Tavarius hadn’t meant to kill the red-eyed rodent, but he’d been feeling peckish as he’d wound his way through the forest on the edges of his niece’s ever-expanding territory and the tiny creature had looked oh-so-inviting, perched plumply atop the trunk of a felled ebony tree. He’d only a moment to savor its tinkling of a life force when the claws slid through his chest.

Fear struck.

Terror.

Panic.

Agalise. She’d caught him at last. His power would be hers, and her dominion would be finally complete. However, a glance down revealed an unmarked indigo waistcoat beneath his usual double-breasted suit jacket. His ribs cracked beneath the grip of an unseen hand. He was alone in the darkened glade.

Magic.

Tavarius struggled against it, and the spellcaster’s link flared hot and brittle-thin. Another bolt of fear struck deep in his chest. It took a split second before Tavarius realized it wasn’t his.

It wasn’t another demon’s either.

It was human.

His prior fear dissolved beneath warming curiosity.

This wasn’t a summons. It’d been ages since his last one, but humans and their methods couldn’t have changed that much. No, this was different.

This was a binding.

Now, what kind of mortal would dare to bind him? The thought curled lazily through his mind even as the burgeoning bond tightened its vice-like grip down to his lungs. Who even could? While the odd, stray binding had slipped over him before, none had ever stuck. Those that didn’t slip, shattered.

Instantly.

That this one hadn’t… That it might possibly well succeed at enslaving him if he didn’t dig his talons in now and actively nip back…

Well, he supposed the curiosity of discovering who and how was worth a possible half-century of service and rebirth. After all, it wasn’t as though he had anyone here who’d be pleasantly waiting for his return. No one beyond Mirael, but her pathetic heart broke for everyone so she didn’t count.

And everyone else wanted to kill him.

As he voluntarily surrendered to the binding, the blackened trunks and wine-red leaves of his native land began to blur, and Tavarius closed his eyes against them. It’d been far too long since his last summons to the human realm, and that’d only been a snippet, a snatch, of a visit, as all his summons had been. To be bound instead, to be chained in elongated servitude…

Why, it’d be practically novel.

His breath cracked and froze as he felt himself shifted through the planes, his body hollowed in the way that always came from being present without being incarnate, his essence and soul becoming tied to that of the human spellcaster’s. He shivered despite himself, squeezed and squeezed beneath an unrelenting grip into a single point. The overwhelming pressure remained even as a young, feminine gasp suddenly reached his ears.

Tavarius frowned as his eyes cracked open, taking in his new world through narrow slits.

That was it then. The binding transfer had finished and yet the pressure remained. Tavarius smoothed a hand over his waistcoat, watching his lungs expand even as the feeling failed to reach his mind, and he bit back an irritated growl. True, it was the same lack of feeling that always happened when he was summoned—and Tavarius supposed it’d been a naive hope, expecting anything different from a binding—yet a part of him had hoped nevertheless, seeing how this arrangement would be far less… fleeting.

A similarly cold pressure circled his neck as well, not as severe as the one gripping his body, but still enough to be annoying.

Tavarius swept up an idle claw and pulled down his cravat to trace the edge of the bone collar now encircling his neck. Dozens of delicate runes graced its service, a master of craftsmanship if he’d ever felt one, especially considering the size of its mirrored source. It was rare for human mages to pour this much effort into the physical side of their practice, not without falling back on magic to guide their hands, and this item didn’t have the stench of it.

Could that be the answer to the spell’s strength? Simple craftsmanship?

No… perhaps that’d been a factor, but it could hardly be the primary reason.

A twitch of movement caught Tavarius’ eye, and he glanced up and away from himself for the first time.

To his mild disappointment yet increased curiosity, rather than the grand hall of some palace or hallowed academy, he was standing in some small storage room of broken furniture. A single oil lamp cast flickering shadows over stacks of cracked desks and splintered chairs. Beside it crouched a mousy wisp of a girl, wearing a neatly-hemmed but frankly drab little dress and petticoat in such a drained shade of red that it almost looked grey. She gripped the edge of the nearest three-legged desk, knuckles white, as if to hide behind it. Overall, she looked more like the rodent he’d just devoured than a great and powerful sorcerer—with brown hair instead of black though, braided and pinned into a small bun that rested against her nape. Still…

His eyes snapped to the bone ring adorning the middle finger of her left hand. Instinctively, like the subtle tug north, he knew that it was a match to the one circling his neck, marking her as his new master.

