Chapter 1: Summoning the Stitched One
The single bare bulb above her desk buzzed like a dying insect, a feeble counterpoint to the whispers crawling up from the pages. Graves traced a finger over the incantation, her nail—chipped black polish—catching on the rough paper. The book smelled of dust and something metallic, like old blood. She’d found it tucked behind a false panel in the library’s restricted section, sandwiched between a tome on funerary rites and another on parliamentary procedure. Someone had a sense of humor.
Her dorm room wasn’t a dorm room anymore. It was a lair. Black candles guttered in jam jars, casting jagged shadows that danced over towers of necromancy texts pilfered, photocopied, or just plain stolen. The air was thick with the scent of burnt wax and the older, damp-earth smell of the clay she’d molded into a crude, man-shaped form in the center of the chalk pentagram on the floor.
“Okay,” she whispered to herself, pushing a silver pigtail over her shoulder. “Theory is one thing. Practice is another.”
She’d tweaked the ritual. Of course she had. The standard reanimation patterns in the Liber Sanguinis were so pedestrian, so lacking in imagination. She’d cross-referenced, substituted verbs from a pre-Christian Aramaic binding rite, and used her own hair mixed into the clay. A personal touch. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum solo beneath the black lace of her top.
She began to chant. The words were gutteral, unfamiliar in her mouth, tasting of ash and copper. The candle flames stretched thin, then flared green. The hum in the air deepened, vibrating up through the soles of her boots. The clay figure on the floor didn’t move, but the space above it shimmered, like heat haze over asphalt.
A pop, a sizzle. One of the candles exploded, spattering hot wax across her notes. She didn’t flinch. Her voice grew louder, more certain. This was it. This was the forbidden click of a lock tumbling open.
The air in the pentagram tore.
It sounded like canvas ripping. The clay form dissolved into a cloud of granules, and in its place, something pulled itself together. Matter congealed from the shimmering distortion—pale flesh, stitched with dark, coarse thread. A broad chest. Shoulders that seemed to block out the light. The form solidified with a final, thunderclap crack that made her teeth vibrate.
Silence, except for the frantic buzz of the lightbulb and the rush of blood in her ears.
He was huge. Seven feet at least, kneeling in the confines of the pentagram. His skin was a patchwork of shades, all unnaturally pale, sewn together with meticulous, hideous craftsmanship. His hair was a ragged, dark mop. His face… was surprisingly placid. One eye was a deep, liquid brown, the other a milky, clouded blue. Both were fixed on her.
And then she looked down.
“Oh,” she said. The word left her mouth as a dry puff of air.
The creature was utterly, profoundly naked. And the summoning… she’d done something wrong. Or terribly, wonderfully right. The magical energy, the raw power she’d channeled, hadn’t just animated the flesh. It had… overclocked something. It had focused with absurd specificity.
Between his legs hung a cock of truly monstrous proportion, thick and heavy even at rest. Beneath it, his testicles were a swollen, weighty sack of unbelievable size. The anatomy was cartoonish, impossible, straining the very laws of biology. It was a mistake written in flesh. A glitch.
A hot, sharp bolt of something entirely new shot through her—a primal, hungry curiosity that drowned her academic thrill.
The creature—Victor, the name came to her instantly—tilted his head. The stitches at his neck pulled taut. He looked at his own hands, turning them over, then back at her.
“You,” he said. His voice was a low rumble, like stones grinding deep underground. It wasn’t a question.
“Me,” Graves confirmed, her own voice embarrassingly squeaky. She cleared her throat. “I, uh. I made you.”
Victor slowly rose to his feet. She had to crane her neck. He loomed, a mountain of stitched muscle and silent power. He took a single step, his foot obliterating a line of her chalk diagram.
“Wait!” she yelped, holding up a hand. “The circle! The binding containment!”
He paused, looked at the smudged chalk, then back at her. “It tickles.” He took another, definitive step out of the pentagram. The wards she’d painted on the floorboards didn’t flare. The hairs on her arms didn’t stand up. Nothing. He was just… free.
Panic, cold and slick, coiled in her gut. She’d summoned a creature that ignored basic hermetic law.
But Victor didn’t attack. He simply looked around her cramped room, his mismatched eyes wandering over the stacks of books, the band posters half-covered by esoteric charts, the half-empty mug of cold coffee. He reached a thick-fingered hand toward her stuffed raven on the shelf.
