Ours: POSSESSIVE GODS BOOK ONE Read online

  Ours

  POSSESSIVE GODS, BOOK ONE

  LOKI RENARD

  Copyright © 2020 by Loki Renard

  Photography: WANDER AGUIAR PHOTOGRAPHY

  Model: Zack T

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Bad Twin

  Bad Twin First Peek

  More from Loki

  Chapter One

  Helios

  “Humans are trouble.”

  “Humans can be tamed.”

  “Only fools believe that.”

  “Fools, and gods.”

  “This is a mistake.”

  I pay no attention to the growling and grumbling emanating from the man shaped embodiment of discontent to my right. Instead, I lift my eyes to the sky, knowing that beyond the blue lies a star field of infinite depth - and knowing that in those depths there is a spark of human innocence headed directly for us.

  “Do you smell that?” Ragnar asks the question with a smirk. He is a brute. A relic of an age older than memory. He is also the closest thing I have to a brother and so I tolerate his barbaric behavior.

  “Arshje!” His raven caws and swears, the glossy sheen of its black feathers only surpassed by the brightness of its beady little eye. That little creature is out of place in this world of bright skies and white albatross, but it, like Ragnar, ignores that fact and makes itself perfectly at home regardless.

  “Get your bird under control.”

  “He is under control,” Ragnar snorts. “Good boy, Odvar,” he says, giving the wretched thing a scratch under its chin.

  An unpleasant odor floats about us as partially digested deer assaults my nostrils. I would prefer Ragnar not be here, but he has every right to be and trying to keep him away would achieve nothing.

  “Contain yourself, Ragnar,” I order, knowing full well the order is hopeless. I have to wait him out, just as I have to wait for the ocean breeze to displace the stench of his godly guts.

  One would not know it by the smell, but this is a momentous occasion. For the first time since we came to this distant planet, we are allowing a human being to set foot on these shores.

  The ocean stretches out like glass, calmly reflecting the bright blue sky. This is my realm. I control every wisp of cloud, every ocean breeze, every ray of sun. I do it the same way a human might breathe, with the near unintentional action of my mind.

  For what seems like an eternity, gods alone have inhabited this world. Those who would try to make landing have been repelled, at first with words of warning, then with force. We are not lonely in our solitude. We are satisfied by it.

  "This is a mistake," Ragnar repeats.

  “We have not helped humans in a very long time. We owe them this.”

  “We owe them nothing. They are beyond our help.”

  “This one isn’t. This one is innocent.”

  Ragnar’s brows crease as he lets out a growl which makes the horizon darken just a shade. He too has the power to affect Okeanus, though he usually keeps himself under better control.

  “You may be King of Okeanus, ruler of the sun, charioteer without compare, but you are getting soft in your old age.”

  He’s trying to needle me into conflict. Usually I would be happy to entertain him with a good fight, but today there is something more important.

  Several suns ago, I received a missive begging for mercy. Delivered on a scrap of parchment carried in the beak of a dove, were written words of such dire need I could not ignore them.

  It was a miracle that I received the words at all. They came from the human realm, from a planet incompatible with our own existence and yet somehow they reached across time and space, using a technology so old I thought the humans had forgotten how to use it at all.

  I could not make reply to the message. But it alerted me to the imminent arrival of a package of desperate humanity.

  There it is. Finally. A bright little spot in the sky. I close my eyes and allow the barrier between realms to be relaxed enough for the traveler to slide through. This is the barrier we have defended with utmost aggression and remorseless ruthlessness. I have never allowed any being to pass through this way, but this one slips through as if there were no barrier at all. I can feel the human inside, even at this great distance as the bright spark becomes a dark dot descending toward us.

  “You’ve undone thousands of years of labor and toil,” Ragnar complains as it slowly makes its way down through the great depths of the sky. “Nothing good comes this way. Only bad things fall from the sky. Flaming arrows. Boiling hot oil. The rain of ash and lava. And whatever this is.”

  A parachute deploys and the little package floats down toward us with unerring accuracy, sweeping back and forth like a leaf falling from a tree. It lands at our feet with a soft thud.

  “Don’t open it,” Ragnar says.

  “There is only a human infant inside, Ragnar. It presents no danger to us.”

  “It looks like a large coffin. It brings death.”

  “It’s not a coffin. It’s a basket.”

  “That is not a basket. It’s made of metal.”

  The word BASKET is written on the side of the tube. Ragnar is not reading with his eyes. He is, as usual, launching into an angry diatribe barely bothering to take the world around him in. He prefers rune script, whereas I’ve familiarized myself with a wide range of scripts over the years, so I can read the word printed very clearly on the side, accompanied with a drawing of a basket, which Ragnar also doesn’t seem to see.

  “Push it into the sea. Forget it ever existed.”

  “And leave Triton to find it?”

  Ragnar sneers at the mere mention of the sea god. “We would never hear the end of it if Triton found out you had let a human in. How do we get the human out of the basket?”

