The Goddess's Might Saves the World - Chapter 10 - Part 1

They fell from the precipice of the heavens, descending into a realm that existed far below the current of time itself.
It was an abyss of black ocean, its depths unfathomable. The surface mirrored no starlight; only the distorted, inverted shadows of the dead. Every drop of this liquid was a noxious concoction of fragmented echoes and the last gasps of annihilated worlds—an endless night where ten thousand souls had been liquefied. The Hero and the Goddess stood suspended, side-by-side, above the core of this lightless gulf. When the tides below their feet swelled, even gravity itself recoiled.
“This place… is the womb of the universe,” the Goddess breathed, the sacred flame at her chest flickering in the black mist, perhaps resonating with some forgotten, primal awareness. “Nyarl is here. She isn’t merely sleeping; she waits for someone who truly grasps ‘Finality’ to stir her.”
The Hero’s hand clenched the hilt of the Holy Sword; the runes etched into its blade wouldn’t cease their trembling. This was a deep rejection from the very core of existence—a mortal was simply not meant to stand here. A thin, sorrowful cry began to permeate the air, like the distant wails of ten thousand infants. It was not a sound registered by the ear, but a direct, soul-shaking resonance that seized his heart and throttled it violently.
“That sound… that’s the breath of her progeny,” the Goddess murmured, her eyes closed, feeling the currents of these cries gather and focus upon a single point in the dark.
A silhouette began to ascend from the heart of the sea.
Nyarl.
Her shape was liquid, never settling. One moment, she was an enthroned empress; the next, a colossal infant, stretching between the earth and the heavens, woven from countless sickeningly twisted limbs.
Finally, she resolved into the form of a young woman with silver-black hair, floating nude upon the abyssal water. Her eyes were like lightless, dead stars, and her alien pupils held the inverted reflections of the Hero and the Goddess.
“Welcome, my dear.”
She extended a single finger. Its nail was pure jet, and from its tip flowed a river of liquid light.
That dark, crushing tide—composed of a billion deceased stars and the relics of shattered civilizations—now rose and fell in time with Nyarl’s heart. Every single beat made the very skeleton of the cosmos shriek in lament.
The Hero drifted amidst the resulting turmoil, his consciousness constantly being ripped apart and splintered. He could hear the sound of time fracturing, and the echoes of himself simultaneously expiring across countless parallel timelines.
He still held the Holy Sword fast.
The sword’s light was pathetically frail, like the lonely glow of phosphorescence wavering on a seabed lost to light.
He couldn’t see the Goddess, only sensed the minute tremor of her divine fire on some distant dimensional plane, as if she were desperately calling out to him.
“Are you… still there?” he managed to whisper.
His answer came as a deep, reverberating thrum—not the Goddess’s voice, but Nyarl’s own.
The sound swaddled the entire abyss, as gentle as a mother’s lullaby embracing a newborn, yet as crushingly heavy as the tolling of a final funeral bell.
“Cease your struggle, child. Your battle, for all of you, is already done.”
Nyarl, poised at the center of the black ocean, spread her arms. Silver-black membranes flaked from her body, instantly transforming into an endless host of ‘Stars of the Umbral Womb’.
These stellar bodies began to whirl in a spiral, and within the core of every star, a single, weeping soul was eternally sealed.
The chorus of mingled cries formed a terrifying, unspeakable sonic wall that immediately shattered…