1889, the new city of Tokyo, Meiji Era, Japan

The mind's pain, the contract devised a century ago by the Marquis de Sade, a French wizard for whom the word 'sadist' was coined, is an unwise and evil action, petty control at best, utter subjugation at worst.

There are thousands of ways to contract a familiar. I am an expert on the process in my own realm, the Makai, the demonic plane mirrored in the sky of the human world. When I say that he had chosen the most painful and degrading one of them all, I want you to know what that means. I want you to know the choice he made, and the kind of man this wizard is.

The pain is fantastic, deplorable, pain beyond pain, like every nerve ending has been refilled with boiling oil, and then it chills to ice. When you're put under l'esprit de peine, and too weak or too slow to fight it off, as I was, it's a sensation like being burned and frozen, ripping you back with a chain around your neck that strangles you all through the dizzying ride in nothing space and through the sky, clutching at passing birds as you fall. I was lucky not to be sick on myself when I finally tumbled through the rift, my fingernails and lips turning blue already when his boot dug into my lap as leverage for the lasso.

He made me perform the obeisance then, my voice a high whisper around the chain noose, then a very real object around my throat as I swore him my fidelity.

It must be sealed in blood, but he was prepared enough to know that. I reached out, feebly, for the chalk dust of the circle on that cold winter's morning, trying to break the glyphs so I could rend this bastard into a billion blood-stained pieces, but his boot came crashing down on my hand, grinding and crushing it mercilessly, until the bones shattered and tore through skin. I was keening around the cold iron links, retching awfully at the pain, my eyesight going bizarre with the tears stroking my face. It distorted my first views of him, everything raucous and mad with agony and fear.

I think often of how different my life would be if I'd made it to the chalk, smudged even the edge of those obsessively precise lines.

Your ability to change is muted, if you don't escape l'esprit de peine, and you assume truest form immediately. One's soul-form is an embarrassing one to reoccupy, and only used in rare instances in the Makai, one of them being lovemaking. You can indulge without being in soul-form, if you aren't particularly close with your partner, but that was an act often condemned to me by my mother for its inherent promiscuity.

I wish I could say l'esprit de peine wasn't often used. Unfortunately there are many two-bit bastards who think they're hard enough to try it. The most common result of their foolishness is the pain letting up and their familiar tearing them to pieces in retaliation. The second most common is they hold on for too long, and the demon suffocates in agony, leaving the wizard with its twisted body locked in soul-form to clean up, and precious little reasons to give the Witch Hunter and his gremlins why he broke the law that governs the use of a demon as a familiar (which is not glorious, certainly, but does have stipends against outright murder).

But every once in a score of years, a wizard is cruel enough to try it, smart enough to succeed, and highly placed enough that no one complains when the tell-tale signs of its usage (such as a bruised familiar trailing behind, trapped always in the revealing nudity of soul-form) pass them by.

My svetla na master was one such.

His name is Karasu, a cold man with hard eyes, and desires even harder and colder.

My name is Kurama, a fox-spirit, known in various places as a kitsune, a huli jing, or a kumiho. I was named Youko at the height of my powers, but my soul-form, which may be considered the weak human inside any spirit, was a small-waisted redhead, a boy with bright green eyes and well-turned feet.

And believe you me, the fact that the attractiveness of my soul form in its perpetual youth was the reason he was drawn to the famous Youko Kurama rankled me daily. I have my pride, after all: I was worth more than a pretty bedwarmer.

Though truthfully, I think he knew that too.