words on the slip of paper Mahal had been unable to make out, and the last word had indeed been “healing,” but they had both been suspicious that the paper was a false lure to tempt a thief into putting the robe on before risking the theft of other things that might be better-guarded. Now, though, Ghalu nodded. “It is indeed healing you. And I think the reason it won’t let you remove it — yet — is that it hasn’t finished.”
“Healing me? From what? I feel perfectly healthy.”
“That I don’t know. Presumably the spells on the robe detected some hidden illness which they’ve almost finished healing. Or perhaps it will take another month or longer. I could cast a few diagnostic spells if you’re willing to pay more, but without any symptoms to direct me, I’d be shooting in the dark, unlikely to find it on my first few tries.”
“No, never mind. Thank you.”
* * *
Mahal sold the remaining artifacts he’d looted from the buried house, recruited some other scavengers to help him work his claim, and returned home. He was met on the way by smirks at his feminine garb, which alternately annoyed and hurt him, depending on whether they came from strangers or acquaintances. Finally, as he reached his home village, he finally met a look of sympathetic worry.
“Oh, no,” said Ninta, his neighbor. “You couldn’t get it off? Did you at least find out what it does?”
“Apparently, it’s healing me,” Mahal reassured her. “I’ll be able to take it off once it’s done. Whatever injury or illness it is, I don’t feel sick.”
“That’s good. I suppose it’s taking care of the illness before it gets serious enough to notice. Did you find out how tough it is?”
“It held up to everything we tried,” Mahal said. “And it protects the parts of me it’s not covering, too, which Ghalu said most enchanted armor won’t do.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“Indeed.”
* * *
Every morning, Mahal made a perfunctory effort to remove the robe, found he still couldn’t, and went about his day. A couple of days after his return, the scavengers he had met with in the city arrived, as arranged, and he accompanied them to the buried mage’s house and showed them the hidden entrance. With the scavengers’ magical weapons, and Mahal’s near-invulnerability, they defeated the new scorpions (there were several) and smaller new creatures, and were able to catalogue the un-collapsed part of the house and remove many of the smaller treasures. Then they cut timber to build a palisade around the site of the house, to protect them against new creatures (or bandits) while they worked, and started excavation work so they could search the collapsed portions and remove the larger artifacts.
Mahal went about this with a distracted air, however, prompting more than one of his colleagues to ask him if he was all right. On the evening before the expedition, he had realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning. He was one of the few men in the village who did; when he’d first returned to the village wearing the robe, he’d decided he ought to stop shaving for as long as he was compelled to wear it. But the scratchiness had driven him to a paroxysm of self-loathing and a hasty mid-day shave. Now, however, a day’s growth was entirely unnoticeable. And the next morning, there was no more than before. It seemed that the robe was doing something more than mere healing, something perhaps far more insidious, beyond Ghalu’s ability to detect.
In and of itself, not having to shave his face anymore was a welcome development. But what did it mean? How far would it go? Would all of his hair fall out? Or would the next change, if there were more to come, be something completely unrelated?
He was kept too busy by the excavation of the mage’s house to worry about it as much as he would otherwise, but he found himself looking at his hands and feet in idle moments, wondering if they looked different in some way.
* * *
He normally bathed once a week when he could get warm water, like most people, but since the robe had attached itself to him, he had been unable to strip down to bathe. He was afraid he would soon put on winter levels of grime with a summer’s accumulation of sweat, but he found, on the contrary, that the armor-robe seemed to keep him clean as well as uninjured and healthy. He’d long since removed the clothes he’d been wearing under the robe, replacing only the underwear, which he continued to replace with a clean pair on the days when he would have bathed. The robe itself stayed clean, too; when he spilled a spoonful of lentil soup on it one day, it slid off onto the floor without leaving a stain.
