Mom brushed the dirt and rocks off her overalls as best she could, shaking them to try to get the rocks that had settled inside to fall out. It looked unpleasant. “Alright Morgan, you’ve made your point. You’re a witch now and you can make your own decisions. But why are you going along with this? Do you want to be a familiar bound to her will? Do you want to be a girl?”
I gave her an awkward smile, not really sure about the answer to those questions either. “I’m working that out right now, mom, but let’s just say that finding out I could have been casting spells this whole time if the circumstances of my birth had been a little different has me feeling a bit… exploratory.”
Sable walked up next to me, looking proud, and put an arm around my shoulder before addressing my mom. “So what do you think about your son’s battling? She’s a natural. See what I mean about wasted talent?”
“Yes, he’s… she’s…” Mom looked at me questioningly, trying to figure out what pronoun she should be using. I shrugged, not ready to commit to anything just yet. She continued on.
“…got potential. Just like… her… sister. So, how did this happen? It’s not normal for a null child to be able to use magic even through gender transformations. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
I cocked my head at the implication that this wasn’t the first time I’d been turned into a girl, but Sable continued on before I could ask about that.
“Well Ms. Owens, the specifics are proprietary to the Ward family, but I can give you the brief. As you’ve so eloquently noted, the Ward family is traditionally a bit ‘perverse’. We generally produce more kids per generation than most witch families. As you know, a few other big name families do this and have a culture of branch families as a result, but we don’t really do that anymore.”
Mom listened intently, but it seemed like she knew this part of the background by the look of light disgust on her face. This exposition was for my benefit, I guessed. Lyris took this opportunity to walk up behind me to listen in, still looking a bit too intimidated by mom’s Howl spell to stand in the open. Sable continued.
“Aside from the Ward family specialization in barriers, we also have a secondary specialization in familiar magic. Other than a few rogues and special cases, nobody else in the modern world, at least on this side, practices human familiar binding but us. It’s out of vogue for understandable reasons. It’s reprehensible to put another under your power.”
Mom nodded, clearly agreeing with this assessment. Lyris, on the other hand, looked surprised to hear that the human world had different standards than her own, and crept out from behind me to better listen in.
“Anyway, I won’t try to defend the family practice, but the upshot is our Bind Familiar sigil is a bit specialized compared to the one the public has access to. Wards focus on defensive magic to the exclusion of most other things. Our familiars aren’t just servants, they’re our sisters in magic, and with the enhanced bodies we give them they’re our front line fighters as well.”
Mom was starting to get impatient, clearly not pleased at the thought of family members, let alone me, being used as soldiers. Sable noted this and seemed to get to the point.
“And that includes null sons of the Ward line. We don’t let their natural talents go to waste. We bind a female familiar spirit to them and, with our specialized sigil, share our own mana with them. Being made a familiar isn’t fair. The genetic link between male and female mana use isn’t fair. But being denied their heritage, even keeping nulls in the dark about magic at all, isn’t something I agree with either. So I gave Morgan the choice.”
Mom considered this for some time before giving a huff. “I had no idea the Wards had figured out a way to bridge the gender gap, even if it is… wrong. That’s a topic near and dear to my heart.”
She looked at me with a somewhat guilty look. “Morgan, I know you’re mad at me for hiding magic from you for all this time. You have every right to be, even if it is family tradition. I’m sorry I’ve had to exclude you from a major part of my life and your heritage. I always thought telling you about it without giving you a way to use magic yourself yet would just be cruel.”
I was glad to get an apology out of her, but a certain word choice caught my ear. “Yet?”
She smiled. “My company is working on something. I can’t really talk about it. You know how magic NDAs work by now I’m sure. But yes, the project recently hit internal beta, so I think I can get you into the beta test soon. You’re a perfect candidate, especially now that you know a thing or two, and hopefully you won’t feel the need to stay bound as a familiar after I show you what we’ve got.”
Sable looked intrigued but refrained from prying. I was surprised, though. “You’ve been working on some way for witch boys to use magic? For how long?”
“It’s been a long time coming. Over a decade now, but we’ve recently overcome some technical limitations. Witch boys, wizard girls, even mundanes with a bit more work could all use magic freely. I wasn’t about to dangle that in front of your nose before the technology was proven, but I’ve been working on it all this time with you in mind.”
