Category: The Magic Quill

Thank you, dear reader Biblio, for suggesting that—as the Magic Quill reaches the big Five-Oh—we go back and summarize where the storyline has taken us so far, to help latecomers catch up. At first I was going to make a rude comeback like, “Why not try reading the column from the beginning and see if it makes any sense to you?” But then, I realized that this would be a good opportunity to “archive” the old numbers of the Magic Quill, and turn a new page, so to speak. So, with apologies to those of you who are eagerly waiting to find out what happens next, here is what has happened already:

Merlin’s tale continued…

“As the sound of locks being undone resounded through the vault, Don Pagliai stuffed something through a knothole in the crate where I was hidden. ‘Hurry,’ he said. ‘Hide this on yourself. It is one of the few things Il Comte did not take from us, and I have hoped until now that it might become useful. Perhaps it will serve you.’

“And so a couple of months passed. Nine wizards, trapped in a Gringotts vault together, speaking three languages, and one of them not speaking at all. The vault was quite large, and it was full of wine—mostly in bottles packed in crates, but also a good number of casks and barrels.

As Merlin’s story continues, he and “poor little rich wizard” Rigel are trapped together in a Gringotts vault, waiting for the next task the goblins have in store for them…

“’I should have known you would take his side,’ Rigel said, pacing the circumference of the vault, whilst I squatted in the middle upon an upturned bucket. ‘You’re just as self-righteous as he is. Well let me tell you–’

Now that one has to use the loo,” Sadie grumbled, scouring the bowl of her pipe with a stream of white flames from her wand-tip. “Just as he was about to tell us what James Potter said when he saw Spanky tied up on the ground and Lupin and Black standing over him with their wands drawn.”

This week’s Top 10 hits on the Wizarding Wireless Network…

In 10th place for the 3rd week in a row is this Romantic ballad by Clive Chive and His Playerless Orchestra:

Spanky’s tale continued….

“Obviously, if there was an unforgivable curse on me and I didn’t realize it, it couldn’t be a killing curse or a cruciatus curse. That left only one option. But the only thing that troubled my mind was the difficulty of getting out of Gringotts when someone had stuck a ‘for desposit only’ tag on me. But you already know how that worked out.

Spanky’s tale continued:

“After they extracted me from the Pensieve, Orel and Eustace roughed me up a good bit. I had been feeling almost sorry for them until then, especially as Orel was so sure that You-Know-Who was going to fry him. But they were, after all, a couple of pure-blood twerps–no offence, Harvey, old man–who enjoyed nothing better than stomping on a half-blood upstart who had, besides, made their bosom friend Shmedly look bad at the Owlympics.

Spanky’s narrative continued:

“I trailed Orel back to his flat in London, which he had filled with a lot of rare and dangerous stuff. One of the things he had was a Pensieve. I was surprised to see it, having read that Dumbledore had rid England of the things, with a few closely guarded exceptions. I had always wanted to mess around with one, and I must admit that I had never understood what was so dangerous about them. I was about to learn a very hard lesson.