People around the village were getting used to him wearing a woman’s robe, and though some of his friends still engaged in occasional ribbing, everyone knew he couldn’t take it off, and everyone had heard the story about the scorpion attack and knew why he’d put it on without having it evaluated by a mage first. The scavengers he’d recruited to help work his claim were also reasonably understanding, most of them, though there was one annoying fellow who wouldn’t let up with the tired jokes. So he was getting more comfortable going around the worksite and the village in the robe, and he found himself thinking one day that if he was stuck wearing one garment, he was glad it was such a beautiful one. The sunlight at different times of day seemed to bring out different patterns in the traceries of darker thread, and he thought the color might be changing slowly as the year progressed, though it was too soon to be sure; if so, he was really never wearing the same garment twice. But he couldn’t shake the nagging worry about what else it would do to him.
By the time the excavation in front of the main doors of the mage’s house was complete, and they started removing the larger artifacts, he was sure of his suspicion that the hair on his arms and legs was thinning out a fair bit. The hair on his hands and feet, which had been sparse to begin with, was entirely gone. And those who knew him best, like Ninta, were starting to notice changes, too.
* * *
“Good morning, Mahal,” she greeted him as they met at the well just before dawn. “Another day at the old mage’s house?”
“Yes, we’ve almost finished removing artifacts from the undamaged rooms, and then we’ll be excavating the rooms partially collapsed by the earthquake. Then we’ll have to transport everything to the city for auction, and protect it from bandits along the way. It’s the biggest find of my life, but it’s taking so many other people to fully exploit it, I won’t exactly get wealthy off of my share. Though I can probably afford to take it easy for a couple of years after this.”
“I’m happy for you. You look well today.”
“Uh, thanks...”
“There’s something different about your face, maybe? Maybe it’s just that you’re happy about the excavation. Happier than I’ve seen you in a long time.”
“Perhaps I am,” he realized with surprise. That happiness didn’t last long, though, as he returned home with a bucket of water and started cooking breakfast. He didn’t own a silver mirror, though he could have afforded to splurge on one after one of his earlier finds; he hated the look of his face in a bronze mirror so much that a sharper reflection could only be worse, he feared. And he hadn’t looked in the mirror since he stopped having to shave. But after breakfast, he took a quick look in the mirror before heading out to the excavation site.
It was hard to pin down what had changed since then, but something was definitely different. The robe was changing his face, if only slightly. Would he be recognizable at all when it was done?
* * *
Mahal started looking in the mirror every morning as soon as there was enough light, and making more careful note of the changes. The acne scars from his youth were disappearing one by one, his jawline was getting rounder, and his nose a bit smaller.
He was starting to suspect a pattern, but the next change he noticed, a few days after they started digging out the collapsed rooms at the back of the house and shoring them with timbers, made it a certainty. Two small bumps had appeared on his chest; looking down inside the robe, he saw that his nipples were getting larger.
He felt a brief surge of irrational happiness before he came crashing down in a panic. Before long, he would look like a woman — might even be a woman, if the robe took a mind to go that far. He would have to leave the dig, go to a bigger city and hire the best mage he could to break the spell on the robe so he could remove it before it was too late.
But he forced the panic down, took deep breaths, and decided to put on one of his old shirts under the robe. It took a lot of contorting, but as long as the robe didn’t think he was trying to take it off, it gave him more leeway to wriggle his shoulders and arms temporarily free of the robe to get into his shirt. He found that his nipples chafed against the shirt, though it did effectively hide the bumps from his fellow villagers and the workers on the dig.
He was even more distracted than usual that day. Being a woman wouldn’t be a problem, of course; he could see some potential inconveniences, but he doubted they could really be worse than the inconveniences of manhood. He thought he might even like it. But changing into a woman, in front of his neighbors and co-workers — that would be mortifying. The jokes a few weeks back when he first returned to the village wearing a woman’s robe would be nothing next to the ribbing when they realized what was really happening to him.
But he couldn’t abandon the dig and go off to a big city to hire a mage to break the spell, or at least the “can’t remove it while it’s ‘healing’” component. For one thing, he doubted he’d be able to afford it until he cashed out his share of the loot from the dig. And by then, who knew how far the change would have gone? He thought he’d rather be a woman than get stuck partway.
For another, he liked most of his co-workers on the dig, but he wasn’t sure he trusted them not to cheat him out of his share if he left to spend days traveling to a big city and finding a mage skilled enough to remove the robe. Even if he could scrounge up enough money, or find a sympathetic mage willing to give him a discount.