To her slight credit, her gaze followed his. She glanced at her ring, then at his neck in reverse synchronicity yet parallel conclusion. To her inevitable discredit, she followed the movement with a swallow.

Poor thing was terrified.

Tavarius debated if he could assuage her fears, even if he wanted to. One wrong word and the girl would likely suffer a heart attack.

Feeling generous, he clasped his hands behind his back in a multi-planal sign of non-aggression, and the girl jumped as if he’d just summoned a flock of deathravens. Then she froze, as if she wouldn’t be visible as long as she didn’t move.

Hardly an auspicious beginning.

“Well…?” he finally said.

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The girl opened her mouth, but nothing came out for a long moment. “Ex-excuse me?” she finally managed in shaky Tiberian.

Right. Languages. He’d defaulted to Alemanch, as had been the tongue of his primary summoners of the past century, but that era was done, as was, if newborn rumors were to be believed, the gilded era of Alemannia itself.

“My apologies,” he said, switching to Tiberian. “What are your commands?”

“C-commands?” The word came out as a squeak, her body tight with tension. She looked as compressed as he felt.

Oh, how he longed for a deep breath of air that wasn’t to be. The air against his skin remained stale. Dead. He’d have to re-examine that aspect of his situation sooner rather than later. With luck, the phasal displacement symptoms would lessen over time. If not, well… while Tavarius wouldn’t be able to directly harm his new master, he always had the heart attack option. He could chalk this whole binding adventure up to an experiment tried and failed before ultimately manifesting into the new life it’d promised.

“For me,” Tavarius said. He stepped forward, hands still behind his back, and bent to meet his new master’s eyes at her level; it was a miracle the little mouse didn’t faint right then and there. “Your new demon slave.” He flashed her a grin, baring rather more teeth than the poor girl had probably ever seen. He could sense the thrum of her blood as her heart raced, and part of him longed to close the gap, to tear her throat out and soak up the life essence that would gush out with her blood.

“I… I’m sorry.”

Tavarius frowned. “Excuse me?”

“I— I didn’t mean to summon you! It was a mistake. I’m so sorry! I’ll undo it. I’ll put you back!” From beneath the broken desk, she retrieved a thick grimoire bound with cracked leather. She flipped through its pages with shaking hands, staying on each for no more than a second at a time. “I’ll find a way. I’ll— I’ll—”

Tavarius flicked his hand and the pages froze, locked in place like stone. The girl gasped.

“I?” he asked, with a mixture of displeasure and amusement. “A mistake?” It wasn’t a shocking admission. No one in their right mind would consciously attempt to bind him, and from her first gasp it’d been clear that she hadn’t meant to… and yet, in spite of all that… to have somehow targeted him so fiercely…

The girl swallowed again, her wide eyes marking her as natural prey beneath the hunter. He could tell her mind was racing a mile a minute, and he grinned as he waited for her panicked, breathy answer. “I… I mean, I…” She held up the grimoire with its frozen pages. “Don’t you want to go back?”

Tavarius’ smile fell. “Perhaps,” he hedged. “Perhaps not.”

The girl’s fear slipped and suddenly she was looking at him like he was the crazy one, which perhaps he was.

Leaving her for the moment, Tavarius swept towards the nearest window. It was a sad, narrow thing, barely offering a view of the outside, with an iron grating that took up just as much space in the wall as the glass did. At least the dark metal felt more solid than the floorboards beneath his feet; he could likely dip his phase-displaced body below them and walk just as easily through whatever lay beneath. Lifting his hand, he pressed the tip of a claw towards the iron and felt an invisible force press back. The feeling was no less stale than the air, but it was something. Grounding him, even as it limited him.

Outside, the view was almost as pathetic as the window that held it. They were on the second floor of some urban building, facing a narrow service alley and another thin-windowed building beyond it. The other building’s facade offered no reprieve from ugliness, clad from ground to roof in a beige sort of plaster. Tavarius grimaced at the sight of it. Still, even he if couldn’t take in his surroundings, the girl’s language gave him a weighty clue regarding their current locale.

“Lucra?” he asked, assuming they were in the Tiberian capital. He craned his neck to glimpse the stars, but the lights from other parts of the city seemed to blot them out. Human cities tended to do more and more of that these days.

“Umm… Yes.”

Tavarius made an idle noise of contemplation in the back of his throat.

