Ascension Of the Divine Sovereign

CHAPTER SIX: THE NEW PATH

"Who the hell are you?"

The man with green hair looked at him sideways and made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. A scoff delivered with the efficiency of someone who found the question mildly beneath them.

"Does it really matter?" He produced a cigar from somewhere inside his loose jacket, lit it with a practised motion, and returned his gaze to the ocean. "I'm not the one who's lost, am I?"

Chase stared at the side of his face for a long moment. The man showed no interest in being stared at. He simply smoked, watching the water.

Chase's knees were still on the ground. He got up. Brushed the grass off. Sat down at the cliff's edge instead, legs hanging, and looked at the ocean because there was nothing else to do with himself.

The wind moved through the blue lilies. The water caught the afternoon light and scattered it.

"So," the man said, after a while. "You think God has forsaken you." A pull of the cigar. "How is that, exactly?"

Chase exhaled through his nose. It came out long and ragged.

"My mother died the day I met my father." He said "Turns out I'm just a bastard. Then things had to go and get more terrible." He paused. Picked a stem of blue lily from the grass beside him and turned it in his fingers. "Got my evaluation today. Turns out I have zero divinity."

Silence.

He felt the man's gaze move to him. Chase didn't look back.

"That was a joke," the man said. "Right?"

Chase stared at the horizon.

“Pfffttt!!!”

The he burst out laughing, rib cracking laugh so loud and uncontrolled, hell he even brushed a tear off the corner of his eyes. He bent forward his cigar hand dropped to his knee. His other hand pressed against his side as the sound kept coming in waves, each one apparently funnier than the last.

"Zero —" he managed, then lost it again completely.

Tears were streaming down the man's face. He wiped them with the back of his cigar hand and shook his head slowly.

"You are genuinely serious. Zero divinity." He said it like he was testing the words for structural integrity and finding them wanting. "Is that even possible?"

Chase spat sideways toward the cliff edge. "Like I said. Forsaken."

The man's laughter wound down gradually. He took a long pull of the cigar and released the smoke slowly, composing himself with visible effort.

"Well." His voice had dropped, the amusement draining into something quieter. "You are right, kid. That is one hell of a forsaken life." He studied the ember at the cigar's tip. "So what now?"

Chase turned to look at him directly. "What do you mean?"

"Simple question." He shrugged, "Now that you've been thoroughly forsaken — mother gone, father useless, kicked out, zero divinity, and whatever else you haven't told me yet —" he gestured loosely with the cigar, "— will you accept your fate?"

The question landed differently than Chase expected. Chase opened his mouth, closed it. The honest answer was that he hadn't thought past the screaming, the screaming had felt like the destination, and now that it was done, he was standing on the other side of it without a map.

He exhaled, adjusted his breathing.

"Of course not." His voice came out steadier than he expected. "I swore I'd become a knight, and I will become one."

The man looked at him. Something shifted in those blue eyes, not softness exactly, but a quality of attention that hadn't been there before. He didn’t have a mocking gaze more like amused and fully intrigued.

"But you have zero divinity, kid." He said it without cruelty, just fact. "How exactly does one become a knight with zero divinity? That kind of miracle doesn't exist."

Chase was quiet for a moment.

Then he chuckled full of ambition.

"Then I'll just have to create my own."

The man was still for exactly two seconds.

Then something cracked open in his expression. A single, low sound of amusement that seemed to surprise even him. He shook his head slowly, reached inside his jacket, and produced a card.

Black matte, a single line of gold lettering and he held it out.

"North Meridian." He nodded toward the card without looking at Chase. "There's a school there. For rejects, or so they say."

Chase took it. Turned it over.

"Go create your miracle, kid." The man returned his gaze to the ocean, cigar back between his teeth. "That's if you can manage one —" a pull of smoke, released slowly, "— in a world already full of monsters and geniuses."