Zerathon Mortia didn’t want to hate his job, but every day for the past two years, he had been thinking of walking right out the front door of the Tower and never looking back.

At first he’d felt bad for the poor young Maziar. He’d shown up on the Tower’s doorstep looking like a drowned kitten with all his mana depleted; it was teetering on the edge of keeping the boy alive, and no one was sure he’d survive the night.

Contrary to the rumors of the powerful Kreeth heir, all they saw was a frail child teetering on the edge of life and death.

He’d usher in a new age, they said. He’d make all those old men in the Imperial Tower obsolete, they said, Zerathon reflected. Utter nonsense. What they should have been more concerned with was the endless stream of chaos that would follow in his wake, power or no.

Squeezing the bridge of his nose to mitigate his growing headache, Zerathon groaned.

“You are truly set on making a mockery of the Archon and this institution!” he exclaimed.

“Did you need to bring her up? Can’t I just make a mockery of myself, or do all my choices have to implicate someone else?” asked Maziar, wincing.

“Either way, your choices have consequences!”

“Professor, I’m telling you—it wasn’t supposed to work!” Maziar insisted, hands on his hips. “How could there be a consequence from a spell that doesn’t work?”

“Messing with any magic circle can have any number of unknown consequences!” Zerathon said with a sigh. “And look, now you’ve summoned a… girl. A perfectly normal young lady who was probably minding her own business until you got it in that empty head of yours to fail on purpose!”

“When I say it wasn’t supposed to work, I mean that it wasn’t supposed to work at all,” Maziar said, and Zerathon wondered what the Archon would do if he slapped him silly. .

What the boy really needed was discipline, not magic instruction.

“I-I’m sorry to interrupt, but… institution? Is this… a Tower?” the red-haired victim asked, miming a triangle with her hands. “Are you all… students? Teachers?”

Tilting his head, Zerathon looked the girl over. Her clothing was strangely plain—especially for a woman, with oddly light, tight pants and a loose shirt that showed her midriff and bore the face of a funny-looking cat. Her feet were bare, and her hair unkempt. Her accent was particularly odd. He’d had many students throughout his tenure, and he hadn’t heard the like.

Is she from across the sea, perhaps? He wondered, though that didn’t quite make enough sense either. It wasn’t like he’d never met people from the other side of Gaiuel.

But if she were from another plane, how would she know who they were?

“You,” he started, squinting as he looked straight at her. “Who are you?”

* * *

Maziar was already annoyed that his plan had failed without Zerathon provoking him, but now he was downright agitated. He needed to find a way to deal with this, fast. Any extra time and mana spent dealing with this girl was an absolute waste of time and valuable resources.

“I’m… Ennette Williams?” the girl said as if she truly doubted that were the case.

“Are… you sure?” asked Maziar, twitching.

“Of course I’m sure!”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“That’s enough, Maziar,” Zerathon snapped. “This is your fault! You should be repenting, not arguing!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

This is a mess, isn’t it? Maziar crossed his arms and looked the girl over again.

By all reasoning it was impossible—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 life force gently pulsated a warm, dull mana through to him.

Perplexed, Maziar scratched the back of his head.

“I mean…” Turning to the professor, he said, “The terms on the circle’s contract 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. 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 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 when she tried to resist him. As his familiar, she should have been easy to bend to his will—but whatever had happened in the forging of their contract made it almost as though there wasn’t one at all.

Maziar closed his eyes and focused on the small amount of power he had left to create a stream of mana between their palms.

According to the promise scrawled on the runes of the circle, it should 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 squeezed his arm as a sharp tingling sensation shot through his arm and 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' names 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!”But, he thought, looking back over the circle, they could be caused by trying something against the terms of the circle.

Scarily enough, 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.

“Yeah, uh huh, those are words,” she said. Smiling in her ignorance, Ennette hmm-ed and kicked the stone floor.“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—partly because to any other ordinary person in the room she must have sounded completely mad, but more importantly because the words “chaos” and “magician” 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. She wouldn’t have minded seeing how hot an Olamar her brain could cook up, either, especially since so much appeal seemed wasted on the tiring young man in front of her.

Now that things were quickly turning from confusing to convoluted, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hang around long enough for things to go from bad to worse. The teacher gave the boy an acidic look as he walked up to Ennette.

“I assure you, Miss Ennette, that Maziar Kreeth is anything but a capable magician, let alone a ‘powerful chaos magician,’” the professor 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...”

The Maziar that I know wasn’t much outside of his role as a villain, anyway, Ennette noted, taking in his well-proportioned stature. Maybe ‘Maziar’ is a common name and this guy is just some random idiot?

He didn’t seem evil—just stupid, even if he was easy on the eyes.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Maziar in front of her said dryly.

“That’s fine,” said Ennette. “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.

Other than the fact her cheek stung, nothing changed at all.

“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 just her being paranoid.

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, I have bad news for you,” he told her, and Ennette’s heart jumped right up to her throat. “You’re bound to your master’s plane. That’s part of what it means to be a familiar.”

She had been wrong all along, Ennette realized.

This wasn’t a dream after all.

She was stuck in the world of The Lady of the Golden Star.