“I’m… Ennette Williams?” the girl said slowly as if she truly doubted that were the case.
“Are… you sure?” asked Maziar, twitching. He was already annoyed that his plan had failed, and now he had to go about trying to find a way to deal with it. Any extra time and mana spent dealing with this girl was an absolute waste of time and resources.
Glaring, Ennette said, “Of course I’m sure!”
“Good, ‘cause you didn’t really sound like it just now.”
“That’s enough, Maziar,” Zerathon snapped. “This is your fault! You should be repenting, not arguing!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Maziar grumbled. Crossing his arms, he looked the girl over again himself and tested the connection between them.
What makes a familiar a familiar isn’t just that they are creatures from other planes, but the magic that draws a connection between caster and familiar. This connection can take on many forms, but it usually involves an exchange of powers or promises. The stronger or tighter the bond, the more shared an existence they have until the bond is broken.
While stronger bonds often mean more significant potential for powerful summons and benefits to the caster, the tradeoff is that one could summon a creature greater than what they can handle without being overwhelmed and eaten alive or sucked dry within seconds. It also risks devastating consequences if the familiar were to die before their master. (Likewise, it is also rather devastating for the familiar if the caster dies before them, but this is usually overlooked because casters are, in their own words, superior.)
Most casters interested in obtaining a familiar will have used the method that Maziar was currently being tested on—a contract that bound them with the promise of power in exchange for servitude with strict limits preventing strong bonds from forming. This has a variety of benefits, including avoiding the more undesirable consequences of pain and death, as well as allowing for the portioning out of a caster’s magic so they can support multiple familiars at once.
War’s contract with Maziar was entirely different and was primarily based on the permissions War needed to return to his plane after Maziar’s inevitable death. When he performed it, Maziar didn’t realize just how lucky he was that War was in a good mood the day they made their contract. If he hadn’t been, his life would have already been null and void. Instead, War had no interest in taking anything that Maziar had in his living existence and was quite content with turning his corpse into a portal home.
As such, the two of them enjoyed a rather lenient bond which allowed the ability of being able to know the other’s location, a channel of power that flowed from War to Maziar, and a line of shared emotions that served as a form of telepathy when it was required. As a consequence of using a circle that wasn’t quite up to par, however, they sometimes shared pain, and occasionally, the flow of power between them reversed, causing bouts of ‘inexplicable’ illness.
Given the fact that Maziar had planned to sabotage his spell by using War’s blood instead of his own to craft the ink he used to draw the circle, there wasn’t any reasonable way that it should have bound the girl to him, even if it had worked.
And yet, though it was the slightest of tingles at the edge of his mind, he could feel her there, the barest hint of her connected lifeforce gently pulsating a warm, dull mana through to him.
Perplexed, Maziar scratched the back of his head.
“I mean…” he started. Turning to the professor, he said, “The terms on the circle are pretty basic. We could try to release the spell?”
Zerathon’s eyes darted around the circle on the ground, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s a simple power exchange. Girl, come over here. Come, now, quickly!”
Ennette didn’t seem too keen on the idea as she stood rubbing her arm with a distrustful look in her eye. Sighing, Maziar walked toward her and offered her his hand. She looked at it as if he was offering her something he’d used to wipe his arse with.
With a snort, he said, “Really, it’s clean, and if this goes well, you can go right on back to where you came from, and we can all pretend this never happened.”
“I’m pretty sure it's not happening anyway,” Ennette mumbled, lifting her hand. It hovered over his for a moment before she pulled back and asked: “Exactly how much of my hand do you need? Like… do you need my full hand, or can I just like… touch you like—”
She poked the tip of his forefinger with hers and withdrew it again like a recoiling snake. Rolling his eyes, Maziar reached over and grabbed it himself, squeezing tighter whenever she tried to resist him. In theory, as his familiar, she should have been easy to bend to his will—but whatever he’d done in the forging of their contract made it almost as if there wasn’t one at all.
Maziar closed his eyes and focused the small amount of power he had managed to build back up to create a stream between their palms. According to the promise scrawled on the runes of the circle, it would only take a little—
—but with a loud snap! the stream broke, sending a shock of energy straight up his arm and into his back. Yelping, Maziar grit his teeth as he squeezed his arm, as a sharp tingling sensation left it numb.