This could very well be an interesting venture yet. True, the mouse of a girl hadn’t done much for first impressions, but her pitifulness had a certain freshness to it. There were no assumptions. No expectations.

No greed.

He’d be free to do whatever he pleased. Explore however he pleased. True, he supposed he was technically the girl’s slave, but there was no reason for that to spread to anything beyond a formality. He was in the capital of the Holy Tiberian Empire, a place he hadn’t been summoned to in the last… Well, he couldn’t remember, and that was a problem in and of itself. He needed new contracts to fortify his strength. Already a little terror, his darling niece Agalise had been busy these past decades, and she’d grown strong. Too strong. And her canid of a half-brother Caedos wasn’t trailing far behind. Only poor Mirael seemed to be keeping them in check, and tears hardly made for effective shields in the end.

Perhaps he could use this binding to… reestablish his influence.

Tavarius’ gaze flicked back towards the mousy girl, who hadn’t moved. He studied the book in her hand. The ring on her finger. “What did you want?” he asked.

“Want?” she said, sounding terribly like a trapped echo. “I…”

“Oh, come now… Even if you hadn’t meant to bind me, you still wanted a demon for something.”

“That’s… I…” Her teeth chewed at her bottom lip. “You mean you’re not going to kill me?”

Tavarius stared at her, then burst into a cackle of such ridiculous joy it almost brought tears to his eyes. He reached for the handkerchief in his waistcoat pocket to dab at them all the same.

“Shhh!” The girl’s eyes were wide with fright again, although, for once, it was not for him. “If anyone hears—!”

Tavarius paused with his handkerchief upon his eye. His lips tugged into a smirk. “Was that my first command?”

It was almost precious, the way her face went white.

“You know nothing about binding, do you, my little mouse?” He approached with a smile and laid a small tap against her nose. Nothing but a small fuzz of sensation greeted him, the barrier between planes still too great even for bound and binder. He touched his bone collar. “Except for binding itself, it seems.”

“I didn’t—”

“Mean it?” Tavarius cut in. “Yes. It seems I’ve already heard that somewhere before. At any rate, there’s no risk of being overheard. My voice on this plane is quite literally only for your ears.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, indeed,” he said with a smile. It seemed to help; the girl’s heart was still racing, but not as heavily as it’d been before. “Which returns me to my original question.” He flicked his hand and summoned a chair: one of his favorites, with golden ornately carved limbs and blue cushioning for both the seat and back. He’d first seen the original in Emperor Francois’ chambers… or had it been that brutish King Palonio’s…? He supposed the exact details didn’t matter; both rulers were both likely dead now. “What do you want?”

“I…” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the chair beneath him. Whether she was in awe at his magic or the item it’d produced, he couldn’t say. With a small shake of her head, she seemed to return to herself. Winced. “It’s somewhat of a long story… Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Tavarius shrugged. “Why not? After all, we do have the rest of your lifetime.” As he tapped at his bone collar to illustrate his point, the girl went white for the umpteenth time that night.

Instead of rolling his eyes, Tavarius cast them over the small room, searching for an unbroken chair for the girl. That turned out to be a fruitless endeavor, but he did find one with a cracked arm yet all four legs atop a pile of less fortunate furniture in the corner—in other words, perfectly suited for his new master. With a wave, he floated it down beside him and gestured for the mouse to sit.

She stared at the chair as if it were a cobra, coiled and poised to strike, but eventually lowered herself into it.

“I’d summon us a drink,” Tavarius offered smoothly. “But I’m afraid that’s slightly beyond my bearings at the moment.”

“Oh, no. That’s quite alright,” she instinctively replied, accompanying the dismissal with a well-drilled wave of courtesy. “Thank…” Her voice died as she remembered who she’d been conversing with.

Tavarius grinned. Her natural responses were far more tolerable than her irritatingly shrill squeaks and gasps and gulps, but he’d take them all as they came. Even now, as the girl clasped her hands in her lap with a fidgety tension, her eyes glancing up and down his form in nervous study, she was still studying him. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been studied. Amused, he leaned back in his own chair and studied his new mouse in return. It didn’t reveal many additional details. Her face was as plain as her dress, and that was saying something, given how human fashions had simplified after the fall of Alemannia. Her dirt-brown eyes shone with a glimmer of fear.

And hope.

“So, umm…” she said, pushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “I guess you could say it all started with my sister…”