The cavernous hallways of the Von Enizbern estate stretched around Rin like the drained arteries of some great beast. The ancient structure rustled and burbled to itself as it settled in the night. The air had an expectant quality like the instant of pause between a question and an answer, like a baited breath. The hugeness of the house highlighted its emptiness, long hallways stretched into darkness on either side of her and seemed to hide disconcerting secrets beyond the reach of her light.
She and Ilya had talked and reminisced for hours, swapping stories, asking questions, and simply enjoying each other's company. When the sun began to set Rin had plead fatigue from her journey and Ilya directed the calm and matronly housekeeper to show her to her room. The chamber was spacious, almost palatial, and furnished in the opulent style of European royalty.
Both the Tohsaka and Von Einzbern families were exceedingly old and exceedingly wealthy. Perhaps it was the Japanese origins of her own family and the European origins of her friends', but Rin was used to the simple grandeur of her own ancestral home. The Von Einzbern estate oozed riches from every wall. The furniture was gilt where it wasn't gold. The sheets were Egyptian cotton. The paintings on the walls were originals and antiques. The scale of everything was massive, even palatial.
Rin's luggage had been carried in and placed next to her bed. Her clothing had been unpacked and placed in the ornate dresser and the rest of her belongings had been organized neatly into drawers by Melva the housekeeper. At her instance the small case that held her enchanted gems had not been touched.
With deft hands and slender fingers she rolled the locks on the case into the correct combination. Before she opened it she held out two fingers and muttered a short incantation, lifting the magical wards that she had placed on the case. With a mechanical click it sprang open.
Inside were Rin's tools of thaumaturgy. A small mortar and pestle, several books bound in cracked leather with arcane runes scrawled on them, inks made from the ashes of saints and heroes, vials, focuses, and most importantly of all, crystals. Rin's unique talent for magic allowed her to transfer energy between her own magical circuits and independent placeholder objects like the multicolored gems arrayed in front of her. It meant that, given enough time, she could build up stores of mana unreachable by lesser magi simply by storing all of her excess energy in magical crystals each day.
Tonight she interrupted her normal routine of meditation and storing mana in her crystals. Tonight was different. Tonight was the night that she would finally use the power that she had been saving up for so long. Tonight she had enough mana to summon the greatest of all the Servants. Tonight, Saber would be hers.
Excitement rose in her breast as she padded silently through the house. She knew her destination, and soon she stood at the base of the long spiral staircase that lead up to the tower. With nervous steps she climbed until she passed through the trap door into the tiny octagonal chamber. The room was small, just big enough for what she had in mind. It had eight short, equidistant walls, four of which had round windows paned with wavy blown glass in tin frames. One of the frames was admitting a ghostly oval of moonlight that fell over one of the bare walls and shallow corners.
Rin knew she had to work quickly before the moon shifted and she lost her chance. Quickly she set down her thaumaturgical case and extracted a small round mirror, a roller, and a vial of thick, paste like ink. She rolled a thin layer of ink over the mirror and let it dry for a few seconds. Then she took a glass stylus and carefully, keeping her eye on the oval of moonlight, drew a complex but distorted summoning circle onto the mirror by wiping away the ink to create the lines that she needed. The summoning circle looked like it had been stretched out into a long oval like a penny squashed under the railroad tracks, its intricate designs perfectly proportioned but pulled to nearly twice the length of its width. When Rin opened the window and placed the mirror upright on the sill the distorted summoning circle sketched on its surface reflected the moonlight at just the right angle to create a perfectly circular symbol on the floor traced in glowing beams of moonlight.
With her summoning circle reflected on the floor in perfect, milky rays Rin quickly drew out five of her most powerful crystals and arrayed them around its surface at the points of the star that she had sketched there. Pentacle within circle, star within pentacle, each touching the other at five points where the corners of the pentacle met the outer edges of the circle. Into each chamber of the subdivided circle had been inscribed runes of summoning, binding, and obedience.
Now she was ready.
She began in low tones, the sonorous, hypnotic chant of the binding verse rising in the empty room.
"O Diener hark aus vergangenen Zeiten
Sei nun deine Macht noch einmal manifest warden"
Her voice rose as she called on the ancient contract. The spidery rays of moonlight reflected onto the floor began to glow, and as they glowed the rest of the light in the room seemed to dim.
"In Turbulenzen gebunden zu sein
Im Kampf getestet werden
In Brand nachgewiesen warden"
Rin's voice no longer sounded like the pitched lilt of a young woman. It had taken a deeper note, vibrating and rising. Each of the gems touching the magic circle began to glow, dully at first, then with rising radiance like five crystal stars in a microcosm of the sky.
