Chapter 1: An Unbreakable Vow

Chapter 1: An Unbreakable Vow

The scent of burnt sugar, ozone, and week-old coffee hung heavy in the air of my apartment, a custom aromatherapy blend I called ‘Impending Doom.’ A half-finished essay on Thaumaturgical Ethics was taunting me from my laptop screen, its cursor blinking like a judgmental eye. Beside it, a precarious stack of padded envelopes bulged with the talismans for my online shop, ‘Pip’s Preternatural Paraphernalia,’ each one promising a little piece of magical peace I couldn't seem to find for myself.

My name is Piper Holloway, and my life was a masterclass in controlled chaos. Most of the time.

I ran a hand through my messy auburn hair, fingers snagging on the ballpoint pen I’d jammed in there hours ago. My eyes, which tended to shift from hazel to a stormy green when I was stressed, were definitely leaning towards evergreen. One deadline for the Umbral Athenaeum—the supernatural world’s answer to a community college—was bearing down on me, and a dozen orders for good luck charms and anxiety wards needed to be shipped by morning. Juggling my mundane and magical lives was less a balancing act and more a frantic, plate-spinning scramble.

A soft sound from the bedroom, the rustle of sheets, sent a jolt of something warm and terrifying through my chest. Leo.

Peeking through the doorway, I saw him sleeping, his dark hair a mess against my pillow, his face relaxed and utterly peaceful. He was so... normal. A graphic designer with a kind smile and a laugh that made my stomach flip. He had no idea that the rustling in the alley below wasn't just stray cats, or that the flickering lights in our building weren’t faulty wiring. He was a good, solid, human anchor in my turbulent world, and the thought of anything touching him, of the shadows that clung to my life even daring to brush against his, was unbearable.

That was the problem. He was dating a witch whose past mistakes had a bad habit of creeping back. Specifically, one very angry, very patient demon named Malgorath that I’d royally pissed off during a botched banishing two years ago. I saw its tendrils of shadow in every dark corner, felt its cold breath in every sudden draft. The fear for myself had become a dull, constant ache. The fear for Leo was a sharp, stabbing panic.

“No,” I whispered, a fierce determination solidifying in my gut. “Not him.”

My essay could wait. The orders could wait. Protecting Leo couldn't.

I moved to my workstation—a scarred wooden desk that doubled as my altar. Jars of herbs were crammed between textbooks, silver rings I’d enchanted lay scattered like shrapnel, and a half-eaten bag of chips sat next to a pristine quartz crystal. This wasn’t some hallowed, sacred space. It was a workshop, and I was a craftsman on a deadline.

I grabbed the quartz, its coolness a familiar comfort in my ink-stained palm. I needed something simple, something fast. A basic ward of protection. I’d done hundreds. I could do one in my sleep.

I lit a bundle of sage, the sharp, cleansing smoke curling around my hands. With a silver carving tool, I began etching a sigil of warding onto a smooth, black river stone—a rune of shielding, interlaced with symbols for concealment and deflection. My motions were sure, practiced, but my mind was a whirlwind.

He has to be safe. He can’t pay for my mistakes. Malgorath can have me, but it can’t have him. The thought wasn’t just a thought; it was a desperate prayer, a raw, emotional plea that poured from me into the stone.

I began the chant, the ancient words usually a soothing cadence. But tonight, they felt sharp, frantic. My magic, a wild, untamed thing on the best of days, began to rise. It prickled at my skin, a familiar static charge that usually hummed with controlled power. Tonight, it wasn't humming. It was screaming. My fierce, desperate need to protect Leo was acting like gasoline on a flame. I felt the power swell beyond my control, my emotions twisting the spell, amplifying it, warping it into something… more.

The air thickened, tasting of lightning and raw potential. The sigil on the stone began to glow, not with the gentle silver light of a simple ward, but with a blinding, furious gold. Panic seized me. This was wrong. This was too much power.

I tried to pull back, to sever the connection, but it was like trying to stop a tidal wave with my bare hands. The magic ripped from me, a raw, untempered torrent of everything I felt for him—my love, my fear, my guilt.

With a final, silent concussion that rattled the jars on my desk, the energy shot from my hands. But it didn't settle on the stone.

Instead, a thread of pure, liquid gold light, no thicker than a spider’s silk, unspooled from my chest. It snaked through the air, impossibly bright, and moved with a terrifying purpose towards the bedroom. I watched, frozen in horror, as it passed through the doorframe and drifted down, connecting with the center of Leo’s chest as he slept.

The golden thread pulsed with a soft, steady rhythm, a second, magical heartbeat tethering him directly to me.

My own heart hammered against my ribs. “No, no, no…”

“Well,” a voice, cool and elegant as a shard of ice, cut through my panic. “That’s certainly one way to tell a man you’re committed.”

I spun around. Seraphina Vaduva leaned against the doorframe of her own room, a vision of deadly perfection in a black silk robe. Her jet-black bob was immaculate, her pale skin almost luminous in the dim light, and her grey eyes, ancient and unnervingly perceptive, were fixed on the golden thread.

“Sera, I—I don’t know what happened,” I stammered, my hands trembling. “It was just a ward. It got away from me.”

Sera didn’t move. Her stillness was more intimidating than any sudden motion. She pushed off the doorframe and glided into the room, her bare feet making no sound on the floorboards. She circled the glowing tether, her expression unreadable, analytical.

“Your control has always been abysmal, Piper,” she stated, not unkindly. It was simply a fact, like saying the sky was blue or that her vampire family ran the supernatural underworld like a crime syndicate. “You let your emotions drive your casting. What were you feeling?”

“I was scared,” I admitted, my voice cracking. “I was thinking about Malgorath. I just… I wanted to keep him safe. I wanted to protect him with everything I had.”

Sera’s gaze flicked from the thread to my face. A flicker of something—pity, maybe—crossed her features before being suppressed. “You’ve done more than protect him.”

She reached out a single, elegant finger, stopping just short of the glowing strand. The air around it shimmered. “This isn’t a ward. A ward is a shield you place on someone. This… this is a connection. An anchor. You’ve poured a piece of your own magical essence into him to serve as that shield.”

I stared at her, not understanding. “So? I linked us? I can break it, right?”

Sera finally met my eyes, and the cold, hard truth in her gaze stole the breath from my lungs.

“You can’t break it because it isn’t a spell anymore. It’s a vow. An unbreakable, magical contract,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, serious tone. “Piper, what you just did… Witches don’t take human familiars anymore for a reason.”

The word hit me like a physical blow. “Familiar? No! I wouldn’t—he’s not an animal! He’s a person!”

“The magic doesn’t care,” Sera countered, her voice sharp. “You’ve bound a human soul to your magical core. You’ve made him your familiar.”

A wave of nausea crashed over me as the full implication of the old texts I’d skimmed began to surface. Ancient, forbidden practices. Desperate measures for desperate times. I looked from Sera’s grim face to the golden thread pulsing softly in the air, connecting me to the sleeping, oblivious man in the other room. A man whose life I had just irrevocably, catastrophically upended.

“Okay,” I said, my voice shaking as I grasped for any straw of hope. “Okay, so he’s my familiar. It’s not… it’s not the end of the world, right? We can manage it. We can figure it out.”

Sera was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her words were quiet, precise, and they shattered what little was left of my world.

“His body has no way to channel or process the raw power you’ve tethered to him. Your magic will act like a poison, Piper. It will burn through his life force, his soul, until there’s nothing left. You haven’t just bound him.”

She took a step closer, her cold grey eyes holding mine, ensuring I understood the full weight of my failure.

“You’ve started a countdown to his death.”