Wow. All this time I thought she’d been neglecting me, but maybe that was just my own perspective. I’d have to have a talk with her about how I’d felt about my upbringing on my end, but for now I was just happy she cared.
“Thanks mom… that means a lot.”
Sable looked happy for me. “That’s great news. I look forward to the product announcement. But I hope Morgan will stay my familiar anyway. It’s got perks above and beyond just using magic.”
Mom looked skeptical. “Sure, being a… catgirl does improve her physique a bit, but is that really worth being a familiar?”
Sable smiled knowingly. “Oh, we’re just getting started. And if you stick around to fight a manticore with us you’ll get to see first hand.”
Surprise blossomed on Mom’s face. “A manticore? What’s a mythical creature doing here?”
“That’s what we aim to find out, but taking it down comes first. Morgan, follow me, I’ll get you set up. It’s time to show you my secret project, but it’s for your eyes only.”
I followed her, interested in what all this hush hush has been about. As we left, I heard Lyris introducing herself to my mom.
“Hello, mother. I am Morgan’s new wife and coven mate…”
Oh god, not this again.
Sable took my hand and led me off before I could turn around and intervene, into one of the barns on the property. After closing the door, she smiled with mischief. “Let’s let that sort itself out and see what happens.”
“There’s no way that’s ending well.”
“At this point the best you can do is damage control after. Let’s focus.”
She raised the hand that she was holding between us and pulled me close, causing me to nearly collide with her. “Ready for your first upgrade, kitty?”
I was a bit flustered at being pulled in so close, but something about this felt familiar. She pulled a marker out of her pocket with her free hand and popped the cap off. Ah, now I remember. This is what she did when she first bound me. She was even holding the same hand.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing this time?”
“Yeah, just enabling a feature of your binding sigil that I left incomplete when I first drew it. I wanted to wait until your mana control was good before I did this, but today you showed me you could handle it.”
That didn’t really answer my question, but she’d already started drawing in a few extra lines connecting disparate sections. I felt the mana flow in the sigil change subtly.
“And what does this ‘feature’ do?”
“Well if this works out the way I think it will you should be able to get yourself familiars of your own. And I’ve got a specific one in mind.”
I was a little concerned about some of the phrasing there, but I was intrigued. “Okay, I’ll bite. What familiar do you have in mind?”
She smiled and poked a hidden sigil on the barn wall. The floor of the middle of the barn wavered and disappeared like it had been an illusion the whole time, revealing a pit that was maybe thirty feet deep.
At the bottom, under a layer of barrier energy, I could see a creature that could only be described as a dragon. I wasn’t sure of the measurements but I thought its body must have been about the size of a big draft horse. It had crimson scales, sharp horns, and I could see flames flicker in its mouth as it saw us.
“That’s the dragon you fought? With your entire staff? And you didn’t even kill it? And that’s a small dragon?”
“Yes to all of those.”
“And how do you expect me to go down there and make a contract with it?”
She walked over to a corner and opened a cooler. “Lunch is served.”
I was greeted by the familiar sight of some large poultry, a whole cleaned cockatrice, this one raw. Based on the size, it was the bigger of the two I’d fought. Sable pulled a packet of some kind of green gel out of her satchel and shoved it inside the cockatrice like stuffing. By the look of it, the refined cockatrice egg sleeping poison we’d been making over the past few days.
“You sure it’s gonna eat that?”
“Pretty sure, she seems to eat just about anything I’ve given her. Whole. Now, dump the cooler down there, and try not to fall in. It’s a one-way barrier.”
I hauled the cooler over to the side of the pit and tipped it up, dumping the raw cockatrice and its special filling down into the pit. Just as promised, it passed through the barrier, and the dragon gobbled it up. Looking back to Sable, who was now applying some hand sanitizer after handling raw poultry, I asked, “Alright, now what?”
“We wait a bit.”
We watched the dragon and she watched us warily for a few minutes, and I was worried that the poison wasn’t going to take, but her eyelids started to droop and she laid down on the floor, apparently settling in for a nap. Success, it would seem.
Sable nodded in approval. “That was worrying but it seems to have taken. We’re ready.”
“What do I do? I haven’t learned a familiar binding sigil, and I don’t know if I want my first time drawing one to be on a sleeping dragon.”
