Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Poker with a timeless void creature

Damien looked down at the Summoner’s Almanac. The pages flipped of their own accord, opening back up to the summoning circle. The image floated off the page, a single rune lighting up on it.

A single glance was all it took for Damien to confirm Henry’s words. The rune he’d drawn on the floor was missing a miniscule line near the top. The pit in the boy’s stomach grew heavier.

“What do you want with me?” He asked.

“I already told you. You called out for a summon. Here I am. As loathe as I am to admit it, you only made one mistake in your runes. I’ve been summoned, but it isn’t my whole power. It’s not even my whole being. The majority of my body is still floating off in the void. I want to explore the Mortal Plane, but I’m too weak to travel far from you. You’re my only link to this world, and I’ll simply fade away if I leave.”

Damien clenched his hands. He hadn’t heard of any rules like that in his studies, but he had to admit that much of the summoning ritual was left to those who specialized in it. There was only so much he’d been able to discover himself from the school’s libraries.

“What if we make a deal?” Henry offered. “I promise to never harm you if we make the contract. You will be safe from me in every way. We can both walk away happy, Damien. However, if you refuse, we can just say that I’m not the forgiving type. Either we both get what we want or neither of us do.”

The young man swallowed. He was struck, somehow for the first time, that he’d made a big mistake. It was a big day for wise thoughts such as those, and all things come in groups. As such, Damien was blessed with a second, much more sobering, revelation.

His mother would be home soon. If she went looking for him and looked into the shed… Damien swallowed.

“I’ll enter your body. Nobody will get their soul torn apart just by looking at me,” Henry said. Damien wasn’t sure how he could tell, but something told him that Henry would have been smiling had the creature even had a mouth.

Damien’s young mind churned as he desperately searched for a way out of his predicament. Unfortunately, he’d exceeded his revelation quota for the day. No ways of escape arose. There was only a single option left open.

“Deal,” Damien said, his voice barely a whisper.

Henry didn’t respond. A wall of force slammed into Damien. His skin burned and his muscles screamed in protest as something forced itself into his body. The headache that had been present ever since he’d summoned Henry quadrupled in strength. What felt like an electric shock traveled through Damien’s body, setting every single nerve alight with pain.

Then it was done. The pain vanished. Damien’s eyes opened and he drew in a deep breath.

“Well, that was something,” Damien’s mouth said. It was his voice too – but it wasn’t Damien speaking.

The boy tried to speak, but his mouth didn’t respond. Panic set in when he realized that his limbs no longer responded either.

“Don’t you worry, Damien,” Henry said with the boy’s voice. “You’re nice and safe. Youwon’t be harmed.”

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It didn’t take a genius to understand what Henry meant. Damien screamed within his own mind, desperately trying to move, to blink. To do anything.

Nothing happened. He was a prisoner behind the bars of his own eyes, forced to sit by and watch as Henry forced Damien’s body to stand. Henry-Damien stumbled, nearly falling over. Henry slowly wiggled each of his new limbs, getting accustomed to them.

After several minutes had passed, he took a weak step out of the summoning circle. Then he took another. And another.

“The time has come,” Henry proclaimed, a savage grin crawling across Damien’s face. “I am free!”

He took another step forward and promptly walked face first into an invisible wall. A flicker of pain shot through Damien’s head as something in his nose crunched and more blood started to pour from it.

Henry, unused to piloting Damien’s body, lost his balance and fell backwards onto the hard ground. The wind was knocked out of the boy’s lungs as several more bruises were added to his growing collection.

“What was that?” Henry asked, his voice garbled by the blood in his nostrils. He made Damien rise to his feet and reach out. His hand stopped above the second circle of runes that the boy had drawn.

Damien – the real one, not his body – suddenly found himself in control of his mouth again. Unfortunately, the rest of his body was completely unresponsive.

“I drew an extra ring of runes around the summoning circle,” Damien said, a note of pride leaking into his voice despite the situation he was in. “A summon’s power is only equal to that of their partner. I made that ring myself. I can’t break it from the inside, so now that you’re bonded with me, neither can you.”

“Clever,” Henry said, taking over Damien’s mouth once again. “But it gets you nowhere. With your amount of power, this circle won’t hold more than a week. A good try, boy. Good, but pointless.”

He handed back control of Damien’s mouth to its original owner. For a moment, the boy wondered how he must have looked, talking to himself in different voices while covered in blood and trapped within his own ring of runes. He counted himself lucky that nobody else was there to see him.

He was wrong, of course. I was there.

“You’re right,” Damien said. “But there’s no food or water in this circle. I’ll be dead before the week is up, and you’ll be sent back to wherever you came from.”

There was a pause. For the first time in millennia, Henry had escaped the void. And, after a few short days of captivity in a musty old barn, he was about to be on a trip straight back to it.

“Shit,” Henry said. Within his mind, Damien agreed with him.

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