  No sooner does he ask the question than the outer panels at the top make a hissing sound, expelling steam and vapor before sliding back with a smooth hissing sound to reveal the occupant.

  We stare.

  “I thought it was supposed to be a baby,” I say in response to Ragnar’s glare, which has now moved from the person inside the basket to my face.

  “That's not a baby,” Ragnar says. "That is a fully grown human female woman lady.”

  Redundancy aside, he is correct. It is a human female, of at least eighteen years of age. There is no doubting the maturity of her form. I would guess that she left her teens behind some years ago, though it has always been hard for beings like us to tell the precise age of humans. They shift so quickly, metamorphosing before our very eyes. This one is very alluring, cast under a shroud of cold fabric dew which does not hide the shapeliness of her entirely naked form.

  What happens next can only be explained by the remoteness of our planet, the humiliations of history, and the fact that we have not seen a human woman in well over a thousand years.

  We look. We stare. And then all hell breaks loose. A bolt of lightning forks from the sky and slams into the earth, setting a sapling ablaze. Out on the ocean, the water starts to roil and bubble as the sea itself boils.

  Dead fish rise to the surface and dance blank eyed among the turbulent wake. Ragnar has los
t control, and so have I. The environment is manifesting our internal chaos at the sight of this female, who remains unaware of the madness being unleashed all around her.

  “Shut the case!” Ragnar cries out.

  “Turn around. Stop looking. Control yourself!”

  I try to take my own advice, but even with my back turned and my eyes closed, I can see her in my mind’s eye. The swell of her hips, the gentle roundness of her breasts, the red down between her thighs hiding an eternity of delights.

  “You let a woman come here! A human woman! You…” I tune Ragnar out as he ejaculates a series of expletives which turn the air a distinct shade of blue. He does not like to be out of control, but the human woman in the capsule is enough to make anyone lose control. She’s stunning.

  Ragnar is snarling next to me with fury, taking deep heaving breaths as he struggles to regain control of his elemental powers.

  “You fool! Why would you allow a human to come here? And one such as that? Why couldn’t you get a pet as the rest of us do? An animal? Instead you pick something we are cosmically tied to. Something that has the power to create and destroy? Humans are dangerous, Helios. And not in the warrior kind of way. In the insidious little ant kind of way. Do you know how many gods they have destroyed?”

  “Calm yourself, Ragnar. This is one female.”

  “Yes. A female. A FEMALE! The most dangerous kind of human of all. You know what these little beasts are capable of with their gentle eyes and soft wiles.”

  “I thought it would be a male infant.”

  “Why!?” Ragnar snarls. “How could you possibly mistake one for the other? Why would you assume you knew?”

  “The message was desperate. It said they were sending their last hope. I had to deduce it would be a male infant. They used to prefer males, and they never used to care about anybody adult. It was only their young they sent away in hopes of a better life.”

  “And you thought you would be a better parent to a human than other humans? The species which rebelled against all gods?” Ragnar glowers at me. “And why did you think a baby was sending you messages? They can’t even talk, let alone write!”

  “Enough, Ragnar.” I say as I begin to regain control. “I received a broad spectrum P.R.A.Y.E.R.”

  “Why are you talking like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Why are you shouting some letters?”

  “They’re acronyms for technical human things.”

  “They’re not. They’re overcomplications of simple human things. They lured us in with those at the dawn of their beginnings.” Ragnar snarls and then bats his eyes at me in a way faintly reminiscent of a human as he begins to mock me and them at the same time.

  “Oh, please, gods, please save us from the wind and the rain and oh, please make the sun rise each day, and also, go to hell when we realize most of that is mechanical.” He breathes out in a vicious snort. “But it isn’t. They’re all miracles. The little bastards just got used to them.”

  “Well, this little bastard threw herself on our mercy, and I gave it.”

  “Because you didn’t know what her fancy acronym prayers meant?”

  “The message implied that the human was incapable of fending for itself, like a baby in a basket placed in reeds.”

  “Like a… the operative term is like a,” Ragnar growls. “Anything can be like a baby in reeds. My axe can be like a baby in reeds. Damn you, Helios. You’ve allowed an adult human here that should never have been allowed within a light year of this planet. Destroy it.”

  “Kill an insensate woman? That would be the act of a coward.”

  “Wake her up first if you want, I don’t care. Just slay her. You know humans cannot exist in our realm, Helios. She’ll probably die anyway. Or worse, become some kind of immortal. You know how insufferable human beings become once they have the touch of the divine about them. Don’t even get me started on demigods. Upstarts!”

  I let Ragnar rant while I think. He is right in a sense. Actually, he is right in every sense. I don’t disagree with any of his snarled objections or curses. Humanity has a lot to answer for. Perhaps it was my ego this human exploited, but I felt desperation in her plea. There was a connection there, something that spoke to me in a way nothing has spoken to me since the war.