“What the hell was that?” Ennette cried, cradling her hand. She was surprised, but she didn’t seem like she was in any kind of pain. Whatever it was that happened had only backfired on him.
“That’s what I want to know!” he shouted back, even more annoyed than he was before. “What in the gods' name even are you?”
“I’m a seven-foot-tall monster, clearly. I’m a freaking human girl. What do you think I am?”
“Normal human girls don’t cause mana lashes from simple power transfers!” Maziar told her, still tending his arm. But, he thought, looking back over the circle, they could be caused by trying something against the terms of the circle.
He was beginning to agree with Zerathon. Despite his intentions, this had gone very wrong, indeed. What exactly had he done? If neither he nor the girl knew anything about the terms of the circle, there was no way to reverse it—and it could end up killing them both in the long run.
Smiling, Ennette hmm-ed and kicked the stone floor. “Yeah, uh huh, those are words. Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of chaos-wielding super-magician? And you can’t handle a little electrical shock? Man, this dream has really downgraded you, huh? I almost pity you. Almost.”
“...S-Sorry?” Maziar’s mind started churning as he tried to comprehend the words that had just come out of her mouth in addition to everything else—partly because to any other ordinary person in the room, she must have sounded completely mad—yet the words ‘chaos’ and ‘magician’ put together hit too close to secrets no one should have known.
“You heard me,” Ennette said. “Damn punk.”
Ennette wasn’t thrilled with any of this, and she was just about ready to call it quits and pinch herself awake. She’d only stuck around as long as she did in hopes of seeing Laria in the dream-flesh anyway, or maybe to see how hot an Olamar her brain could cook up, especially since all that appeal seemed wasted on the lame young man in front of her. Now that things were quickly turning from confusing to annoying, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hang around long enough for things to go from bad to worse. Walking up to her himself, the teacher gave the boy an acidic look as he passed.
“Whatever else, I assure you, Miss Ennette, Maziar Kreeth is anything but a capable magician, let alone a ‘powerful chaos magician,’” Zerathon said in a tired voice. “He’s hardly a caster at all, to be honest. He’s more like a stray cat we can’t get rid of.”
Maziar glared, but it seemed like he didn’t have any reasonable defense to the man’s insult.
“Oh?” Ennette said. “Well, I guess that could be the case, too. Maybe my brain just lent you his name.”
Given that the Maziar that Ennette knew was the villain of the story and not someone involved with the main character or her lover's interests, she didn’t actually know much about ‘the Dark Magician Maziar.’ Standing in the strange room, she now wondered if it was all just a coincidence and that Maziar was entirely different from this Maziar. This one didn’t seem evil, at least. Just stupid, even if he was admittedly easy on the eyes.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Maziar said dryly.
“That’s fine,” she said with a shrug. “On that note, if Laria isn’t going to show up anytime soon, I think it’s about time I excused myself. It’s been fun, everyone, really. This might be the most detailed dream I’ve ever had. Toodles!”
Ennette waved at their confused faces and pinched her arm. It hurt, but nothing happened. Furrowing her brows, she winced as she pinched herself harder.
Still, nothing happened.
Dread began to settle in as she gave a nervous laugh.
“T-That… something must just be broken. L-Let me try something else!” she said, feeling suddenly lightheaded. She pinched herself again, this time in a different spot. She slapped her arm. She clicked her heels three times and wished to go home. When all that failed, she slapped herself in the face.
What was going on?
“Um,” Ennette said, turning back to Maziar and the rest of them. “By chance, you guys don’t know anything about the Starlight Secretary, do you?”
“The who?” Maziar asked, giving her a dubious look along with the rest of them.
“Like…you see…I-I was dreaming, and she said stuff about the Universe and all, and then she asked me to make a wish, but it was a dream, right? So I might have said something stupid, and now I’m not really sure what’s going on?” Ennette rambled, wondering if any one of them could tell her that dread in the back of her mind was some kind of stupid paranoia.
But Maziar just had to go and say the exact opposite of what she was hoping to hear: “Assuming you aren’t completely mad and are just trying to use your own magic to go back to wherever it is you came from, you can’t,” he told her, and Ennette’s heart jumped right up to her throat. “That’s part of what it means to be a familiar.”
She had been wrong all along, she realized.
This wasn’t a dream after all.
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