Eternity passes differently for us.
A thousand years is a passing conversation.
Ten thousand is a mild shift in perspective.
Over the ages, I met the others.
Once.
Twice.
Rarely more.
Elder Gods do not gather for festivals. We orbit one another loosely—curious, cautious, self-contained.
And then something changed.
It began with hunger.
Set discovered something no Elder God had dared attempt.
He learned he could kill us.
And worse—
He could consume us.
Absorb our divinity.
Steal our power.
Integrate our essence into himself.
He became the first murderer.
The first cannibal.
The first true abomination among us.
I saw it before it fully unfolded.
My farsight had evolved over millennia. I could scry across time's branching probabilities, watch futures like drifting tides.
And in those futures, I saw chains of devastation.
Elder Gods devoured.
Divinities ripped apart.
Chaos spreading like rot through our kind.
Set's power grew rapidly. With each consumed god, he became more monstrous—less divine intellect, more primal appetite. His aura warped. His essence began to curdle.
He was no longer merely an Elder God.
He was becoming demonic.
And worse still—his corruption was contagious.
Not a disease of flesh.
A disease of divinity.
Those who lingered near him too long felt the pull. Hunger. Paranoia. The urge to dominate before being devoured.
I calculated outcomes.
In 73% of projected futures, I would eventually be forced into direct confrontation.
In 61% of those, I would survive—but at catastrophic cost.
In 28%, I would be consumed.
Unacceptable.
I did not fear death.
I feared corruption.
I liked my mind the way it was.
Yes, I leaned toward darkness.
Yes, my morality was… flexible.
But I was rational.
Set's corruption would not merely make me cruel.
It could warp my will.
Distort my autonomy.
Twist my Azathoth resonance into uncontrolled annihilation.
That could not be permitted.
So I withdrew.
Immediately.
The Sealed Dimension
My personal dimension transformed.
What had once been a cathedral became a fortress.
I layered:
Chaos barriers that rewrote intruding energies.
Dark magic encryption woven into spatial constants.
Dimensional misalignment fields.
Temporal distortion layers.
Conceptual cloaking spells.
I severed traceable metaphysical signatures.
From the outside, I became absent.
Not hidden.
Absent.
If Set looked for me, he would find only silence.
From within my sanctuary, I watched.
Through farsight and scrying pools of condensed void, I observed Set's descent.
He devoured again.
And again.
With each act, his form grew more serpentine, more abyssal. His aura dripped corruption into the fabric of early Earth.
Some Elder Gods resisted.
Most did not.
Paranoia spread among our kind. Alliances fractured. Divinities shattered. Ancient beings who once shaped continents were reduced to screaming fragments absorbed into Set's expanding essence.
He was no longer just an Elder God.
He was becoming something like a proto-demon lord.
And then the corruption tipped fully.
Those who fed began to mirror him.
Cannibalism became survival.
The Age of Elder Gods became the Age of Devouring.
Only two escaped the spiral.
GaeaOshtur
Gaea chose preservation. She bound herself to life, to the planet's growth, becoming its nurturing force.
Oshtur retreated into higher magical planes, distancing herself from the carnage and pursuing structured mysticism.
They fled in different ways.
I hid.
Not from fear.
From calculation.
Set would burn himself eventually. His hunger was exponential. The more he consumed, the less stable he became. My farsight showed branching futures where he either:
Devoured nearly all remaining Elder Gods and destabilized Earth itself.
Or fractured under the weight of stolen divinities.
I needed him weakened.
Then perhaps I would emerge.
Until then, I studied.
I refined chaos magic further.
I reinforced my mind against external corruption.
I anchored my consciousness across additional dimensional layers.
If Set ever tried to infect me, he would find no stable core to latch onto.
I would not be devoured.
I would not be controlled.
I would not lose myself.
From my hidden throne of shadows, I whispered softly to the silent void:
"Devour them. Grow arrogant. Exhaust yourself."
Because when the Age of Devouring ends…
A new age will begin.
And I will still be here.