The apartment was silent for a long moment.
The grimoire, bound in what looked like flayed skin, had promised a solution. A servant to ease your burdens. A companion to fill the void. He’d performed the ritual for a simple familiar, a demon to do his bidding. Instead, the floor had cracked open like a wound, and from the sulfurous smoke, she had stepped forth.
She was called Malvoria.
Elias had stared, dumbfounded. “My… slave?”
Then, he felt a touch. Cool, dry, and impossibly light. Malvoria’s hand rested on his shoulder. Demon Maiden and Slave Summoning
“Kneel, mortal,” she had whispered, her voice the sound of a dry well echoing. “Your summoning was clumsy, your offering pathetic. But the pact is sealed. You are my master.”
The breakthrough came not from a command, but from a collapse. The apartment was silent for a long moment
The first few days were a nightmare.
The chains of the slave pact were iron and magic. But the chains of a shared, broken loneliness were forged in something far stranger. A companion to fill the void
He’d been a fool. A desperate, heartbroken fool.