“Don’t–” she started.
He picked it up with surprising delicacy. He squeezed it. It squeaked. A low, ponderous sound vibrated from his chest. Was that… a laugh?
“Soft,” he stated.
“Yeah. It’s a toy.” The panic began to thaw, replaced by a dizzying wave of fascination. He was interactive. Cognitive. “Do you know what you are?”
He dropped the raven and faced her fully. His gaze was unnervingly direct. “Yours.” He said it as a simple fact, like stating the color of the sky. Then he looked down at his own colossal genitalia. “This is… large.”
A hysterical giggle bubbled in Graves’ throat. “Yeah. No shit. That’s… that’s probably my fault. The energy channeling must have had a focal feedback loop. I used a multiplier sigil from the Gremoire of St. Cyprian, and I think it interpreted the… the procreative, life-force aspect of the animation ritual a little too literally.”
Victor stared at her, unblinking. She wasn’t sure he understood a word.
“Magic goof,” she summarized weakly.
“Ah,” he said.
He took a step closer. The sheer bulk of him, the heat radiating from his patchwork skin, the eye-watering reality of his physical… endowment… it should have been terrifying. And it was. But it was something else, too. It was exhilarating. She’d done this. She’d pulled him from nothing.
“Does it… function?” The question was out before she could stop it, born of a clinical hunger that was rapidly ceasing to be clinical at all.
Victor looked down again. As they watched, a faint, eldritch glow—the same sickly green as the candle flames—pulsed briefly beneath his pale skin, coursing down his torso. The massive cock twitched, thickening further, becoming obscenely full. The balls beneath drew up slightly, looking even heavier.
“It… fills,” Victor said, a note of mild interest in his rumbling tone. “When the power comes. The power you used. It is still here.” He placed a hand on his lower abdomen. “A warmth.”
Graves’s mouth went dry. The ritual energy was residual, cycling in him. He was a battery. And the charge had a very clear, very absurd physical manifestation.
A sudden, aggressive knock shook her dorm room door.
“Graves! You in there? I smell like, burnt plastic and weed. Open up!”
Lindsay. Her roommate. Key clutches jingled outside.
Graves’s eyes widened in real terror. “Oh, fuck. Hide.”
Victor just stood there, a seven-foot-tall, naked, stitched-together man-giant with a supernatural package.
“Where?” he asked, reasonably.
The doorknob rattled. “I’m coming in, you weirdo!”
There was no closet big enough. The bed was too low. Graves did the only thing she could think of. She grabbed Victor’s massive, rough hand—his skin was cool and dry—and yanked him toward the only cover available.
“Behind me,” she hissed, stepping toward the door just as it began to swing open. She planted herself, trying to block the view of the ritual aftermath, the candles, the towering, pale form now pressed awkwardly against the wall behind her, his head bowed to avoid the ceiling.
The door opened. Lindsay, blonde and flushed from the gym, popped her head in. She scrunched her nose. “Dude. What is that smell? Are you melting action figures again?”
“Something like that,” Graves said, her voice impressively steady. She willed her body not to shake. From behind her, she felt a slight tremor in the wall. Victor was perfectly still, but the residual energy, sparked by the surprise, was glowing again. She could see a faint green luminescence reflecting in Lindsay’s eyes.
“What’s that green light?” Lindsay asked, trying to peek around her.
“Blacklight,” Graves blurted. “For… minerals. Go away, I’m in the middle of an experiment.”
“Freak,” Lindsay said, but she was already retreating, the door starting to swing shut. “Just air it out by tomorrow, my parents are visiting.”
The door clicked.
Graves didn’t move for a full ten seconds. She listened to Lindsay’s footsteps fade. Then she let out a shuddering breath and leaned back.
Her spine met not the cold wall, but Victor’s solid, warm stomach. She jerked forward, spinning to face him.
The glow was fading. But in the dim candlelight, his mismatched eyes were fixed on her, calm and waiting. A creator and her creation, standing in a room that smelled of magic and mistake. The night stretched ahead, vast and full of forbidden questions. The first one, burning in her mind as she looked at him, was not about necromantic theory or binding rites. It was much, much simpler.
What now?