Desini watched the strange man in front of her rapidly scramble around the circular room, his emotions shifting from irritation to uneasiness to incredible fear. Then he slowly turned to face her. She could feel the fear rippling off of him in waves.

Confused as to why the man would be so erratic, Desini cocked her head and stared at him, which only seemed to make him more panicked.

She was somewhat assured that if he intended to hurt her, he would have done so already. He was harmless. Probably.

With no idea of what to do, having just entered the world, Desini simply continued to stare at the man. She tried controlling here eyes individually and slowly closed them one at a time: left, right, up, left, up, right, it was a strange feeling.

Her legs began to ache, having been cramped in the small shell for so long; so Desini repeated the one-by-one process with her legs, flexing them each in turn. At this point she had decided to ignore the man. If he was going to do something drastic, he would have acted by now.

Just then, he began to speak to her, but again in an unintelligible series of noise. His beard was mostly black with streaks of grey and it shook erratically as he spoke like it had a life of its own. His curious red robes had strange black patterns inscribed on them, mostly jagged circles with lines branching off of them at strange angles.

He continued to jabber on. Not really irritating, but didn’t he realize it was pointless yet?

Bored and exhausted at this point, Desini lowered her abdomen to the ground and folded her legs up against it, sitting down. More or less. What in the world was she doing here? What was she supposed to do?

Her memory was fuzzy, even the strong memory of another man attacking her only came back in quick, blurry fragments. Other than her name, she could remember almost nothing of her previous life.

The man was still chatting away. At this point, he wasn’t even talking to her, just making noise to comfort himself or something. While mentally unstable acquaintances weren’t usually a good thing, this one didn’t seem malicious, just… off.

A pang of drowsiness swept over her then, and seeing as she wasn’t necessary to keep the man company, Desini leaned the human-half of her body back against the front of her abdomen and turned her upper body on its side. She would get some rest and figure out what was going on later.

---

Sidren just stared at the spidren for a while as it creepily blinked one eye at a time at him. He shuddered; it was incredibly unnerving. Then it started to extend its legs and then retract them as well, one at a time.

Watching for a while, guard fully raised in case of any sudden movements, Sidren shuffled back a little bit, distancing himself from the creature.

“Now l-listen here, I b-b-brought you into this world, and because of that I think I d-d-deserve a bit of courtesy!” He stammered, “I d-d-don’t intend to hurt you or anything, but you cannot hurt m-me, as I’m going to be in charge of you.” No! That was stupid sounding and didn’t work at all!

Sidren felt the cold sweat on his back multiply. This creature, although half his size, was equipped with razor-sharp claws that extended like daggers. Should it deign to attack him, he didn’t stand a chance, and he was here explaining how he was its master for all intents and purposes!

A movement from the creature startled him and he clamped his jaws shut as to not scream out, but the spidren was simply sitting down with a somewhat humorous thud. Oh. It was basically a baby, and there was no way it could understand his speech.

Sidren sighed, “Well that’s a relief you know. Here I was thinking I was about to be killed by a vicious spidren, but you’re not going to attack me are you?”

The spidren leaned back and yawned, turning away from him and closing all of its eyes. Sleeping was it? Well alright then. Just in case it was a ploy to lure him into false security, Sidren slowly backed out of the room, carefully watching the creature until he had made it out the door which he closed softly. He was alive! Somehow.

He spun and walked down the dimly lit stone corridor that led to his study, determined to figure out just what had happened with his binding and what went wrong.

The wooden door to his study creaked open as he pushed it and revealed another circular room with a vaulted ceiling, still lit from the candles he had placed earlier. Books lined the walls in great number, some incredibly old and others with new bindings. Other than the musty smell and the stained rug, it was a rather cozy little alcove.

Walking over to his desk, Sidren examined the original rune he had devised for the binding. Perhaps he had copied it down incorrectly on the sheet he used for reference in the summoning chamber? No, it was identical to how he remembered it. The fact was it had simply performed differently than he had expected.

Catastrophe! The Kaidian order had sent him here to discover a new and powerful way of binding intelligent souls, but what did he have to show? Failures upon failures!

Flipping through a nearby book Sidren reviewed the challenges others had faced in binding intelligent souls. A simple one-way binding on unintelligent creatures was commonplace, however, anything strong enough to bind intelligent souls could never be so asynchronous. There were many stories following the fate of a foolish king that decided to tamper with soul magic and bound his subjects to him. In a one-way binding, the master is supreme and the subject’s will is erased. In a two-way binding… not so much.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Kaidian priests had been searching for a way to create a new rune that could accomplish this miracle of subservience for centuries, but no matter what combination was used, the rune never did quite what was wanted. Horror stories of a melded consciousness between the priest and the test subject were just as common as stories where years of effort and research yielded absolutely no effect.

Of all the unfortunate assignments to receive! Sidren mourned his fate and cursed himself twice over for showing promise at the academy. He had risen too quickly through the ranks and must have spooked one of the existing priests, resulting in his current assignment intended to delay or remove him. It was bad enough they had shipped him off to a foreign country alone, but he had also received orders to not return unless his task was complete.