"Ich rufe dich, und meinen Willen laß dein gebunden sein könnte
Und so gebunden lassen die Manifestation Ihrer könnte die Manifestation meines Willens sein
Um den Willen von sechs dass man der Regel sunder"
Rin felt eddies of magical energy swirl around her, drawn into the center of the circle like filings to a lode stone. They gathered there, twisting, writhing over one another, clumped into a mass of power that sought to escape the cylindrical boundary of the circle. Altho there was nothing to see with the naked eye Rin felt as if she would burn her sixth senses just by perceiving it. It was more power than she had ever seen in a single convergence.
"So ist die Bindung, und die Prüfung und die Prüfung
So ist mein Wille, so ist deine Macht
Lassen Sie wird und eins sein
United in Holy War"
The room was completely black now, a supernatural darkness punctuated only by the blazing brilliance of the magic circle. One by one the five magical gems powering it winked out as they were drained. Now came the most tenuous part of the ritual, the transfer. In truth no mage could channel enough power to sustain a Servant for even a few minutes. The summoning ritual created a rift, and through that rift liked the mage to the Grail itself. With a start Rin realized that the changeover had already happened. There was a second source of magical energy now, emanating from within the circle. The circle was no longer drawing in energy, it was struggling to prevent the kernel of magic within from escaping.
Rin watched in wonder as it built up. It filled the boundary of the summoning circle like water pouring into a cup, endless amounts of energy so powerful that the pillars of reality trembled to contain it. The circle filled like too much water being pumped into a glass tank and, like a glass tank, it began to crack. Worry shot through Rin but she dared not reinforce the boundary. If she interfered before the energy buildup could catalyze into the Summoning she could unleash a magical event of untold destruction.
Worry turned to panic as the magical pressure continued to build without resolving.
Something's wrong. It should have happened by now. I must have done something wrong. I must have forgotten some line, some modifier, some ritual component. If the power keeps building like this without the Summoning…
Rin's thoughts were scattered and she had but an instant to react. With the force of a bomb the magical barrier containing the grail energy shattered, bursting the walls of the parapet like a grenade and sending its roof up in a blazing pillar. Instinctively Rin threw up her hands, wildly drawing power from the gems in the case at her feet and funneling it into a shield. The force of the explosion shattered her shield the instant she materialized it up but it did prevent the blast from killing her outright. Instead it blew her back through the wreckage and into the empty air.
For a single sickening instant she hung as if in defiance of gravity, her arms and legs wind milling helplessly. In the burning ruins of the spire she thought she could see a dark figure, some monstrous apparition wreathed in smoke. And then she fell.
A single involuntary scream tore from her throat as she plummeted towards the earth. The ground rushed up to meet her, but before her body could shatter on the paving stones below something hit her from behind, wrapping her in a vice like embrace. She got the impression of charred flesh and a single, madly rolling eye, and then they hit the ground.
The impact knocked the wind from her lungs and she tumbled end over end before coming to a stop in the grass. She wound up flat on her back, dazed, bruised, and bleeding from half a dozen small cuts. She gasped for air and pushed herself onto her side, her eyes scanning wildly for her rescuer. She spotted a bulky figure just rolling to a stop some distance beyond her.
It stood, its back to Rin, and she fought apprehension as she tried to push herself up. It was a man, but proportioned like a giant out of myth. He was eight feet tall, with shoulders as broad as the hood of a car. Rippling muscle stood in clumps under skin stretched as taut as cellophane. His shoulders tapered to what seemed an impossibly tiny waist. It was as if he was a caricature of masculinity, a grotesque depiction of the idealized muscle man.
But as he turned and approached Rin his muscle mass seemed to fade, his height decreased, and he shrank to a somewhat more human proportion. Still, he was a jarring, disconcerting sight. He was completely bald. His head, chest, arms, and in truth his entire body was networked with a seething mass of clumpy scar tissue. He looked like he had been run through a meat grinder and then set on fire. Shiny burn scars glistened in the light of the flaming rubble scattered over the lawn, barely visible beneath the marks of cuts, claws, and scrapes. His left hand was mangled, the last two fingers cleanly severed along with most of the side of the palm. His brow was thick, almost neanderthalic, and his eyebrows were bleached white as if from old age. His left eye was a blind, milky white portal of cataracts. His right blazed with…something. Rage? Sorrow? Simple confusion?
Rin ignored the aching of her body and struggled to her feet, determined not meet this bestial assailant on her knees. Altho he was no longer at his magically enhanced height he still towered over her. Silenced stretched between them as they regarded one another, Rin staring defiantly up and the massive, disfigured interloper staring quizzically down.
It was he who broke the silence.
"Are you my master?"