《My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror》Chapter 4: Poker with a timeless void creature
Advertisement
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. Henry didn’t have to show him his other mistake. At this point, there was no need to.
“What do you want with me?” He asked.
“I already told you. You called out for a summon. Here I am. As loath as I am to admit it, you only made two mistakes 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.”
“I’ve got another question,” Damien said, dodging the eldritch creature’s offer. “Why do you talk like… well, a kid? You don’t sound like an ancient being.”
Advertisement
“This is all to make things easier on you,” Henry said in a soothing tone. “I have studied humans for millennia. You are speaking to a façade – a persona, if you will. If you attempted to speak to my true form – well, you know what happened when you saw me. The results of speaking to me would be even worse.”
The young man swallowed. It struck him, 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.
Advertisement
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. You won’t be harmed.”
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.
Advertisement
- In Serial14 Chapters
Infinity Online
After their mother goes missing, Jane and Jackson must find out what happened to her and who is responsible. Joined by their quirky father, Lionel and their fearsome protector Gerald, their only lead is inside of the new immersive world of Infinity Online.
8 72 - In Serial16 Chapters
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Set one hundred years after the kingdom of Hyrule’s downfall to Calamity Ganon, this six-book series reveals a land still reeling and disunited in the Calamity’s aftermath – and threatened anew by the great machines initially meant to protect them. Link, the fallen hero from a century ago, awakens from a healing sleep to find his memory gone and his forgotten world in chaos. With only the word of a dead king’s spirit and the aged leader of the mysterious Sheikah to guide him, Hyrule’s former Champion sets out to redeem the kingdom and himself. As he does, Link grapples with the true cost of his failure and the harrowing guilt that assails him. Yet with the princess he was commissioned to protect somehow still alive and only just holding Ganon’s full wrath at bay, Link must allow himself to let go of the past and embrace a present that needs him now more than ever before.
8 424 - In Serial45 Chapters
Forward In Time
A new threat comes to the Four Nations. Unfortunately, at the same time, the Gaang is sent forward in time... to the future... seventy years into the future. What they don't realize, is that there are bigger things going on. There's a bigger plan happening... and Aang is apart of it.Can they stop it and return to their own time?
8 232 - In Serial84 Chapters
(EX)tinction.Protocol() - All Life is precious...unless it gives EXP.
Nightmares. Monsters. Creatures. MAJIK? HP? MP? WTF IS MAGN??? The world is falling into a twisted dark age where organic and inorganic matter is being ‘changed’ giving birth to disturbing nightmare creatures. Humanity is not excluded however; they are given the chance to reach new evolutionary heights and absorb power.... As long as they can fight and kill. Follow fresh parents Goduyne and Marrigan do what they can to protect newborn boy Lone, in a harsh and terrifying world that has technology and normalcy abruptly rug-pulled from humanity.Already facing the harsh tests of being new parents, can they survive long enough to give their child a chance at life?.. This isn’t your ‘happy-go-lucky’ RPG MMO theme park experience. There is no system. Just the raw laws of physics, twisted & bent. There is no help guide. Just bloody trial and error. There is no noob zone. Just harsh survival. All life is precious…. ...unless it gives EXP it seems.
8 141 - In Serial15 Chapters
KILLERS & KINGS
This is the first installment of what will be a multi-part adventure in a world where magic and monsters are returning and want to dominate the world. In this installment, the world of Kronos must face a radical religion that kills and rapes everyone who does not convert. The Kings of Kronos along with the few mages and some of the non-human races must work together to save their people.
8 171 - In Serial32 Chapters
STAND BY ME ⟦ BRIDGERTON ⟧
SO, DARLING, DARLING STAND MY MEOH, STAND BY ME"TAKE MY HAND" "WHY""BECAUSE I WANT TO ASK YOU TO MARRY ME"
8 191