On Duvets and Magic

I'm up north at the moment visiting my sister, and with my 'regular' laptop still inbound from Germany where it was being repaired, I'm limited to my spare. That means no Scrivener, but not that I can't write. My method when I'm Scrivener-less is to review anything I've got in my Google Docs 'scraps' document for a book.

I have this because I'm very much a 'mood writer'. Sometimes a scene will just come to me prompted by an emotion, or conversation, a song or something I see and I want to scrawl the basics of it down before I forget. I then pull it properly into the full manuscript in Scrivener at a more convenient date.

So this trip up north is an opportunity to occasionally polish up some of the contents of that doc, or add to it. As the wind whistles round outside this morning, I'm very much pulling together a bit on walking across wind-swept hills (no spoilers).

But the other thing that's still lurking in that file is the section on how duvet magic works. So for those who missed it when I shared it on Twitter, here it is again. Enjoy your own Sunday mornings, hopefully under a duvet!

This was what most normal people didn’t understand, but that trained sheet mages could instinctively see - that laundry and bedding weren’t about conflict, they were about compromise. You just had to find the point where pressure needed to be applied, persuade everything that it wanted to move in the same direction and… there.

With a single, deft flick Em felt both duvet and cover voluntarily align. As it did, she found herself probing for what other information it held. It had been river-washed, she realised straight away. It was also pretty low tog. Barely adequate for summer, let alone the kind of harsh winters you got this far north. 

Em frowned and flicked open an eye, hoping that Alan wouldn’t see her looking. Luckily, they were busy rearranging themselves after their duvet escape. Now that she looked closer, she could see the flecks of rust on Alan’s armour and the badly-sewn patches on their trousers.

Tog spells were harder than alignment. Not by much, but enough to require being spoken out loud. She whispered one under her breath, as quietly as she could, hoping that Alan wouldn’t hear. She felt the duvet’s weight increase slightly. Hopefully not enough to be noticeable, but enough to make a difference. To further distract from what she’d done, Em cast, level five freshen on the duvet under her breath. Then, with no small amount of satisfaction, handed it back to Alan.

“I will never understand how you do that.” Alan said, with a mix of awe and amusement. “I’ve been fighting that thing all morning.”

“Sheet mage, remember?” Em replied, with a smile. “And the first thing they teach you is that fighting fabric is a route to failure.”