No, really, despite how embarrassing it would be, he decided the best thing would be to stay put and change into a woman. Perhaps he could defuse the jokes by simply telling people what was happening rather than letting them guess one by one and spread rumors.
* * *
He was going to tell Ninta first, but he lost his nerve when he was about to tell her the next morning, and put it off — then again the next day. By the time he worked up the courage to tell her, his new breasts were starting to be noticeable, especially if he didn’t wear an undershirt under the robe. And wearing an undershirt was getting really uncomfortable. So he left it off when he went out to the well early the next morning. He felt nervous, but somehow glancing down at his chest made him happy enough to keep putting one foot in front of another. The hand holding his water bucket didn’t even tremble — much.
“Good morning, Mahal,” Ninta greeted him. “You look nice today. There’s something different about you...”
“Yes,” he said, glancing at the well, at Ninta, and away from her. “I have something to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“This robe — I think it’s changing me into a woman.”
Ninta studied him silently for a moment. “Oh... Yes, I can see it. It’s been so gradual, I hadn’t realized how much you’ve changed until you point it out.” She fell silent for a moment. “I think you’ll be a very pretty woman, if it’s any consolation?”
Mahal felt his face getting hot. “Uh, yes, I suppose it is? ...You really think I’m pretty?”
“Getting there,” Ninta said with a laugh. “I thought you said it was supposed to be healing you of something?”
“That’s what the mage told me,” he said with a shrug, and blushed again when he realized what that did to his chest. “Perhaps, since it was made for a woman, it considered my manhood an illness to heal? I wouldn’t mind so much, if...” He sighed. “If I didn’t have to change in front of so many people.”
“But you can’t abandon the dig at this juncture,” she realized. Then she frowned and looked at him like she was seeing deep inside him. He glanced away from her. “I’m not sure that’s it, though — I mean changing you because the client the mage made it for was a woman. I wonder...”
“What?”
“An idea. Not very clear yet. I’ll tell you later if I can figure out what I’m thinking.”
She refused to say anything more, and all day, as he ate breakfast, worked on the dig, and told his fellow scavengers about the changes he was going through (which didn’t exactly go well, but wasn’t as bad as he’d feared — he got more pity than rude jokes), he wondered what Ninta was thinking.
* * *
The next morning at the well, he asked Ninta, “Have you figured out what you were thinking yesterday?”
“Part of it,” she said. “I noticed a little while ago that you seem happier these days. And I don’t think it’s just joy over your incredible find. If anything, you seem happier now than you did before it was obvious what the robe was doing to you.”
“...Yes,” he admitted. “It’s very strange, but somehow, the thought that I’ll be a woman soon makes me happy.”
“Hmm. Would it make you happy if I called you by a woman’s name? Have you thought of changing your name, or would you rather keep using ‘Mahal’?”
He hadn’t really thought of it, but now that he did, the idea of a new name was rather appealing. “‘Mahal’ doesn’t feel quite right,” he said. “Perhaps ‘Mahila’, or ‘Halsa’?”
“And if I said ‘Halsa is the most beautiful woman in the village’... Oh dear.”
Halsa dropped her bucket so she could cover her face, and was reduced to incoherence, leaning against the well for support.
“I think that proves it,” Ninta said, picking up Halsa’s bucket. “You have always seemed to me melancholy, not only when your parents or your brother died, but even when you made your first good discoveries as a scavenger — even, at first, when you discovered the mage’s house. But that has changed in recent days. I think your manhood was, for you, an illness that needed healing. It was making you sad, if not sick inside, and becoming a woman is making you happy.”
“...maybe?” Halsa said in a small voice when she had recovered a little. She took her bucket back from Ninta and drew up another bucketful from the well to replace what she’d spilled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“Welcome, sister.”
Halsa’s eyes filled with tears as Ninta set down her bucket and hugged her.
This story was written during the TG Writing Lair's 2020 Secret Santa story exchange for Callie. Her prompt was:
A fantasy hero-type finds some cursed armor that slowly feminizes them, and it can’t be taken off. They manage to break the curse of binding, but maybe they want to keep wearing the armor anyway?!
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Comments
very cool !
I love the idea!