A bell rang and the students of St. Csilla Academy poured out of their classrooms and into the hallway. Though the student body was mostly human, the range of ages varied broadly. Ranging from nine to ninety.
That was just how wizarding schools were, some people entered young and left as quickly as they knew enough magic for it be serviceable. Others would either enter later, or enter young and never leave, remaining as students for as long as they could because the average magical institution had access to materials, research and supplies that the average individual could only dream of.
Amidst this river of human bodies, there was particular young woman. Orange-brown hair. Grey-green eyes. Thick oval rimmed glasses. Pale skin from lack of sunlight. She wore the same navy blue blazer and dark gray skirt that most of the other female students around her were wearing.
Walking quickly, head down, gaze focused on the ground, as was her habit. Her ingrained aversion to any sort of social confrontation making her avoid making eye contact with the people around her. In her arms there was a stack of books, topped with a notebook that was covered in dark blue scrawl.
Margot Wallace’s week had been a busy one. Sunday started with the horrifying realization that human consciousness was apparently something that a powerful enough being could just shut off or on if you let it get through enough of your protections. She’d woken up screaming as she surfaced from a dark and dreamless sleep so similar to death that her memory seemed to be purposely blocking out most of what she’d experienced.
After the screaming stopped she, looked down to find that she was different from before. Margot might have been clueless about many things but her own body wasn’t one of them. She was too neurotic not to notice the many changes. The first thing she noticed was that she’d grown four inches in height her body finally breaking through the 5’0 mark to reach 5’3. Even if she had been less self-aware there was no way she could have missed the new musculature that had been added to her frame.
Though the girl kept fit by running and occasionally making use of the school’s fitness center, there’d always been a fair amount of baby fat. Now, though, now her physique was as unrealistic cut and chiseled as that of some of the superhero social media influencers she used to follow online.
She wasn’t skinnier. On the contrary, the muscle added a lot of bulk that she hadn’t had before. Shifting the arrangement of fat on her body to make room for new musculature.
The definition of her muscles was phenomenal now. Her abdominal muscles were sharp enough to grate cheese on and she could now flex her biceps, triceps, and deltoids with enough gusto to put most vanilla-human action movie stars to shame.
This was the case for most of the changes that had occurred in her physique. It wasn’t just that she was taller and more muscular.
It wasn’t just the minute changes to the size, spacing, and angle of her eyes. Nor was it the changes to the arching, width, and shape of her nose. It also wasn’t just the changes to curvature of her brow, and the fullness and width of her lips.
Her skin now had a glow to it, and most of the blemishes and scars that had accumulated from her childhood and adolescence had now been completely erased with her freckles being the one odd exception.
Something innate had been tampered with, improved, and sharpened. Taking a good look at herself naked, while Margot could still recognize herself, it was still very clear that she was different from how she’d been before.
It was like someone had taken her old-self and pushed it through an evolution-based image editor. The lines of her face, limbs, and body had all been subtly remodeled to be stronger, sharp, more graceful, just better overall. Refined in ways that she didn’t have the biological background to describe.
Ironically, body image issues had been one of the few things that she hadn’t had problems with, so she didn’t know how to feel about the changes. On the one hand, she’d liked the old her. She’d liked the person she’d seen in the mirror, or at least had never felt any self-loathing based on her appearance. On the other hand, a small slightly vain part of her found some pleasure in knowing that she could now objectively consider herself as attractive as some of the prettier girls in school.
She was now as pretty as those popular girls whose ancestors were seductive man-eaters, or who had parents that could afford to purchase charisma boosting enhancements. Instead of maybe being cute, she was now definitively cute, and maybe even just a little sexy.
Again, Margot just wasn’t sure how to feel about the situation. Sometimes she’d wake up and see herself grin. Other times she’d feel disturbed to realize that the person in the mirror didn’t feel quite right and wonder if she was a terrible, shallow, person for thinking it was okay to give up who she’d been before.
For the most part, Margot tried to focus on other things. Turning her attention to other matters, ike the return of her magic. Which to be fair, was a huge thing to focus on. Margot’s magic was back. That was explosive news for the young mage.
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Not only was her magic back, it seemed that she’d also been compensated for the growth that she would have experienced had her talents been left unplundered. She wasn’t entirely certain whether this was a result of the contract, or merely result of her contracted being’s refurbishment of her inner-self.
Magical talent was a thing born partially of the spirit and partially of one’s physical biology. One’s genetics acted as a modifier on both factors. According to what she knew of her parents both her mother, Margaret, and her father, Gerald, had been fairly powerful mages. Thus Margot had always been bound to be at least a little beyond the norm.
That being said, the magic Margot current felt flowing within her was on a scale that would have had her put on a watch list by certain national interests. Thus this new power couldn’t just be the result of her genes. If her parents were that powerful then house Wallace wouldn’t just be a small-potatoes magus clan.
Having her magic returned to her was mind blowing, but it was mind blowing in a good way. Margot had spent the last twelve years of her life, studying and dreaming. Dreaming of a day when she too could use the spells that her classmates and cousins learned in class.
