They pounced.

"No running!"

Luminara’s hand closed around a fistful of long hair.

Mearie caught her ankle.

"What?!" The Goddess of Purity went down in a tangle of limbs and robes, and the two mothers followed her onto the grass in a pile that was half punishment and half embrace, and the line between the two had always been thin with these three.

Luminara’s golden hair fanned across Mearie’s lap, Liliyanna’s robe rode up past her thighs as she squirmed, and the garden filled with the sounds of maternal scolding and divine protests.

"Let go of my hair!"

"Apologize first."

"I will NOT! Miri, stop holding my ankle! Your Goddess commands you! Obey!"

"I’ll consider after you apologize~"

"Heresy!!"

From the pond, Malakar did not turn around.

He read the golden window with his fishing rod balanced across one knee, and the low chuckle that left the Father of Humanity traveled across the water like a stone skipping twice.

"The laddy certainly knows how to stay in the spotlight, doesn’t he?"

...

In the high garden of pale stone and slow-blooming roses.

The goddess of love and family was kneeling in the soil when the announcement arrived.

Her garden was small by divine standards, tucked into one of the quieter corners of the Pantheon Nexus where the light came through soft and golden and the silence was deep enough to hear a petal land on stone.

Every bush in the garden carried a story she could read through the soil, because each bloom answered a different act of love happening somewhere in the vast web of worlds, and the goddess could tell by touch alone which rose had opened for a wedding and which for a widow who had finally let herself laugh again.

Three had opened this morning. She had been pressing fresh earth around the nearest with her bare fingers, humming to it the way a mother hums to a child she has already comforted but does not wish to release, when the golden script carved itself into the air above her garden.

She read it once.

Her hands stilled in the dirt, and the honey-colored eyes that lifted toward the script carried a warmth that deepened as they traveled the words.

Bloodfather. His Beloved and his Champions. A pantheon unto themselves.

A private smile crossed her lips, small and genuine.

"What a lovely way to announce your family, Bloodfather," she murmured, and returned to her roses, proud. "How grandiose... and romantic."

She was approving fully.

The goddess was still kneeling when the garden shook.

They arrived thirty-two strong, in divine armor that gleamed with planetary sigils, their combined presence pressing against the pale stones and slow-blooming roses with a weight that bent the light.

God Vurnax led the formation with a grim expression carved into features that had not changed in ten thousand years, and behind him came the War God Kravik, the Flame Mother N’shara, the Voidborn Twins, the Tidefather, and more, each radiating an authority that would have crushed the air out of any mortal world they chose to visit.

Petals fell from three bushes at once. A rose that had been mid-bloom curled shut.

The goddess’s contentment receded, then disappeared fully as she caught the petals.

"You blessed him." Vurnax’s voice shook the petals from the nearest stem. "The Bloodfather class carries your signature, your divine covenant woven into its architecture. Did you think we would not notice?"

The goddess of love and family turned a rose petal between her fingertips.

"I blessed a patriarch," she said simply. "His existence spoke to me through the long thread of family. He was surrounded by women he loved, and his deepest wish was to see them rise beside him." Her thumb brushed another petal that had curled under the weight of their arrival, coaxing it back open with a touch so gentle the rose obeyed. "So I helped. As I always do..."

"You created a potentially hostile pantheon!" Vurnax’s voice climbed, and another rose curled shut.

"I blessed a budding family worthy of my blessing." Her honey-colored eyes found the High God without apology. "What love builds with my blessing has never been mine to control. It’s you, warring gods, who utilize endless violence for control."

Vurnax’s jaw set. Behind him, N’shara’s flame-wreathed fingers curled at her sides, and Kravik’s gauntleted hand had found the pommel of his blade as if the instinct to draw on something, anything, would make the discomfort in his chest go away.

None of them spoke.

The goddess looked at the golden script still hanging in the air above her garden.

"Beloved and Champions..." she repeated softly, reading the words the way she read roses. "He named the women he loves his Beloved, and the ones who fight beside him his Champions. He did not call them soldiers, or retainers, or subjects." Her smile returned. "He called them family."

Then she looked at them, and rose to her feet. She was a tall woman.

The warmth did not leave her face. That was the part that made it worse.

"Thirty-two gods," she said. Her voice had not risen, had not sharpened, had not gained a single edge it did not already carry, and yet every deity in the garden felt the ground shift beneath them. "In my garden. Raising your voices at me like whiny children over a blessing I gave to a deserving man and his women."

She set the rose down and brushed the soil from her fingers, slow and unhurried.

"May I ask you something, esteemed gods?"

Vurnax’s face hardened. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"The patriarch I blessed is a mere primordial." She said the word the way one names a species of flower. "An inferior life form, far beneath us gods. That’s what you all believe the primordials to be, isn’t that right?"

Her gaze swept the thirty-two, and the quiet smile at her mouth had turned into a look that none of them had ever seen on the face of the goddess of love and family.

Mockery.

"So why are you afraid of him?"

The silence that followed was not the comfortable silence of her garden. It was the silence of thirty-two divine beings standing in a field of roses and having nowhere to put their hands.

Vurnax did not answer, because the answer was the one thing he could not say in front of thirty-one other gods: that the rules they obeyed did not seem to apply to Quinlan Elysiar, and that fact alone had brought them here, thirty-two strong, to a garden of roses, to shout at a woman who blessed families for billions of years.

N’shara’s flame dimmed a fraction. Kravik’s hand left the pommel. The Voidborn Twins exchanged a glance that neither of them would reference again.

The goddess knelt back down beside her rosebush and pressed her fingers into the soil.

"Go home," she said, warm and final. "Tend to your own domains, or go fight your endless wars for all I care."

She found the rose that had curled shut under their arrival, cupped it between her palms, and breathed on it once, warm and slow, until the petals opened again.

"But do not come here to disturb my garden with your insecurities ever again."

Thirty-two gods stood in her garden with nothing left to say, and one by one, they left.

...

With his family declared on a universal scale, it was time for the Bloodfather and his bonded to go to war, more powerful than ever before!