My Enemy Is My Familiar [BL]

To everyone who sees two men trying to kill each other and immediately starts shipping them.

This one is for you.

There are enemies. There is magic. There is one bed. There are several extremely avoidable bad decisions and two grown men who will avoid one honest conversation for as long as humanly possible.

No one here is going to behave sensibly.

Enjoy.

Aren Vale had three requirements for his first familiar.

First, it shouldn’t spit venom.

Second, preferably it wouldn’t shed.

Third—and here Aren was willing to negotiate only within reason—it should fit in his room.

None of these struck him as particularly unreasonable. Over the past six years, he’d watched students walk out of ritual halls accompanied by creatures equipped with too many legs, too few eyes, or an altogether too casual attitude toward other people’s property. One of last year’s graduates had summoned something that looked like a cat right up until it opened its mouth. Another student had spent half a semester wearing gloves because her familiar expressed affection exclusively by biting fingers.

Aren didn’t need anything impressive. He genuinely had no interest in a creature that would draw admiring looks during official presentations or make other summoners stare at him with envy. If the ritual ended with something small, intelligent, and capable of going several hours a day without destroying the furniture, he would consider it a personal victory.

A familiar wasn’t a pet, anyway, even if a fair number of students started treating theirs like one after a few months. The term covered far more creatures than the popular stories about mages going everywhere with ravens perched on their shoulders would suggest.

Animal-shaped familiars were the most common. They didn’t necessarily belong to any species one might encounter in a forest or at a market, but at least the number of paws, wings, and heads usually remained within the bounds of reason. Some resembled foxes, cats, birds, or small reptiles, though the similarities tended to end wherever ordinary anatomy did. Some could see the flow of magic. Others could pass through locked doors, alter the temperature around them, or sense an active sigil through several walls.

Less often, a ritual attracted something harder to classify: spirits, elemental beings, creatures made more of magic than flesh, and occasionally familiars with humanoid forms. Those almost always became the talk of half the College, particularly if they could speak or possessed enough intelligence to argue with their summoner.

Aren had once seen an older student’s familiar who looked like a slender woman until you got close enough to notice that her skin was translucent and her hair moved without the slightest trace of wind. Another time, one of the professors had brought a creature to a lecture that had a human silhouette, horns, and entirely too many teeth.

Aren did not need anything that attracted that kind of attention. The more ordinary the familiar, the better. Ideally, something he could introduce to a neighbor without first having to explain why they shouldn’t look it directly in the eyes.

The ritual didn’t choose a familiar by species, anyway. That was one of those things popular stories made considerably more interesting than it actually was.

There was no grand destiny involved, no magical soulmate, no creature that had been waiting since birth for the right summoner to finally draw the right circle. At least, no one had ever managed to prove such a thing, despite romance authors insisting otherwise for the past several centuries.

What the ritual searched for above all else was magical compatibility.

Magic moved through every mage’s body a little differently and reacted to the world around them in its own way. The differences were subtle, but enough that some kinds of magic worked together with almost no resistance while others required constant correction and stabilization. A summoning circle could reach farther than a summoner ever could on their own, searching for a being whose magical signature could enter into a lasting resonance with theirs.

They didn’t have to wield the same kind of magic. They didn’t even have to be particularly similar. What mattered was whether their combined energy formed a stable system instead of trying to tear the contract apart the moment it came under any real strain.

That was why a familiar was more than an extra pair of eyes or a magical assistant. Once the contract was properly sealed, it became a second anchor for the summoner. It could absorb part of the overload, smooth out unstable magical flow, and help sustain constructs a mage working alone would have been forced to abandon much sooner.

There was, admittedly, a certain irony in someone specializing in stable bonds requiring a second being to make his own magic even more stable. Aren had decided not to examine that too closely.

The ability to form such a bond was also the final proof that a summoner could create and maintain a stable, long-term contract. Summoning a familiar was the last practical stage of their training. A person could pass every theoretical exam, draw flawless sigils, and memorize several hundred binding formulas, but until they had sealed a contract of their own, the College did not consider them a fully trained summoner.

Afterward, the familiar became part of the mage’s work. Depending on the species, it might sense magical disturbances, help maintain more complex sigils, carry small amounts of energy, or simply do things a human couldn’t do as quickly or safely. Some made excellent scouts. Others were suited to protection or tracking. Still others possessed abilities so narrow they bordered on absurdly specific.

Aren really did not need anything unusual. In a few hours, he mainly wanted a passing mark, a signature on his paperwork, and a creature he could survive eight years of royal service with without having to replace all his furniture.