  “She’s here,” I say. “She passed through the veil at the border of Okeanus, and was welcomed. Not by you. Not by me. By the place itself, which is older and more powerful than either of us.”

  That, Ragnar cannot deny. This is hallowed ground. Nothing sets foot here but that which Okeanus allows. I relaxed the boundary, but the planet has an intelligence and could have repelled her itself if it wished to.

  “If she was not meant to be here, she would have perished. She would have burned in the sky, or been swallowed by the sea. The earth itself would have claimed her. But here she lies safely. She lives.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Ragnar raises another point. Our first glance of her was brief and overwhelming. She was beautiful, but beauty does not mean life. Many times, that which has become frozen outside the stream of existence carries with it a veneer of beauty.

  I turn back, aware that she may have passed. The moment I see her again, I must fight once more for control. It is not just her physical form which triggers all manner of impulses in me, many of them base and animal and nothing to do with being a deity. There is something about this red headed stranger, this woman who has presented herself to us without a strip of vanity or modesty. She is exposed, entirely natural, hiding nothing. The longer I look, the more pity I feel, for the smaller she seems and the more vulnerable.

  She needs my help. Our help. She has been accepted to this place of refuge for a reason, and I may not know that reason yet, but we will discover it.

  "She does not look dead. Let us bring her inside.”

  “Yes. Let’s bring the grenade inside. The human bomb. The fleshy incendiary device. The gun pointed squarely at all of our heads. These are all human terms, Helios. This is the language you will need to learn if you want to court a human,” Ragnar snarls and swings his axe, though not at the female herself. He would not harm her. He is as intrigued as I am though he growls and snarls and claims to be furious at this turn of events.

  There was a time both of us were familiar with the world of men, in which we used to have dalliances with the most beautiful maidens, taking our pleasure on the golden sands of earthly beaches. Ragnar was native to another part of that blue and green globe, but the human experience shares some commonalities. They are lustful, intelligent little things capable of great feats of kindness and creation, and even greater cruelty.

  We last knew humanity in the time of legend, before people changed, before the world grew cold and then hot again, before the old ways became the forgotten ways, before the war came and my reign ended in a bloody night of fire and fury.

  I rule this place. Ragnar defends it. We have both told ourselves that we are now separate from the humans who once followed us, but at the sight of this woman, I know that we are not separate at all. A torrent of emotions rush through me. Desire, loss, lust, rage, sorrow, perhaps even joy. To her, we are alien. To us, she is a long lost bastard child, the product of many thousands of generations of godless illegitimacy. She carries a small spark of the divine somewhere in the core of her, and perhaps that will be enough to allow her to survive here. But will she survive us? That, I do not know.

  Crouching down, I retrieve her from the capsule. There is an outer layer of padding around her which comes up with her, so I find myself holding her like a package yet to be unwrapped, strange material crinkling against my arms. I start to strip it from her as best I can. It is an awkward process. It would go easier with two helping, but Ragnar shows no interest in getting close enough to the human to actually touch her.

  The effects of her arrival are beginning to ripple. The seas have calmed themselves somewhat, though the fish who perished now bob among the waves. Th
ey will rot in the sun and draw pestilence if Triton is not alerted, but I cannot concern myself with their tiny fates in this moment, not now that I have my arms wrapped around the human’s small form.

  “Were they always that short?” Ragnar grunts the question, his rough observation mirroring my own feeling. I have gotten used to god scale. A true human is a much more delicate thing, so delicate I find myself worrying I might hurt her if I am not gentle.

  “We are grander than they, Ragnar. In every regard.”

  “There is no doubt of that,” he says, eyeing her suspiciously. The weather is still turning, hot and cold air mixing in the distance to create a powerful storm. I know it is no natural phenomenon taking place. It is my passion and Ragnar’s hostility manifesting over the water’s flow.

  “What is it?” I ask him the question directly as he stamps and growls like a beast.

  “Cast her into the ocean, Helios. Throw her into your sun, but do not take her into your chamber. Humans do not belong among us. Remember, they decided we did not belong among them. They decided they did not need us.”

  He has a long, and bitter memory. He does not forgive, and he does not forget. But we have different stories. I was not cast out by humans. I was routed by a new pantheon of gods. Whatever happened to Ragnar, he never speaks of it.

  “You remember walking Earth,” I say. “As do I. We thought those days were long behind, forever forgotten. But perhaps they are not. Maybe this human contains the key to…”

  “She is a lock. We are the keys,” Ragnar says, his implication crude.

  In one respect, we are both feeling the same thing, a surge of primal lust which we have spent the last eons doing our very best to erase.

  Heavy rain begins to fall as it has rarely fallen before. I am forced to bend over the human, pull her close to my body to protect her from the elements. The last remnants of the packaging fall away, leaving her naked skin in contact with my hands. It should be a sensation which drives even more chaos, but I discover that she is cold and stiff, a little lump of space ice. I once more fear that this may not be a rescue at all. It could be too late for the one who found me with her prayers.