The ritual Kasseri was about to perform was a hard one. Then again,summoning a familiar wasn't supposed to be easy. "let's see," she muttered," Crow feathers, 3 quartz crystals, energy stone, dacra. That's everything." Kasseri knelt in a prayer to the moon goddess for luck. What she was doing was quite unwarranted. No one was supposed to call a familiar. The familiar was supposed to find you, but Kasseri had been a witch for 3 years and not one had made its way into her life. She was desperate. Just as she started to set up the summons, a chill wind swirled around her. It scattered the October leaves and her crow feathers. To her horror, Kasseri's crow feathers swirled over her fence and into the next yard. The yard where Orthus lived.

Orthus was a rottweiler the size of a pony that took his job of guard dog very seriously. He seemed to know the exact moment someone who was not supposed to be there set foot in his yard. He was only 3 years old, but had supposedly been professionally trained. Kasseri was perplexed as to how the idiots next door had been able to afford such a creature. Their yard was full of old junk and Orthus didn't seem to be fed much, but his loyalty (or pride) to his territory seemed unending. He was terrifying and handsome, his black lips holding razor-sharp fangs. But Kasseri was still desperate, and most often the desperate are stupid.

Kasseri held a tiger's eye stone in one hand as she scaled the chain-link fence dividing the lush green grass from the brown junkyard. Kasseri prayed reverently under her breath that the great beast would be asleep or otherwise preoccupied as she reached the top of the fence. She paused for a moment to look for the wayward feathers and Orthus. The feathers were in the far corner of the junkyard on a top of a rusty, broken down car. Orthus was nowhere in sight. Kasseri maneuvered herself straight across from the feathers and prepared to run. Clutching the tiger's eye, she leaped off the fence and sprinted towards the car.

The moment her feet touched the earth, she heard growls and movement off to her left side. She knew that if she looked back, she'd fall and only ran faster as she heard big paws beating the ground behind her.

T he car was only a few yards away now, and Kasseri could almost hear the dog breathing behind her. She cried out as she leapt onto the top of the car listening to jaws snap behind her, lightly grazing her bare feet. She scrambled to the center of the car, grabbing the prize feathers and clutching them to her chest. Orthus tried to jump onto the car, but his paws couldn't find any purchase on the rusty sides. After a few more tries, his leaps against the car shaking its entire frame, Orthus sat down in front of the car, softly growling. It seemed that Kasseri would have go through him before leaving the yard. She took a few deep breathes, assessing the situation. 'Okay,' she thought,' I'm about 30 feet away from my yard, and there's a gargantuan, ferocious dog in the way. This'll be easy for sure.' She experimentally scooted over to one side of the car and was rewarded with the sight of Orthus getting up and slowly prowling towards that side. "That seed of a plan's gone then", she said quietly to herself. Orthus's ears perked up and he uttered a subdued 'ruff' noise. He seemed perplexed by the noise. "Haven't you ever heard people-talk Sir Dog?" Kasseri said calmly at him. Orthus tensed and sucked in a big breath. He sniffed her way inquisitively and cocked his head to the side. Kasseri wasn't sure where it would go, but she kept talking, "Come now, I'm sure we can work this out, why don't you just let me down from here and I'll quickly go on my way out of thy yard." Orthus narrowed his eyes as Kasseri scooted back away from him and started to get off the car. The dog seemed to fly to her side and started barking and howling enough to give a cat a heart attack. Kasseri narrowly avoided its jaws again as she hurried back up to her original position. "Damn thee animal!" she yelled down at the black form below her. He had stopped barking and was only growling menacingly now, his hackles raised. Kasseri felt angry tears form in her eyes and brushed them away. Tendrils of fear crept into her heart and mind as tried to think of a plan.

The moon had been at its zenith when she'd tried to start the ritual and with three hours gone, it was slowly sinking out of Kasseri's vision. Her mother was away on business and wouldn't be back for 2 more days so she wasn't going to find help there. Her father had run off after a failed attempt to murder Kasseri and her mother. This had happened when Kasseri was very small, so her memories were hazy and vague. She did not know much more than that. It seemed she would have to get out of this herself, outside parties not involved. She reached for her powers, hidden in the back of her mind; it was a small comfort, but comfort nonetheless. She hadn't figured out exactly what her powers entailed, because one needed a familiar to hone them. She bit back tears again as she remembered the past three years of her life, excitement at first when she and her mother realized she'd been born w/ magick, then a sort of happy nervousness while waiting for her familiar to appear, then despair and a sense of lacking seeping into Kasseri's heart. Her mother had been very understanding, helping her where she could, but without her own familiar, Kasseri was stuck. She sniffed back the tears as she noticed that Orthus's growling had stopped. She looked around warily and saw Orthus trying to scramble onto the front of the car, his claws scraping off the paint. She tried to calm her breathing down as she pressed the feathers and stone into her chest. She'd better think of something fast if she wanted to keep all her limbs.

Kasseri forcibly calmed herself down and let her as yet unknown power well up inside her. She seemed to be outside herself as she heard a voice rise in a sweet melody. She realized with an absentminded sort of shock that it was her own. Muted colors spun through the air in time with the wordless music flowing out of her. The made their way lazily down to a very surprised and confused dog and wrapped themselves around him. Orthus floated in the air, being hidden from view in diaphanous ribbons of blue and green and silver. The ribbons of color and music spun faster until the dog was completely covered. The colors glowed brighter and brighter until they were a silvery white, and Orthus's shape slowly changed. It lengthened and grew taller. Limbs popped and cracked as paws morphed into hands and feet, his snout sunk into his face and his ears shrank. The music faded suddenly then shot up in pitch as a single white-hot ribbon spun from Orthus and tied itself around Kasseri's chest. For a single moment, the dog-person and the girl were bound by spirit, then the music stopped and the ribbons faded from view. Kasseri collapsed on the cracked earth by the car, as only the stars watched a black-clothed figure tenderly scoop up the girl's limp body, and carry it across the yard.