Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

The women looked up and marveled at their lover who looked otherworldly in this moment.

Quinlan floated cross-legged a meter above the moss with [Soul Reaper] turning slow at the level of his folded knee, point down, the dark blade carrying ghost-pale flame along its edge. Crimson script wrote itself across his throat and his collarbones in a language none of them could read, and a second pattern was layering itself in the air around his shoulders at a frequency only the rite could hear. His sleeve had pulled back along the inside of his forearm, baring the wrist [Soul Reaper] had cut on his command, and the thread of dark crimson he had bled was still rising into the cloud above his cross-legged float.

He bled patiently, without pain on his face, the way the sky bleeds into a sunset, unhurried and enormous.

Less than a minute ago, this man had been splashing them with cool water under his daughter’s tree. Now he sat in the air above the moss like a primordial the world had decided to wake.

The ribbons hovered.

Each woman in the loose ring around Rosie’s tree had a small floating thread of his blood waiting a hand’s width from her sternum.

Not every woman in the courtyard had received one. Morgana stood off to the side without a ribbon, freshly subjugated and still cataloguing her new household. The five maidens of the Bloomguard up in Rosie’s canopy continued grooming the bark, their rite belonging to their princess. The household maids who had stopped at the edge of the moss to watch had no thread at their sternums, nor did the parents of his women who had walked up from the lower properties on hearing the rite begin. The only mother in that group with a ribbon was Sylvaris, who had carved Elvardian rune-iron alongside the rest of the line all morning and had not been separated from it now.

 The Bloodfather class itself did not cap his family at any number. The system had laid its floor at ten, which was the threshold the rite needed to cross before the deeper layers of the class opened to him.

Beyond that floor, the family could grow as far as he was willing to bleed for it. More than ten ribbons hung above the moss for that reason.

Then the prompts arrived.

[Ding!]

[The Bloodfather wishes to welcome you into his family.]

Not every woman in the courtyard had received one. Morgana stood off to the side without a ribbon, freshly subjugated and still cataloguing her new household. The five maidens of the Bloomguard up in Rosie’s canopy continued grooming the bark, their rite belonging to their princess. The only mother in that group with a ribbon was Sylvaris, who had carved Elvardian rune-iron alongside the rest of the line all morning and had not been separated from it now.

The household maids who had stopped at the edge of the moss to watch had no thread at their sternums, nor did the parents of his women who had walked up from the lower properties on hearing the rite begin.  The Bloodfather class itself did not cap his family at any number. The system had laid its floor at ten, which was the threshold the rite needed to cross before the deeper layers of the class opened to him.

[Do you accept?]

Heads jerked in unison because the notification arrived in a register none of them had ever heard before, warm and low and feminine, with the gentleness of a hearth fire seen through a winter window. There was a smile underneath the words. A woman none of them could see was smiling at each of them in turn through the shape of the prompt.

Their smug primordial lover, hovering above his moss with his eyes half-lidded inside the trance, had just sent each of them an offer of…

Vex’s red eyes had gone huge.

Her mouth fell open, snapped shut, opened again. The hmphs from a minute earlier had not finished landing inside her chest yet. Half a minute ago she had been studying the high reaches of Rosie’s canopy with her chin tilted, refusing to acknowledge that her hubby had publicly dared utter those words to her. The other half of her brain had been working through how exactly she should exact her beyond justified vengeance, and was gathering the willpower not to cave when Quinlan looked at her and offered hugs and kisses.

She always folded.

This time, she would not.

No folding allowed, Vex!

Stand your ground!!

Teach him a lesson!!!

Then the prompt landed.

Pink instantly bloomed across her cheeks.

Her chest started to rise and fall in shallow beats.

“…Th-this is…”

Vex’s voice was small and soft, disbelieving.

“This is marriage…”

A pause.

“This is a marriage, just better…? Just… ‘more’?”

The Hexwitch’s words trembled at the end of the question.

She did not wait for anyone to answer her.

“YES!!!”

The word came out of her in a volcanic eruption.

Her ribbon of blood before her brightened a shade, but it did not move yet. The rite was waiting for the rest of the family to arrive at their answer.

The Hexwitch did not know that. The Hexwitch was breathing too hard to know anything except that her hubby had asked her, and she had answered, and the air in the courtyard was suddenly very warm.

Her hand pressed itself to her sternum, just below where the ribbon hovered, fingers splayed.

She smiled.

It was the full, soft, helpless smile she had spent her life waiting to deliver.

The other women in the ring, against their will, looked at her.

…

A wave of recognition rolled through the courtyard.

Each of them caught it inside her own ribs at the same moment. The recognition of what the Hexwitch had just heard, what the Hexwitch had just said, what had bloomed across the Hexwitch’s face the second the answer left her mouth. Warmth bloomed in their own chests in the shape of the same realization.

Marriage to Quin, just better, more than mere vows before the altar.

The wave broke through them in the same instant. Sera’s free hand drifted to her sternum without her noticing it move, her smile arriving warm and shameless. Aurora’s amber eyes went soft inside her composed face, the diligent alchemist running the math she always ran and finding the equation balanced on her side of the ledger. Serika laughed once, low and warm, the Solar Fist tilting her chin up at the man hovering above the moss. Lucille pressed her palm flat over her heart with her green eyes glassy, the only mother in the harem giving her yes the second time without ceremony. Kitsara’s three tails slowed, and the princess underneath the perversion, who had been an abandoned child once, said her quiet yes inside her own head while smiling bright and beautiful at Quinlan. Kaelira’s bluish-purple ear-tip went very pink, and the small fierce yes that had been making peace with this man for weeks rose up out of her chest at last.

Six ribbons brightened in the same heartbeat.

Blossom did not bother with any of that. The dogkin had been fizzing at the edges since the prompt arrived. Her ears snapped up, her tail snapped to full propeller, and the blonde had not finished reading the words on her notification before her answer was already in her throat.

“Blossom accepts!!!”

Her ribbon brightened.

Ayame did not say anything for two full seconds.

The samurai’s arms were folded under her breastplate. Her blue eyes had not left Quinlan’s hovering shape since the prompt landed. The second-in-command of the harem, who could keep an entire battle line organized through telepathy without breaking the cadence of her breath, was not capable of organizing herself at all.

She inhaled once.

“…Hmm.”

The scoff was very small.

“My arrogant primordial man, whatever shall I do with you…?” she whispered, quietly, into the air at his cross-legged float, with the tip of her chin lifted exactly the way she always lifted it when she was about to lose an argument with him in front of the entire household. “Asking me through a notification read by another woman. Truly… you have no shame.”

Her ribbon brightened.

…

Iris’s ribbon of blood hovered.