Chapter Text
Most familiars were summoned through ritual- at least, that was how it worked for most mages.
Schools would designate a specific day for mages who qualified for the privilege of having a familiar. The mage would summon, and something from the unseen world would answer.
Ohyul considered himself ordinary. What he lacked, he made up for with relentless work. He studied longer than everyone else, practiced until his hands cramped, rewrote his notes until the pages were soft and worn.
Some found him admirable while others found him strange. He didn’t have many friends, and he liked it that way. His life was quiet: his family, his work, and Woonhak, his best friend since childhood.
Life had only grown more quiet when Woonhak was admitted to a different university, although it thankfully wasn’t too far away. It was disappointing, but not unexpected.
What Ohyul had never imagined, however, was himself responsible for another being. He spent most of his time trying to manage himself. A familiar, he thought, would only get in the way.
Life changed anyway, not in a flash of magic or a summoning circle.
Ohyul opened his front door one freezing morning, already running late for class and mentally calculating how fast he could get to campus. Instead, he nearly tripped over a massive white dog sitting on the step.
What the fuck, Ohyul thought, stumbling back.
The dog was enormous. Fluffy, thick-coated, with big eyes and a heavy plume of a tail wrapped around its paws. Snow had collected along its back like powdered sugar.
How long had it been waiting there?
The dog looked up at him, nervously. Its tail began to wag, slow at first, then faster, sending little sprays of snow into the air behind it.
Ohyul stared back. “Uh…”
He slowly closed the door. He opened it again.
The dog was still there, sitting exactly the same way. If anything, it looked even more uncertain than before.
“Hey, boy…” Ohyul said awkwardly. He cleared his throat. “Or girl. I don’t know.”
He had absolutely no experience with animals. No pets growing up, no friends with dogs he spent time around. The thing in front of him looked less like a dog and more like a small polar bear someone had left on his porch.
Up close, it was even bigger than he’d first thought. Its eyes were dark and strangely expressive, following his movements with careful attention.
“Oh my god,” Ohyul muttered under his breath.
Ohyul’s brain started sprinting through possibilities. Someone’s lost pet? But he had never seen a dog like this anywhere in the neighborhood. And there was no collar or tag around its neck.
He pulled out his phone, fingers already numb from the cold, searching for nearby shelters. If he hurried, maybe he could drop the dog off someplace on the way to campus. He was already going to be late.
Ohyul squinted at the screen. “Is this… a shelter?” he muttered to himself. “Fourteen minutes.”
“Do you usually leave your familiars outside?”
Ohyul stopped scrolling. The words slid into the quiet morning so casually that for a moment his brain filed them under things he must have imagined.
“My what? Wait, what?”
“Your familiar,” the dog said patiently. Then it added, with a small wag of its tail, “Me.”
“…I don’t have a familiar,” he said eventually.
The dog tilted its head.
Ohyul stepped back inside the house and closed the door halfway, letting the warm air relax his body. He stood there in the entryway for several seconds, breathing out slowly through his nose.
Maybe he was still half asleep, or maybe this was what happened when you didn’t get enough sleep for three weeks straight.
From outside, the voice came again, faint through the door.
“…Are you coming back?”
Ohyul groaned, quietly.
“Yes,” he muttered.