Krya felt the sensation, it was both cooling and burning at the same time, as a small stream of blood dripped down her forearm and into her palm, where it was lapped up greedily by the staff she held, the wood so used it was stained a permanent dark red-black color. She had not been the first of her generation to use it, but it was hers.

Irrevocably.

It was then that she realized she would never pass the staff down to one in the line, seeing as the man she was sworn to be with, and to cherish like no other was not really human. He was not even technically alive, sentient yes, but alive no, seeing as he was a construct of magic, a soul projecting its form in the physical world. To maintain a construct like this required a large amount of mana, so much so that mages were taught to corden off a percentage of the mana they possessed so they could keep a familiar active at all points in time. Once they had separated enough mana it was then sealed away with a spell, making it wholly inaccessible but for one purpose. It was once said that mages didn't always use familiars, that some used to keep that excess mana, bolstering their own reserves with the mana required to keep a soul bound. They would be set free if the mana that sustained them and bound them was ever cut off, simply wandering souls, lost for all eternity.

She looked at the man in front of her, or rather the familiar, he was a tall beast, standing just over six foot four, a height that towered over everyone she had ever met. His mere presence commanding attention. He smiled as she looked at him, in his hand was a sword made entirely of fire. He really did look like an avenging god, that or a demonlord. The hair that he had was fiery red, as was the beard on his chin was short and well kept, a testament to her grooming techniques, seeing as if she had left it up to him he would not have trimmed it at all, and she was not going to be married to a troglodyte, even if he was a rather well-built troglodyte.

“Are you ready?” he asked, his face had a smile on it that would have normally been something she narrowed her eyes at, but this time she found herself smiling in return, it was such an interesting thing to be this, well open, this free. It was like being a different person.

She didn't answer as she tapped the staff onto the ground, the blood that coated the polished wooden staff scattered into small droplets that hit the ground in perfectly spaced intervals, each drop going to her desired position. Mana was life, the will to control it was the will to control life, and at its most basic form life is blood. It was the reason Mages were only of royal descent, and magic could not manifest in the blood of a common without them being in part a noble in decent somewhere in the past. It was passed from bloodline to bloodline, each generation inherently getting weaker as the blood was mixed and less and less concentrated amounts were found in the children.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Where the blood touched the ground a small pillar of ice, no more than a needle stuck out of the ground, they all rose, hardening and spinning around her at such a speed they could not be seen. “Ready,” she smiled and launched herself forward, swinging her staff like a conductor's baton directing the blood ice shards like they were an orchestra whos sound only she could hear.

“Good,” Leon growled and also launched himself forward, somehow dodging the first shard that was too small to even be seen by moving his head ever so slightly. The blade of ice whizzed past shaving a thin line skin off of his face right under the cheekbone. His smile grew wider as he spun left, avoiding another that came in for a pincer attack and batted away the other one from the right with a swing of his fire-kissed blade.

Krya dodged back, kicking off the ground with a force that allowed her to move out of the circle she had formed and allowed him to occupy her previous position. “Checkmate.” she purred as the droplets of blood she had spilled that she had not turned into ice shot pillars of light up into the sky. The pillars were pure mana, each one connected to her body, as she powered them she could feel the strength drain from her. Normally she would not put this much power into a spell, but she was after all attempting to cage a demonlord.

“Did you ever ask Lira about the first time I ever showed up in this world?” he asked, the sound of his voice muffled by the barrier. It also distorted his image, making him seem more like a silhouette than a man standing there.

“Can't say I did,” she answered honestly, beginning to close the barrier, making the walls of it shrink down, boxing him in more.

“When I first showed up they put me in one of these, a blood barrier, or a magic barrier whatever you want to call it.” she had not heard this story before. “I broke the containment chains,” Krya’s eyes opened wide at that, it would mean that he was at least an S class familiar, and no one had even felt the need to tell her. “I couldn't get past the barrier, I was too weak at the time,” he laughed, and she felt her blood run cold. Suddenly the distorted image that was Leon was ablaze, she could see it through the barrier, a glow of the pure fire that burned through the red light that formed the walls of his confinement, and with no effort at all, he stepped right through.

The being that stepped out of the containment spell, however, was not Leon, or at least he was not the Leon that she was used to seeing. In its place was a creature with a human body, and a Lion’s head wreathed in flames like the most majestic mane she had ever seen. He opened his eyes and looked at her, but there was no red there, simply a fire licking the inside of the lion’s eye sockets. She gasped as he looked over at her, this was not the man she loved, this was something different.

“Leon?” she asked softly, and the creature just looked at her, its face contorting, it took her half a second to realize that the barring of its teeth that it was doing at her was actually a smile.

And then he vanished.

One second he was there, and the next there was nothing in the place he had once been standing. “Yes?” a hot breath whispered next to her ear, her eyes widened in fright as jumped practically out of her skin, shrieking as she threw herself away. Leon’s rumbling laughter caused a small vein to appear on her forehead as she picked herself up and brushed leaves and dirt off of her clothes, she turned to face him and found herself wrapped up in his arms, she looked up and found it was the normal Leon, not the lion-faced horror she had just seen. “Checkmate,” he growled with a sadistic smile as he pressed his lips into her own possessively…