The Goddess's Might Saves the World - Chapter 9 - Part 1

The snow went silent.
After three days and three nights of divine combat, an unimaginable quiet finally settled over the entire ice plain. The wind didn’t howl anymore; it felt as though time itself had paused its stride. The grey clouds tore open, and an aurora slowly cleaved the sky, scattering a soft, lonely light across the scarred, ruined earth.
It was the relic of a battlefield, the sepulchre of a myth.
The Hero slowly opened his eyes.
He remembered the final sight—the Goddess spreading her arms, her chest light surging like a tidal wave, merging with the Frost Dragon and dissolving into the aurora’s current. Now, only a snowfield, chillingly luminous, remained, along with the faint scatterings of silver feather-glow beneath the ice.
He sat up, his throat as parched as desert grit. The air still carried the residual scent of flame, a fragrance both divine and sorrowful. It was her very essence—the afterglow of the Sacred Flame’s purification, a soft radiance wavering gently on the wind.
“You’ve saved the world, once more.” He managed a bitter smile, his voice swallowed by the aurora in the snow-mist.
He saw the pattern of those light-veins—the Goddess’s own conduits, stolen by Yggra and repurposed as the Treant’s new musculature.
“Even her Divine Flame… has become its very bl00d,” he whispered.
Then, a deep, rumbling roar tore up from the earth. The entire ruins exploded upward, shattering and collapsing as if some colossal stone cap had been violently ripped away. And from the very heart of that cataclysm, a ‘tree’ slowly began to rise—
No, it was a colossal silhouette forged from root and flesh, bone and rock.
Its massive torso pierced the cloud line. Its trunk had become a vertebral column; its enormous branches, its arms. From every joint, a silver-green liquid poured—the ‘Primal Ichor’, a hideous blend of the Goddess’s tears and nature’s own bl00d. The central ‘Flower of Flesh’ unfolded its petals, the faceless tree-head tilting towards the heavens. Deep within the flower’s heart, the Hero saw—the Goddess.
She was sealed inside that flower-heart, like a seed. Her body was pierced by countless light-roots, and the Holy Flame in her core was so faint it was nearly transparent. Yet, it still pulsed; that light was the very engine driving the heart of the entire Treant.
“Your heart beats to breathe life into it,” the Hero whispered, tightening his grip on the sword hilt.