He'd been against it for the longest time. 

The difference between an archmage and a god – they say – is that gods have rules. He doesn't know what those rules are, exactly – which is still more than almost any other living mortal – and what he does know doesn't tempt him. It wasn't a god who freed Cheliax from Hell, or Hell from Asmodeus, or every city on Golarion from pox and plague. Gods work their will on the world primarily by means of clerics, which he's always found terribly inefficient. There's a school of though which claims it's not so different from his arcane engines, but that's nonsense: a god can't be taken apart and put back together again. They don't do what they're told, and nobody knows how they work. 

Children today know that wizards used to live in towers and hoard spells like dragons hoard gold. After all, they've read fairy-tales. Modern magic is an altogether more rational endeavor. There are fewer monsters in the dark, and less to be gained by fighting them. Who wants to risk their lives for years on end for the chance to sell teleports when a trip from Westcrown to Goka takes less than an hour (depending on traffic)? The real energy now is in great communal workings. He's always claimed one doesn't need to be an archmage to do the work that really matters, and his students are constantly proving him right. 

They need him less than they used to. That's a good thing: it gives him time to explore distant stars, debate abstruse and useless questions of theory, keep up with his great-great-grandchildren. He spends a few years as a sort of many-eyed space octopus. He learns Protean. It's not that there's nothing for him to do, gods know – there's always more, always, always, always, always more – but less and less that couldn't be done without him. 

He's never been a god before. And nobody knows how they work – yet. 

In his first moment as a god, he's certain that he is going to die.

That isn't unexpected: most gods do. He hasn't had to face the inevitability of his own utter destruction for – oh, centuries now –  he feels like a child again, shivering in terrified disbelief, nauseatingly aware of everything he could have been and done – he reaches out to Naima – and she's there – and everywhere – and he can't say where he ends and she begins – 

– and then the world is calm, and extraordinarily vast. 

Being a goddess is very weird. Naima has been some weird things, such as a dragonfly, and a plant, and a giant clam, and is less unprepared for this experience than she could have been, but none of those things are really anything approaching the level of weird that being a goddess is. 

There are a lot of mothers and babies in the multiverse. An overwhelming number of mothers and babies in the multiverse. Doctors and midwives and healers and all those great people also exist, but their numbers are not anything remotely approaching the number of mothers and babies. She is full of - probably actually only a tiny fraction of the love between mothers and children in the multiverse, but enough to make her feel like if she had a head it would be swimming. Without especially trying, she can also feel their tiredness - sleepless nights broken by infants who will not stay down, mothers snapping at their children for lack of any idea what else to do, mothers as overwhelmed and fraying at the corners as she feels right now. Between them, of course, there is the rest of mothering, less charged but not actually less visible - nursing infants, walking around markets with them strapped to your body, spinning thread and keeping it from tiny hands, answering the same question seventeen times -

The healers are almost lost in the shuffle, at first, but she can see them, too, and can see more when she looks: nurses standing watch over babies so small it is a marvel they can survive outside a woman, mothers teaching children about why they grow each medicinal herb in the garden, researchers growing diseases in dishes and staring at them through the long hours of the night, shamans offering cockroach paste in an attempt to treat arthritis, surgeons cutting cancer from a man's body and missing tiny pieces that will sprout back up again, midwives vaccinating infants as they scream -

It is so much. She wonders if it is always this much, or if she accidentally crippled her ability to think about stuff by biting off an extremely large area of concern while inevitably starting out extremely small, as goddesses go. But she can feel Elie here, too, closer now than he's ever been, and if she needs to take a moment to tremble at the vastness of the multiverse, well, at least she doesn't need to do it alone.

Élie left behind reams of writing – works of magical theory and philosophy of government, manuals of spellcraft, treatises on optics, memoirs and letters and notes from his travels, natural histories, childrens primers, a three-volume history of the opera in Galt – but no holy book. 

Holy books are dangerous things. In the first place, they tend to encourage an attitude of worship, which is no fit way for reasoning beings to relate to each other. If anyone wishes to follow his teachings, he's given them more than enough material without lending any of it the imprimatur of divinity. Aroden's specified everything down to a sewer plan for Westcrown. What did it get him? Theological opposition to plumbing in the outer city. Holy books, once written, don't change, and his people have all the rest of time figure things out for themselves.

