Ny'yala
"Every end is a beginning already unfolding." -Fragment of the Veil-Songs.
Ny’yala is not mercy, nor is she punishment. She is inevitability itself. The Lady of Cycles governs endings and beginnings, the endless turning of the Wheel that grinds down empires and raises new ones from ash. To mortals she is terrifying, for she cannot be bribed, tricked, or delayed. Kings weep before her, for their reigns must end. Lovers cry her name when torn apart, for reunion waits in her design. Every death, every birth, every fading memory and rekindled fire, Ny’yala’s hand is in them all. Yet it is precisely this inevitability that makes her worship so enduring. To kneel before Ny’yala is to find peace in the certainty that nothing is wasted, nothing is lost forever. What crumbles will feed what rises. What dies will live again in another form. The desperate pray to her for endings to suffering; the hopeful pray for beginnings. The weary beg her to close chapters too long endured, and the ambitious whisper her name, trusting she will grant them another chance should their present lives falter. Unlike gods who demand devotion through fear or hunger, Ny’yala’s promise is steadier, not the granting of wishes, but the assurance that time itself will not betray them. Her shrines are circles of stone, unbroken rings carved into cliffside and graveyard alike, or mirrors set facing one another so worshippers may glimpse the illusion of infinity. It is said that to step within such a circle and chant her name is to feel the world slow, breath deepen, and grief soften, as if one has already been woven into her tapestry and need no longer struggle against the thread.
Pilgrims travel leagues to find these places, leaving offerings of wilted flowers, cracked hourglasses, or heirlooms passed from one generation to the next, each gift a symbol of endings feeding beginnings. Those who turn from her call describe her as cruel, for she strips away the illusion of permanence. Yet her faithful see this not as cruelty but as honesty. A ruler may lie; a merchant may cheat; even memory may fail. But the Wheel turns, unbroken, eternal. Ny’yala alone is truth. Her worship is not despair, but liberation: to know that nothing lasts forever is also to know that nothing is gone forever. The wound will scar, the fire will leave ash fertile for new growth, and the grave is but another door. To despair, then, is folly; to embrace change is grace. Where Xaethra tempts mortals with hunger and unfulfilled desire, Ny’yala answers with the only true promise, that time turns, always, and no one escapes its rhythm. This is why even kings, priests, and conquerors kneel in secret to her: for in her turning, even their failures may be redeemed, and their power reborn in another age. The humble see in her the chance that their suffering is not wasted; the mighty see in her the certainty that their legacy will not end in silence. And for both, the Wheel continues.
Divine Domains
Ny’yala does not soothe with false hope; she affirms the truth of endings and beginnings as one:
- Primary Domains: Fate, cycles, inevitability, rebirth. All that turns, returns, or repeats is hers.
- Secondary Connections: Oaths, prophecy, patience. She is invoked in vows intended to outlast lives, and in visions that reveal paths already woven.
- Tertiary Reflections: Decay, renewal, inevitability of death. Not death’s silence (Caelbrith’s domain), but its role in making way for life.
Artifacts
Ny’yala’s relics are subtle, endless in their repetition:
- The Turning Wheel: A bone-and-bronze disk that always returns to its holder, no matter how far thrown. A diviner’s tool and a test of inevitability.
- The Loom of Quiet Threads: A tapestry that eternally unravels and rewinds itself, showing births and deaths in its weave. Those who stare too long lose sense of their own moment in time.
Holy Books & Codes
Her scriptures are whispers caught in repetition:
- The Veil-Songs: Endless chants of endings and beginnings, sung in spirals until voices crack. Used in rituals of transition, birth and burial alike.
- The Wheel Codex: A prophetic text foretelling deaths and rebirths with cold certainty. Fragments surface in forbidden libraries, feared as curses.
Divine Symbols & Sigils
Her signs are simple in-form, if-not somewhat haunting in their simplicity:
- A perfect ring-circle is the most common depicton.
- Simple spirals often in mounds atop stone with a mix of soil and powdered leaves to represent the march of time.
- A wheel with missing spokes, showing brokenness mended by time.
Tenets of Faith
Her creed is quiet, but absolute:
- Nothing ends. All things return.
- Oaths sworn in Ny’yala’s name bind beyond death.
- Grief is sacred, despair is weakness.
Holidays
Her holy days are not feasts, but marks of transition:
- The Cycle’s Turn: Observed on first frost and first bloom, when offerings of rot and seed are buried together.
- The Remembrance Spiral: Elders lead children in a circling procession, chanting names of the dead until voices fail.
Divine Goals & Aspirations
Ny’yala’s aims are the slow tides of eternity:
- Preserve the Wheel’s turning, ensuring nothing can halt the rhythm.
- Bind oaths and debts across lives, so justice and promise always find their time.
- Teach inevitability, stripping away the mortal illusion of permanence.
- Her faithful believe she has no enemies, only inevitabilities yet to arrive.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
Ny’yala’s form is not a body but an endless spiral of void-pocked growth, a gyre of hollow chambers boring infinitely inward, each hole a mouth of history that can never close. The spiral pulses like a living cell, swelling, collapsing, replicating, and rotting all at once, a grotesque tide of creation and dissolution. From every pore yawns an age already passed, kingdoms etched in miniature, crumbling into dust; generations repeating in perfect cycles, mothers becoming daughters, rulers becoming slaves, ad infinitum. The further one gazes into her spiral, the smaller and more countless the bored holes become, until vision collapses into infinite regression, worlds inside worlds, deaths inside births, a sickness of eternity that no mind can endure. To behold her is to feel trypophobic terror magnified to divine scale, the dread of countless holes pressing closer, each one filled with faces that smile and rot in the same instant, each one whispering the moment of your death like an echo already spoken. Witnesses describe not pain but paralysis, as if their bodies are already spiraling inward, caught in the pull of her infinite lattice. Survivors return compulsively scratching spirals into walls, into skin, into the ground, unable to stop marking the inevitability of the Wheel. Others lose their sense of continuity, their lives looping into repetitive fragments as though their thread has already been spun into her tapestry and shredded again. When Ny’yala condescends to veil herself, she cloaks this horror in gentler forms, a wheel of bone and vine that turns endlessly in shadow, a midwife with spiraling eyes who holds both infant and corpse, or a circle of mirrors that reveal you dying and being born again with every glance. But even here, the spiral never disappears, it lurks in the background, in the pupils of her gaze, in the patterns of dust, in the very fabric of her voice. She is the eternal mark on history, every age a hole in her infinite coil, every life a pore in the skin of inevitability.
Divine Classification
God.
Children
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