Parry wanted to crawl back into the chimney.

"This is the best you could find?" he mentally snarled at the demon rummaging in his memories.

"I told you. Save your vitriol, it's not organized down here."

"I barely remember that life. I don't think I remember it at all. It had to have been early on. Look around for more powerful memories nearby."

"I checked every adjacent cell three layers around it," Styak defended. "There's nothing, unless you want to learn hippogriff ecology or care about your first kiss."

That startled him. "Wait, first kiss?"

"I don't know, first kiss in that lifetime? You've probably had thousands of first kisses. And you won't get one here if that gnoll pounds us into paste."

"Keep looking."

Parry pressed his ear to the door, at once grateful it was so thick and frustrated that it limited his senses. The thing could be right outside and he might not detect it. Panic pounded in his chest.

He turned to the crate where he'd stowed most of his gear and began digging through the old windbag, his father's nearly bottomless sack. He pulled out his rations, setting them in piles.

Dried fruit, nuts, dry crackers...jerky? He quickly judged everything he got his hands on. Jerky could work--wait, sausages. A whole coil! Thank you, Domo, you beautiful old soldier.

He replaced everything but the sausage, closed the crate, then sat on it quietly as he dared, giving him a little height. He held the heavy coil of meat in both hands, cradled in his lap and drew on his tamer magic.

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"You're serious?"

"Stay in my memory-scape, lest the gnoll imagine you're the appetizer."

"You're going to tame a gnoll?" Styak's doubt was a palpable force.

"No way, I'm just going to befriend it."

"I'll keep looking for fireballs or [Finger of Death]."

"I can't cast either, I'm not a mage!"

But the demon was already digging for more memories, tasting them as fast as possible. Parry had no recourse but to pour into the meat what little magic a low-level tamer like him could manage.

He felt a tension that could spell disaster. In his heart, he wanted the gnoll to spare him, pass over him like a gap in a storm, maybe see him as too insignificant to be a threat: anything to keep that club down and those teeth away from his throat. But the magic required he see the target as a friend, or at least a potential ally, a fellow-traveler in a hostile world or a pack-mate, maybe even long-lost family. The two tides of thought disrupted the magic. He was getting nowhere.

Think about the gnoll. What does it want? What is its point of view? Stuck down here, alone (by all the gods, let's hope it's alone), defensive, angry. Hopeless? Does it feel like it has a future, or had one stolen away? Did it want fresh food, a mate?

He took a moment to try and organize his memories, the millions upon millions of them he could access without the demon's help. How many times had you been a gnoll? Never, not once. Alright, what about something similar. You were an ogre at least once, remember the steppe? Hunting caribou, tormented by vicious will-o-the-wisps, attacked by humans and dwarves...

Parry clung to those thoughts, remembering his ogre-addled rage against interlopers who refused to leave him in peace, who stole his kills and tried to ransack his cave, who wanted always to slay and slay and slay. No, not the rage, don't concentrate on that, think of sympathy for the rage. Offer the gnoll what you can: a kindred spirit.

Was his feeble starter-level tamer magic infusing the sausage? It wasn't a freshly plucked leaf, it wasn't an animal he'd killed himself, it wasn't receptive. It felt forced, and his efforts felt undercut by his own panic.

It had better be working, because there was a sudden pounding on the door, high up where something very tall would slam its fists.

The gnoll was here, and in a moment it would break in.