“Rat,” Master Corvin said.

Aren looked up from the final line of the circle and glanced at him over his shoulder. “What?”

Corvin stood beside one of the stone pillars with his hands clasped behind his back and the expression of a man who had spent at least the past hour regretting his decision to take on an apprentice. His silver-framed glasses had slipped slightly down his nose, though apparently not far enough for him to consider fixing them worth the effort. “A rat meets all three requirements.”

“Rats shed,” Aren pointed out, frowning.

“Barely.”

“That still counts as shedding.”

Corvin gave a quiet sigh. “If you intend to rule out every creature with fur, you’re going to narrow your options considerably.”

“I can live with fur. I cannot live with fur in my tea.”

“Drink less tea.”

Aren stared at him in genuine offense. “Now you’ve gone too far.”

The corner of Magistra Elowen’s mouth twitched. She stood at the long table against the wall, checking the contents of a row of small vials for the third time as though there were a genuine possibility one of them had managed to change what was inside it over the past five minutes. The first time, Aren had assumed she was simply thorough. By the third, he had started to suspect she was nervous too. She was merely doing it with considerably more elegance than he was.

Knowing he wasn’t the only one feeling the tension helped. A little.

“Besides, I’d like to preserve whatever remains of my dignity,” he added.

Corvin looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Vale, I watched you try to open a bottle of ink with your teeth yesterday.”

“That was an emergency.”

“The cap was loose.”

“I didn’t know that before I used my teeth.”

“You could have tried your hands.”

Aren raised an eyebrow. “I did.”

“One hand.”

“My other hand was occupied.”

Corvin regarded him for a moment. “You were holding a cookie.”

Aren fell silent, apparently considering whether there was any possible defense that wouldn’t make his situation worse. “I maintain that the circumstances were complicated.”

This time Elowen actually laughed, though quietly. Aren decided that was a good sign. Examiners probably didn’t laugh at someone immediately before informing him that he’d just wasted six years of his life.

At least, he hoped they didn’t.

He turned back to the circle.

The sigil drawn across the stone floor took up nearly the entire center of the hall. Three concentric rings intersected with anchoring lines, with directional marks and smaller symbols for stabilizing magical flow arranged between them. At the center, they’d left an empty space perhaps two meters across, large enough for most ordinary familiars.

Aren measured it with his eyes. Two meters should be plenty. If whatever he summoned needed more room than that, the size of his bedroom would stop being the problem. The problem would become why he’d summoned something that large in the first place.

He passed his hand a few centimeters above the final section of the sigil, checking the path of the line without touching the chalk. Everything looked exactly as it should.

It did absolutely nothing to calm him.

Over the past two weeks, he’d spent more time with this circle than in his own bed. He knew every symbol. He knew where the chalk was slightly thicker because he’d sneezed halfway through drawing it, where he’d corrected one of the lines after Corvin told him its angle looked like the work of a man on his third bottle of wine, and where a faint discoloration in the stone resembled an extra symbol if viewed from the wrong angle.

He could draw the entire ritual from memory. He could probably do it in his sleep.

He was almost certain he’d woken up two nights ago convinced that his blanket had an incorrectly drawn binding line.

“Done,” he said at last.

“Check it again,” Corvin replied.

Aren slowly turned his head toward him. “I’ve checked it three times.”

“Check it a fourth.”

“Is this part of the exam?”

“No. This is part of knowing you.”

Aren narrowed his eyes. “That sounds insulting.”

“It was meant to.”

He sighed, but crouched beside the outer ring and started another inspection. Naturally, he found nothing.

The first anchoring point was correct. So was the second. Every line closed exactly where it should. The protective symbols faced inward rather than outward, which, despite what one of his classmates had once claimed, did matter and was not merely “an aesthetic detail.”

Aren knew this because three years ago, that same classmate had summoned a small horned creature directly outside his own protective circle. The creature had immediately escaped, and they hadn’t found it until two days later, in the kitchen.

To this day, no one knew how it had gotten into the pantry.

Aren moved on to the next line and checked its path once more. “Everything’s fine.”

“Are you sure?” Corvin asked.

Aren looked up. “If you ask me that one more time, I’m going to start suspecting you broke something.”

Corvin didn’t answer immediately.

That was unusual enough to make Aren study him more closely. His master hadn’t moved, but something shifted across his face for a second. It wasn’t fear. More like a flicker of irritation or concentration, gone so quickly Aren could just as easily have imagined it.

“I didn’t break anything,” Corvin said at last.