Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

The Tidebreaker’s pout died on impact.

“PFFT! What the fuck is wrong with you, bastard?!” She got a mouthful of cool water before she got her hands up. Dwarven blood sluiced down her cheek, her throat, the front of her breastplate, and into the dirt at her boots in a red trail. Her hair, which had been clinging to her cheek in damp strands, was now plastered flat to her skull in a way that did not flatter the pout.

“This is not the kind of liquid I wanted from you!” she sputtered, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“…” Quinlan’s grin did not move as the water unraveled and re-formed at his other shoulder, this time as a sheet rather than a ribbon.

It rolled across the courtyard, found both squirming swordfighters at the foot of Rosie’s tree, and broke over them at once.

The kitten-wrestle paused mid-grapple.

A wash of cool water ran the dried dwarven blood off Iris’s sword arm, lifted the streaks from the side of her neck, slicked her dark hair against her scalp in one wet sheet, and emptied the rest down the back of her plate. The same wash hit Ayame across the shoulders, took the smeared red off the lacquered plate Iris had just transferred it onto, and plastered the Skysplitter’s ponytail flat to her spine.

By the time the stream eased, Iris looked like a thoroughly drenched alley cat that had just been hauled out of the rain by its scruff. Ayame, who carried her dignity into most weather, looked like a smaller drenched alley cat from the same litter.

Two pairs of narrowed eyes lifted in unison toward the man who had just hosed them down.

“You!” Iris snapped.

“Quin!” Ayame snapped at the same time, in the same key, half an octave higher.

“”What gives?!”” the two demanded in perfect sync.

Quinlan did not comment and instead kept the wave rolling.

It washed Raika next, sluicing the dwarven blood out of her mane in a long pink ribbon, then continued out to Lyra, to Ria. The wave moved to his wives as well, all of whom had been doing the same work the whole day. Even Morgana, who had been very pointedly studying the canopy, took a respectful spritz across the shoulders. The entire grimy column found itself, inside three seconds, freshly rinsed.

His palm turned upward.

A soft golden radiance bloomed out of his palm and settled into a low warm dome over the courtyard. Steam lifted off armor. Hair fluffed up at the roots. Plate that had been streaming runoff a heartbeat earlier dried in slow visible passes, and the small contented sounds of women whose long bloody day had just been replaced by an unscheduled bath rolled out under the canopy.

Wasn’t he magnanimous?

He couldn’t very well have his women undertake the trial without a refreshing bath first.

Above them, on Quinlan’s shoulders, Rosie had been howling ever since she’d laid eyes upon Iris’s expression at being splashed abruptly.

Then the [Warp Gate] at the rear of the moss patch pulsed once and Orianna stepped through. Her eyes traveled the courtyard, took in the gang of soaked-and-drying women basking in the caring warmth of the man she still couldn’t quite comprehend, took in the foot-of-the-tree wreckage that had once been a samurai noblewoman’s afternoon, and lifted a single composed eyebrow.

She did not comment.

Rosie noticed her.

The dryad princess decided her current vantage on Quinlan’s shoulders was no longer the optimal observation point for the comedy at her feet as she launched off her perch in a controlled little float across the moss. She landed lightly on Orianna’s shoulder, steadied herself against the Flower Queen’s hair, and swung her tiny green legs.

“Orianna!”

The Flower Queen had asked to be Rosie’s friend, which the young lady gladly accepted.

“Welcome back! Do you want a shower from Daddy too?!”

Orianna’s eyes turned, slowly. They tracked across the courtyard, took in Iris’s drying fluff, Ayame’s sunbeam-cat collapse, Raika’s tilted chin, the entire spectacle of his women being collectively pampered against their will.

They returned to the youngster on her shoulder.

“…No thanks. I’m good.”

The Flower Queen’s voice was perfectly dry.

Quinlan grinned.

He let the dome ease and the radiance settle, and his women, dried and rinsed and standing in a loose ring around Rosie’s tree, slowly registered what was about to happen for the rest of his afternoon.

His grin tilted.

“The others are busy right now. Let’s begin the ritual.”

The girls perked up immediately.

Whatever postures their afternoon had collapsed them into reset in a single shared breath.

Quinlan called upon the magic and as soon as he did, crimson script bloomed across his throat, his collarbones, the hollow above his heart. [Rite of the Bloodfather: Initiated.]

His breathing slowed.

The garden’s edges softened. The sounds of the afternoon eased a half-step further away. His vision widened. He could still see his women, the canopy, the moss. He could also see the rite layered over them: the crimson script on his skin still writing itself toward completion, a second pattern weaving itself in the air around him at a frequency only the ceremony knew. The two views rested on top of each other and neither moved without his permission.

His weight left the moss as he rose into the empty air above the courtyard, and his legs folded beneath him into a meditative cross.

Then Nyxara’s voice arrived at the back of his thoughts.

It came in the cadence she only ever used in private. Slow, half-sung, devoted in a register no one else in the universe heard from her.

<Let me help you, my ruin…>

A pause.

<…and for the record. I am very proud of you~>

Quinlan’s mouth tilted upwards inside the trance.

‘Hmm.’

Quinlan let her voice settle against the ritual’s spine and kept rising.

The trance was not possession. He was very much in control.

The [Soul Reaper] lifted off his back. It orbited him once, considered, and came to rest in the air at the level of his cross-legged knee, point down.

Synchra answered next.

The dark silk at his sleeve receded along the inside of his forearm in a slow pull, the cuff shrinking back toward his elbow until the soft underside of his wrist lay bare to the air.

[Soul Reaper] turned a quarter of a degree.

Then it cut.

A single clean stroke. A thread of dark crimson welled along the inside of his forearm, lifted away from the seam in a slow rising arc, and held there a heartbeat above the wound. Then it bloomed into a cloud above his cross-legged float, hung there in the shape of a held breath, and split.

One ribbon for each woman.

Each ribbon traveled out of the cloud in a slow arc, found its woman in the loose ring around Rosie’s tree, and stopped a hand’s width from her chest. They hovered. Patient. Each a small floating thread of his blood, suspended in front of one of his women, asking nothing yet.

The Bloodfather had bled for them.

Now they would choose how to respond.