Free Web NovelChapter 32: Velarrax
"What should not be allowed?"
The voice cut through the fading remnants of the cave and the forest and everything that had been solid a moment ago, and Ren turned toward it with his heart still racing from the unwanted transportation.
He was not at the cave anymore.
The space around him had resolved into something that made very little architectural sense. A black and white tiled platform stretched out beneath his feet, the pattern clean and deliberate, and the air around it was neither dark nor light but something in between, a warm dim that felt less like a place and more like the suggestion of one. The scent reached him before anything else did, something herbal and heavy, the particular smell of something burning that wasn’t quite wood and wasn’t quite anything he had a name for.
Then the couch came into focus.
And the figure on it.
He was a man, or at least looked like one, slim and well-built in the way that suggested the build had come naturally rather than from any effort, a loose black robe hanging open around his frame and genuinely the shortest black shorts Ren had ever seen on a person who wasn’t at a beach. His hair went in several directions simultaneously, the kind of hair that suggested sleep had happened at some point but the details were unclear.
His eyes carried the specific quality of someone who had been awake for too long or had been asleep too recently, the line between the two thoroughly blurred. In one hand he held a pipe connected by a thin tube to a cylindrical glass container sitting on the floor beside the couch, the glass interior clouded with smoke that curled upward in lazy spirals.
He was, very clearly, in the middle of smoking whatever was in that container.
Ren stared at him.
"What the hell," he muttered, mostly to himself.
The man’s eyes drifted over and registered Ren’s presence with the unhurried pace of someone whose reaction time had been somewhat softened by whatever was in the glass tube. Something clicked behind his expression and he straightened up, pulling the pipe from his mouth, letting out a cough that went on for slightly longer than was dignified.
He got to his feet.
"Yo." He pointed at Ren with the hand that wasn’t holding the pipe. "Yo, Ren."
Ren said nothing.
"My bad," the man said, dropping the pipe onto the couch cushion, waving a hand through the smoke still drifting between them. "Sorry for just yanking you over like that, that was probably jarring." He crossed the platform toward Ren with the loose, easy stride of someone who had never once in their existence been in a hurry, stopped a few feet away, and extended his fist.
Ren looked at the fist.
Looked at the man.
Looked at the fist again.
"You have to be kidding me," he said.
"Nah, nah, it’s chill." The man lowered his hand, looked around the space, and then looked back at Ren with an expression of someone trying to find the right way to deliver news they already knew wasn’t going to land well. "Okay so. I know this is probably not what you were expecting. This is probably weird. I get that." He paused. "I’m one of the gods of this world."
Ren opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"I’m also," the man continued, his voice dropping just slightly, something more serious moving underneath the easy surface of it without fully displacing it, "the one who blessed the divine armament you consumed."
Ren stared at him for a long moment.
"You have to be joking," he said. "There is absolutely no way that someone like you is a god."
"Okay, chill out on that," the man said, pointing at him. "I’m a real god. You want proof, I can do proof. I’m just, I don’t usually lead with proof because it tends to traumatize people and I’m trying to keep this casual." He dropped onto the edge of the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Divine armaments work the way they do because we put a piece of our soul into them.
Old agreement between the gods and humans, been that way for a long time. Normally we don’t bother using that connection. There’s no point in a god calling up every human who ever got their hands on one of our armaments, that would be exhausting." He looked up at Ren. "But for you it’s different."
"Different how," Ren said, his arms crossed, deeply unconvinced by the entirety of this situation.
The man stood again, crossing the distance between them until he was close enough that Ren could very clearly smell the smoke coming off him, and looked at him with the particular focus of someone whose eyes had suddenly become a lot more awake than the rest of him suggested.
"I can sense something about you," he said. "Something that doesn’t fit this world the way everything else does." He tilted his head slightly. "Have you spoken to any other gods before? Before getting here?"
"No," Ren said immediately.
The man looked at him.
"Nah, you’re lying." He held up a hand before Ren could respond. "But I respect it. Not wanting to give up your secrets. Fair enough." He stepped back, ran a hand through his already destroyed hair, and seemed to arrive at some kind of internal decision. "Okay. Since we’re doing this properly. I’m Velarrax." He said it with the ease of someone who had introduced themselves ten thousand times and had stopped performing it. "You can call me Vel Most things do."
"And what are you the god of," Ren asked, because it seemed like the logical next question.
"Chaos and destruction," Veil said.
Ren stared at him.
Vel pointed at him again. "I know. I know what that face means. I get that face a lot." He walked back to the couch, dropped into it, and picked up the pipe. "In my defense, I rarely actually do any chaos and destruction anymore. It was more of a phase. These days I mostly just exist, smoke, enjoy my general immortality, and try to find ways to stop being so unbelievably bored." He took a slow pull from the pipe, blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling of whatever this place was, and looked at Ren through it. "Which is actually why I contacted you."
"You contacted me," Ren said slowly, "because you’re bored."
"Because things are about to get interesting," Vel corrected, pointing the pipe at him, "and you are the reason they are about to get interesting. I can feel it. You’re about to stir this world up in ways it hasn’t been stirred in a very long time, and I want to be part of that." He leaned back. "Or at least watch it. Watching counts."
"I’m not doing anything with you," Ren said flatly. "You give off genuinely strange energy and I’ve had a complicated enough week already."
"Hey." Vel’s voice carried just a fraction more weight. "You’re still talking to a god. Keep that in mind."
Ren kept his mouth shut.
Vel settled back into the cushions, the brief flash of something larger and older behind his eyes fading back into the easy surface he’d been wearing since Ren arrived.
"Look," he said. "I understand I’m not what you’d expect. I know that. But I am a real god and a fairly powerful one, and I genuinely cannot come down to your world right now because there is not a single physical body that could survive the full weight of me occupying it without immediate and catastrophic problems, and also it would violate about twelve separate balance agreements that I’ve already pushed the edges of by contacting you like this."
He gestured vaguely with the pipe. "So I can’t be there. But I want to watch. And I need your permission for that because I’m not the type to invade someone’s life without asking. I have standards. Minimal ones, but they exist."
Ren looked at him.
"You’re asking my permission," he repeated.
"To observe. Yes. I don’t control you, I don’t make demands, I just watch and occasionally this." He gestured at the space around them. "Talk."
Ren was quiet for a moment, running the full absurdity of the situation through his head, the god of chaos and destruction sitting on a couch in what appeared to be a pocket dimension, smoking something out of a glass tube, asking a baby dragon’s permission to watch his life.
"What do I get in return" Ren said finally.
Vel smiled for the first time since Ren had arrived, and it was the smile of someone who had been waiting for exactly that question.
"How about I give you a name," he said.