With nothing else to do, Sidren fell into his chair, cradling his face with his hands. It was hopeless. Even if he changed something about the runes used he still wouldn’t be able to make any progress. He had no idea how to start, he was so sure his runes would work!

Double-checking his links, he confirmed that indeed there was no connection between him and the spidren. He could only feel her faint presence through the stone walls, still in the tower chamber. No link meant no progress, and he couldn’t feel anything.

But wait…

Nobody else would feel anything either. Links were only discernible by those bound by them… What if… no, that was a terrible idea.

Could he pull it off? A scam to make it seem like he had succeeded?

Pondering over the possible consequences, Sidren dissected this wicked idea of his. Were he to succeed with the façade, he could go down in history as the first person to have created a one-way binding with intelligent beings. And if anyone asked him to recreate it he could merely claim that perhaps it only worked with newborns.

Sidren grinned as he realized that spidren were the only intelligent creatures that had a location suitable to inscribe runes on, the shell. Everything else was borne by womb. And spidren eggs, really spidren themselves, were nigh on impossible to find!

A way out! A ticket to freedom, power, and fame!

He would have to make it work… He would have to train this spidren infant of his to make her obedient to him, anything to add to the validity of his deception.

But it could work.

It would work.

---

Desini awoke to the sun leaking through the slits in the walls, casting faint beams of light across the circular room. The sun was still rising, so the light was faint, but she could already make out everything in the room as if she were outside at noon.

Raising her torso up she began to stretch her shoulders. As strange as it sounded to her, her thorax made a pretty decent bed. She was still resting with her legs folded up neatly, so she began to stretch them as well. For some reason, it was almost second nature for her to move them, but the back of her mind was itching, sending signals as if something was… off.

Thinking about her situation, she knew she had some foggy memories of her past, a cruel man, pain, loss of… something important. She had lived on her own for a while, or something.

Desini shook her head as the memories became even more muddled and were giving her a headache. She was here now and she needed to figure out what to do. Escape was the most appealing option. Even though the man from yesterday didn’t do anything, there wasn’t anything stopping him from doing so today or the next day. Distance would be safety.

Standing up with only a few shaky movements, she looked around the room she was in, looking for some clue as to where she was and why she was there.

The shell fragments from her egg were still strewn on the floor about her, she grimaced as she remembered that unpleasant experience.

Wait, how did she have memories if she had just been born? She flinched as a throb of pain reverberated through her head. Alright, alright, that train of thought is off limits. Sheesh.

Aside from the two desks brimming with paper and ink, the room itself had basically nothing but stone and the heavy looking door.

Clattering over to the table, Desini poked her head over the drawers and looked at what was on the desk. A book! Probably. That’s what first came to her mind, so book it is.

Reaching for the book, her claws pried the book up, making a faint scraping noise across the wooden surface of the desk, and she pulled it off the desk. Holding it with two…hands…she squinted at what was written.

A strange circle with all sorts of squiggly figures that almost seemed to bleed across the page was the central figure of the left page, while the right page had some of the same squiggles, but without the same effect.

With no idea of what to make of it, she flipped through the other pages, but nothing else broke the mold, and what was worse was she couldn’t understand any of it.

Frowning now, she placed the book back on the edge of the table and moved over to the door. It didn’t have a handle, so a push would probably open it.

She did so and entered a darker corridor with less openings for light. She could still see everything in good detail though, her eyes were working well. At the end of the short hallway was another door, like the one behind her, and about halfway down the hallway there was a T-shaped intersection.

The other door probably just led to an identical chamber, so the new hallway it was. Moving as carefully as she could, Desini crept her way to the corner, peeking around it to see if the man was near. No sign of him.

Moving down the second hallway, she saw light spilling out of another doorway on her left. As she neared it, the aroma of food wafted over her. Her stomach… which was in her larger half instead of her torso, didn’t exactly rumble, but something like it? Gah, what a weird feeling. Uncomfortable too.

Sneaking up to the doorway, she peered around the edge of it and saw the man sitting at a wooden table eating. He wasn’t doing a very good job, as he was also scribbling something on a piece of parchment next to him, so about a quarter of the soup he was spooning into his mouth ended up on his robe instead. There was an odd look in his eyes, like a maniac or mad scientist…whatever that was.

Her stomach made the same sensation again. She needed to eat, and escaping now would postpone a meal for who knows how long. The man hadn’t done anything terrible before, so maybe he wouldn’t now. But it was safer to try and get food without him noticing.

Slowly skittering through the doorway, Desini hunched a little to make herself smaller and made her way to the table, which was just about eye-level. The man didn’t notice. She scoured the room to find the source of the food, and saw a small pot on the counter. Conveniently, right next to it was a stack of wooden bowls.

However, getting to it would be a problem as the counter was even higher than the table. As she hid under the far side of the table, she thought about possible solutions.

But it was to no avail, as a low growling came from the feet of the man. Jerking her head down, Desini saw a wretchedly old dog staring at her and baring its, well, what were left of its, teeth.

Crap.