”That’s the beauty of this, you can do it using the sigil you’ve already got, no need to draw one. Alright, so, your binding sigil has a trigger, located here,” she said, pointing at a node on my arm sigil. “When you get down there, put your hand on the dragon somewhere and push mana through until you’re done. You’ll know when. Here’s some mana potions that you can drink if you get low. I'm not really sure how much you’ll need for this but hopefully these should cover you.”
“And this is going to bind the dragon and make it loyal or something?”
“In theory, yes.”
“Theory? That does not sound promising.”
“Let me clarify. There’s no practical reason a witch who is also a familiar shouldn’t be able to bind her own familiars except for artificial restrictions. The normal Bind Familiar sigil blocks use of spellcasting. The Ward version doesn’t, but still disables familiar binding. Your sigil lacks both restrictions, and the feature I just activated lets you deploy the effect directly. There’s no reason it shouldn’t bind a familiar spirit to you, but it just hasn’t been tested before.”
“Why was it disabled before?”
“Probably the same reason other mages disable the potential for spellcasting in their familiars. Restrictions to control them. Just so you know, I made sure you don’t have any artificial restrictions. I hate that shit, at least on people.”
“Alright, but if I go down there and make that dragon my familiar, is it going to have restrictions?”
“Yes, though they’re fairly basic safety things. She won’t be able to harm you for any reason, or anyone else you don’t specifically approve unless they attack her first. You can also call or dismiss her, but actually getting her to do things is going to require some diplomacy. Generally speaking monsters tend to respect the familiar bond to some extent regardless of how you achieve it, though.”
“Well, as long as it can’t hurt anyone… I don’t know how useful this is going to be, though… is binding a dragon really as easy as going down there and getting it, though? Do other mages do this?”
“Monsters like dragons are pretty uncommon on this world, but it’s not unheard of. It’s more common for elves to do it. Over here, well, it’s hard to catch a monster alive and get it to hold still long enough to bind. Your special binding sigil gives you an edge on that part. But, I don’t really know how long that sleep poison will hold. Get to it.”
Well, it sounded like she knew what she was doing, and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. I hopped down the thirty feet to the bottom of the pit, trying out a superhero landing (it looked cool, I promise), then approached the dragon. Even sleeping, the creature felt menacing, like it could lash out in its sleep and cut me in half. I slowed my approach dramatically, not wanting to risk waking it somehow.
Sable called down, startling me, “Oh, and hopefully the sleep will let you bypass the negotiation step, but if not, it should at least be a bit groggy. Just get it to consent to being your familiar, you’ll be fine.”
There was a negotiation step? Had I gone through that? Had I misread my job interview that badly? Maybe whatever magic judged consent around here wasn’t too picky. Either way, yet another something I could have been told about before this very moment, Sable…
It looked like a cat curled up, and was almost cute, in a terrifying way. Like the manticore, I knew this thing could probably give me a slow, painful death if it got a hold of me. Maybe I had some sort of cat version of a certain arachnid superhero’s danger sense, but I held off on saying ‘my cat sense is tingling’. Out loud, anyway. But yes, it was tingling.
But, I was able to put my hand on its forearm. Foreleg? Whatever, it had thumbs, it was an arm. The dragon didn’t seem to notice my touch. Just in case, I moved to the side slightly in the event that it suddenly blew fire, and I triggered the binding process. I could feel my hand seem to lock to the dragon’s arm as though by a magnetic force, and I could tell something beyond mana was flowing between us, but I couldn’t say what.
Sable called down from above. “You’re doing great! Just keep it going and do not try to stop early. You’re locked into the process anyway.”
Say these things before I start. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to shout at her or shush her. Would noise wake this thing up?
Fortunately it didn’t seem to wake up even with the noise. The flow of… whatever it was seemed to be increasing. It was starting to feel intense. My mana was draining rapidly so I chugged one of the potions and felt it replenishing, but not fast enough. I drank another. I felt a sense of exhilaration, like I was riding a rapidly accelerating roller coaster. But something felt wrong. This rollercoaster didn’t have any kind of restraint to hold me in. And it was rapidly approaching a dark tunnel. The mana drain was getting untenable, there was no way I could have bound this thing if it wasn’t sitting still while I chugged potions. I drank a few more for good measure.
The dragon opened its eyes.