Feeling the aether flow through her body and dwell in her core was like finally being able to breathe properly for the first time ever. Naturally, Margot had immediately begun to train. Working to build up her magical power and cultivation as a mage. She was shocked to find that making progress was stunningly easy and was certain that her new familiar’s influence was part of the reason why.
Speaking of not being able to breathe, many of the physical maladies that had accompanied the theft of her power were gone. For starters she was no longer having respiratory problems and no longer seemed to need her inhaler. The world was sharper and less gray. The smells and sounds were clearer. Last and certainly not least, while she couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t dare go to the school’s doctors to verify it, she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to die.
Correction…. She wasn’t going to die due to loss of vitality due to the loss of her magical talents and the dissipation of her aetheric channels. There was nothing guaranteeing that her contracted-being wouldn't change its...his...mind and kill her. After the excitement of realizing that she could do magic again, and was no longer athmastic, or feeling ominously weak, Margot remembered that there was being out there...somewhere...whose spirit was connected with her own. A being that was far out of her understanding, and simply beyond her power to control.
While Margot had known she was putting her life at risk when she was preparing the ritual, she hadn’t expected to regret it like she was regretting things now. it had been the kind of risk that she’d expected to either be negligible or result in failure so catastrophic that she’d be dead too quickly to regret the matter. It was like skydiving from the upper atmosphere, or sailing directly through a star. One of those things that was either so dangerous that a swift death would be certain, or safe enough that it was reasonable to assume success.
What she hadn’t expected was to grab a being far outside the league of the lesser and minor-tier spirits that she’d been trying to summon. If she’d conceived of her summoning circle failing at all, she’d expected it to fail so spectacularly that she’d be atomized. Her spirit blasted into the afterlife with such force that she’d need to ask to confirm that she was indeed dead. That was the whole reason she’d splurged using school credits to rent one of the academy’s heavily shielded labs.
Instead, the being broke through her circle and stepped free of its restraints, like something out of every horror movie, psa, and adult video Margot had ever watch. Striding forward with eyes that glowed with menace and a body that rippled with power.
It’s face incomprehensible to her, the sheer horror and beauty of its true visage filling her with a strange and awful sense that she was the existence that should not exist rather than it. It was something greater, while she was an ugly insect. A living stain. Her mere presence in the universe as the being lessening its transcendental beauty.
For one insane second she felt the urge to tear off her own face and self-terminate. Then her sanity snapped back into pace and she was terrified. Sure she was about to be eaten, killed, and/or violated physically and spiritually. The escape of death no longer a certainty. To her surprise, she wasn’t killed and as far she knew she remained unharmed.
The question was how to keep things that way. The being had not only broken her summoning circle it had re-written the contract that was folded into the circle. While Margot hadn’t been so bold as to believe that she’d be able to find an entity that she could overpower and force into a master-servant familiar contract, she’d at least believed she could find something that would accept either a transactional contract or patron-client. Something that she could trade with, or swear some manner of reasonable service to, in exchange for power.
Instead the being re-wrote those potential contracts and created a new script. To her surprise and great relief the being hadn’t elected to create a master-servant contract with her being the servant, binding her soul to its service.
The entity had instead created a strange and ambiguous bond that was both loose and tight at the same time. An intimate thing that was firmer and more secure than any of the bond’s she’d read about, but free of most of the usual restrictions that one would expect of a familiar contract.
Thinking of some of the research that she’d done on tethering magics, the bond kind of reminded her of the bonds shared power used and created by married sorcerer, but Margot was very carefully skirting around that idea. The mere idea of somehow finding herself married to a being so far outside her understanding was laughable. Not “this-is-so-funny” laughable, but the kind of laughter that was followed by weeping and hysterical screaming.
Margot would rather focus on the matter of keeping herself alive. Before it disappeared, went dormant,...whatever it was actually doing....,the being made two requests. The first request was a little tricky and she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d manage it. The average high-grade magic crystal sold on the market for a price between 45K and 50K.
The Wallaces were just a small Wizarding family. Old but lacking in the departments of genuine weight, wealth, and influence. Even if Margot wasn’t her family’s unfavorite it wouldn’t have been easy for her to get her hands on that kind of money.
Funnily enough, the request that was more doable for her was the more impossible sounding one. The average adult had between nine and twelve pints of blood. As an adult woman of sitting in the upper-edge of petite, Margot probably had around nine or ten pints of blood in her body at any one time. Vampire hunting, and blood magic had been around for thousands of years. Conclusion?There were myriad methods that a person could use to survive the loss and/or expenditure of a great deal of blood.
All Margot needed to do was dip into the large pile of school credits that had been building up untouched because up until now she’d more or less been a magical invalid. Then she could buy a few low-level healing potions, the ingredients for a blood strengthening potion and a phlebotomist’s kit and safely(?) siphon out between three and four pints per day without risking her life.
Doing this naturally took its toll on her body, and even with her new super-enhanced physique she still couldn’t do much during the rest of the day after each of her little donations, but that was fine. A perfectly acceptable price to pay for keeping her life.
As far as the outside world was concerned Margot feeling weak, and being forced to lie in bed physically and mentally drained, was pretty much just the same status quo she’d been keeping for the last few years. Not having to deal with people asking questions was an unexpected silver lining from years of being discounted by default.