Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs Chapter 1116: Goddess Mother Stirs

Beneath the Abyssal Chasm, where the ossified bones of elder worlds had been laid to rest with the indifferent contempt of a continent settling upon its own forgotten dead, there existed a sanctum that possessed no door.

Doors, after all, were courtesies afforded only to the fleeting living.

Within that lightless cradle, upon a slab hewn from stone older than any name spoken beneath the sun, a woman had slumbered through uncounted centuries.

She was not dead. The old realms had, at intervals, sought to persuade themselves otherwise... because they feared the fact that she’d one day awaken and then they’d be nothing left to save them from her wrath.

But hopes were a cruel as they could ever get!

Yet, the image of her didn’t match the monster they feared... she was beautiful in the manner of primordial cataclysms and star-forged ruins — a beauty that first struck the soul as awe, then revealed itself, with glacial as warning.

Her black hair spilled about her like the unbound veil of eternal night. Her hands, pale and regal, lay folded across the ribcage that had once cradled a son while she hid among mortals to hide his presence, now remembered by none upon the sunlit world above.

Her breasts did not rise... because they had not needed to.

Until this day.

Once.

A slow, deliberate inhalation, drawn from a wellspring within her that had lain disused so long it fractured upon opening, like the first crack of ice upon a frozen sea.

A shard of the ceiling—a fragment of matter older than basalt itself? — detached and plummeted, and plummeted still, suspended in the breathless hush, even as she exhaled.

Her eyelids did not stir.

Yet behind them, deep within the shadowed sanctum of her mind, something ancient had been kindled.

It turned, patient as the turning of ages, and began, at last, to remember.

Far above, in a corridor of crystalline glass and golden morning light that held no inkling of the tomb beneath its foundations, a young woman walked with her palm resting upon a wall she did not know was a wall, within a house she did not know she’d been brought to after saving her brother... reversing time itself for him, his Divine Consort before she threw the arrogant warden out and she passed out.

Now she had woken up and, on her way, to meet a brother who did not know ever had a sister to begin with!

Beneath the Chasm, the mother’s lips curved — not quite a smile. Smiles were a mortal habit she had not yet deigned to recall.

It was more a muscular memorandum, acknowledged, received, and filed away in the archives of eternity.

Her fingers, folded so long over her ribs, uncurled by a single knuckle.

Just one.

Three strata of primordial stone, one veil of consecrated indifference, and a floor of veined marble worth more than kingdoms separated her from the breakfast table above, where laughter still rang.

And upon the western edge of the estate, in stable raised by hands that had never been told what they were truly building, a white Friesian mare lifted her head from the polished trough.

Nyxire.

She did not snort, stamp to betray of what she’d just felt stir, in any manner her grooms would have recognized, the nature of the creature she truly was.

She simply became still —every sinew of her vast, lacquered body locked, ears pricked, nostrils flared so wide they quivered like the petals of some night-blooming orchid.

Her great obsidian eyes fixed upon a point far beyond rafter and sky, upon a sliver of aether that had, for one terrible instant, acquired a wrongness.

Something had reached for her boy.

Not within the house or within this fold of the world. A reach — long, slender, and lethally precise — sliding through a rent in the veil of reality the way a needle of star-forged silver pierces silk, aimed unerringly at the heartbeat seated at a breakfast table, lifting a slice of mango to his lips.

It was a masterpiece of subtlety. A killing stroke crafted by something old, patient, and exquisitely proud of its own cunning.

The would-be assassin had chosen a wrong place to attempt to kill her son... and she was waking up to give her a piece of her mind.

Nothing in the house perceived her waking up.

Not the ancient gods. Not the unseen watchers like the Source or other ancient beings who were afraid of her return. Not ARIA, whose vast attention was at that moment scattered across forty-seven disparate concerns and a single piece of buttered toast. Not Soo-Jin, still feigning interest in her melon.

Not Seraphiel, who had carried her wounded pride to some distant balcony and was nursing it like a chalice of mulled nightwine.

Not even Peter himself, laughing at some joke Rebecca had made concerning her own teeth.

The mare’s pupils bloomed wide as twin eclipses.

A pulse issued from her—not of muscle or breath, but of something deeper: the silent displacement of abyssal waters answering abyssal waters.

Something raced along the invisible artery that bound her stall to wherever in the cosmos her chosen heart currently beat, and it met the needle halfway.

A needle halted.

It was, with exquisite gentleness, examined.

The needle—which had been forged in the forges of something ancient and patient, and which had been rather proud of its own lethal elegance—discovered, in that instant, that it was now held by something older still, more patient still, and utterly devoid of pride, for pride was the luxury of those who still had something left to prove.

The needle was bent and folded back upon its own gleaming length the way a love letter is creased along its original fold, and then, with a courtesy bordering on mockery, returned along the very path it had come.

Somewhere very far away, in a lightless chamber no soul in this tale had yet entered, something screamed—a sound that cracked the silence like a whip of lightning across dead stars.

Nyxire registered nothing of it.

She lowered her head, unhurried, back to the trough. Took a measured mouthful of oats. Chewed with the serene deliberation of one who has witnessed the rise and fall of empires and found oats, on balance, more interesting.

Her tail flicked.

Below her stable, beneath strata of consecrated indifference and the patient weight of ages, the sleeping woman in the Chasm exhaled a second time. Another flake of ceiling surrendered its ancient hold and drifted downward like a memory given form.

The Goddess Mother had stirred.

The daughter had woken up.

The son had been struck at, and lived, and would never know.

And the only being upon the entire estate who had felt the tremor of any of it stood placid in her stall, lipping oats from a polished trough, white as a held breath, indifferent to the breakfast above her, indifferent to the sleeper below her, indifferent to all the turning world—

End of Book One.