No mucking about with scriptures or church heirarchies – he meant to be a god for free people, a god of those things which make them free. He would stand for truth and reason and hope: those qualities which, fixed in the mortal spirit, preserve it from slavery and propel it towards greatness. A god for an age of light. 

He has something vastly and indescribably dissimilar to a pounding headache. 

He has, once more, the ability to think. He has ten thousand inarticulate points of conscious experience spread across creation like raspberry jam. He has a bright, crystalline awareness of every strand of his extended self. He knows that he cannot be lied to. He sees revolutions, bloody and bloodless. He has agonized flashes of total and absolute comprehension. He suspects that he has bitten off substantially more than he can chew. 

He reaches out for Naima in all the places where they both exist, and starts putting himself back together. 

It's been centuries since Naima couldn't reach out and call to Elie's mind with her own whenever she wanted to, or since he couldn't do the same to her. Reaching back to him is as natural as reaching out to control her own body. Now, granted, she doesn't currently have one of those, and doesn't know where the thing that she does have is in relation to anything else, or whether that's a question that it even makes sense to ask, but she can see the places that they overlap and make some kind of contact.

She's a little bit worried that a bunch of gods who aren't particularly their friends are staring at them - she can't actually sense this at all, it just seems embarrassingly likely - and she'd like to socially orient almost as much as she'd like to physically and mentally orient. The most important aspect of that, though, really, is figuring out how to communicate freely with Elie specifically. It's hard to exactly be lonely when they're not-holding-hands in a hundred different places, but she'd ideally like to also talk.

....figuring this out responsibly sounds hard, so she's going to sort of flail in his direction in a bunch of different ways now, in an attempt to determine which of the ways of flailing she has appear to approximate "talking". 

HEY ELIE, she manages, after accidentally sending him random medical trial results and her sense of curiosity and something like a half-filled map of where some parts of her are in relation to other parts of her.

He tries and fails to localize himself in a fraction small and coherent enough to communicate in words. Maps he can handle, though he's not entirely sure if what he sends her strictly corresponds to some distribution of his parts through what he previously understood as space. Whatever. 

He hears her. He would like to be where she is / be conceptually linked with her / exchange information with her freely. He loves her. He's trying. 

Cayden Cailean has put in a lot of thought into smoother introductions since his own ascension and sends them both a neatly organized orientation packet. It covers:

- A guide to understanding your senses and way of cognition, with numerous examples and analogies to help with the difficult process of understanding how you're even thinking. 
- An overview of godly abilities, common pitfalls in using your godly abilities for the first time, and various gods' strategies for getting the most out of them. 
- Several different ways of conceptualizing becoming legible, godagreements, and letting other gods use some of your intervention budget (not everyone thinks only in trade, ARODEN), as well as notes on which gods use which. 
- The current state of divine and planar politics, according to Cayden, who is very snarky and opinionated. 
- A guide to starting your church, choosing your first cleric, and making good use of your small initial intervention budget.
- A discussion of options for godly recreation, such as incarnating in Elysium to hang out with petitioners, gossipping with other gods, and arranging for events to happen in very emotionally satisfying ways. A discreet explanation of godsex with minimal agricultural metaphors is included.  
- The grudging advice that you should not curse out Asmodeus even though it is very satisfying and Cayden doesn't regret it. 

It isn't at all like this, because gods think in a very different way than mortals. But of the things it is not like, it is most like your cheerful, good-natured uncle taking you out on your 21st birthday to teach you to drink, introduce you to all the people you need to know, whisper the important gossip in your ear, warn you away from the places that are bad in a bad way instead of bad in a fun way, and hold your hair back when you misjudge your alcohol tolerance and throw up. 

That's all extraordinarily helpful, thanks! 

(Also, he doesn't feel any need to curse out Asmodeus, being secure in the knowledge that Asmodeus is continually cursing out him.) 

That's the attitude Cayden likes to see!

Naima spent her 21st birthday as a widow with a baby, and she typically responds to confusing mind altering states by drinking herbal remedies that make them stop. She is, maybe relatedly, not coping incredibly well with her decision to completely change what sort of being she is, or with attempts to help her come to terms with the kind of being she now is. However, she's met Cayden at least once and one time he responded to a party invitation, and the only other god this describes is... Nocticula... so he's probably the least embarrassing god to receive this information from.

She will thank him with as little grumpiness as she can manage about it. Then she will go back to trying to figure out where she is and how to communicate and what sorts of things she can do with moderately more success, this time.