From within my sealed dimension, I watched history pivot.
Gaea had endured long enough.
She was life.
Growth.
Preservation.
And she could see what Set's corruption was doing to Earth. The cannibalistic spiral of the Elder Gods threatened not only each other—but the planet itself. Life had only just begun to stir in primitive forms. If the devouring continued, nothing would survive long enough to evolve.
So she made a decision.
A desperate one.
She turned to the source.
Demiurge — progenitor of Earth's divinity, the fountainhead from which we were born.
Together, they conceived something new.
Not an Elder God.
A weapon.
A successor.
A different lineage entirely.
And in the depths of the Earth, in the molten core of the young planet, he was born.
Atum.
I observed through scrying magic, my projection form standing silently before a pool of condensed void.
Even from afar, I could feel him.
He was not like us.
Where Elder Gods were vast, conceptual, chaotic…
Atum was focused.
Condensed.
Purpose-driven.
He was the first of a new race of gods.
Structured divinity.
Refined.
And he carried within him a singular instinct:
Purge.
I did not intervene.
Why would I?
This war offered me no benefit.
At this point in my growth, I was powerful—high mid-tier among the surviving Elder Gods, perhaps. My chaos divinity had awakened. My dark magic surpassed nearly all of my peers. My Azathoth resonance granted immense potential.
But potential is not the same as supremacy.
I was not yet ready to fight multiple corrupted Elder Gods simultaneously.
And I certainly had no desire to fight something new whose power I had not fully calculated.
So I stayed hidden.
Desperately hidden.
Layer upon layer of dimensional misdirection shielded me. My existence was blurred, displaced, rendered statistically improbable.
From the shadows, I watched.
Atum rose.
And he began the slaughter.
One by one, the corrupted Elder Gods fell before him.
He was not subtle.
He did not scheme.
He hunted.
And when he killed—
He consumed.
Just as Set had.
But unlike Set, Atum did not become unstable.
He became refined.
Each absorbed divinity strengthened him without corruption. He metabolized godhood itself. Power folded into him cleanly, efficiently.
The irony was exquisite.
Set had begun the age of cannibalism.
Atum perfected it.
Elder Gods who once shaped continents screamed as they were reduced to divine essence. Their stolen powers flowed into Atum's expanding radiance.
I observed dispassionately.
This was not cruelty.
It was correction.
A cosmic immune response.
By the time Atum was finished, nearly all corrupted Elder Gods were gone.
Devoured.
Erased.
Their legacies reduced to fuel.
Only a few survived.
Those who had fled into other dimensions.
Those who had hidden deeply enough.
Those who, like me, had refused to participate.
Oshtur remained distant in higher realms.
Gaea endured, tethered to life itself.
And I remained in my sealed cathedral beyond reality's fold.
Atum stood alone.
Bloated with stolen divinities.
Radiant beyond measure.
Dangerous.
Even from across dimensional barriers, I felt the magnitude of him. Had he turned his attention outward, had he sought hidden presences…
I might have been discovered.
But he did not.
His purpose was complete.
The corruption was purged.
And then—
He released the excess.
The energy he could not stabilize erupted outward in a controlled discharge. A cosmic flare of divine force that reshaped planetary balance.
Then he ascended.
He became one with the sun.
A silent guardian, burning in nuclear divinity above the world.
In the silence that followed, I exhaled.
The Age of Elder Gods was over.
The Age of Devouring had ended.
A new divine hierarchy had begun.
And I was still alive.
Still hidden.
Still growing.
I turned away from the scrying pool, mind racing.
Atum's existence changed everything.
He had proven something crucial:
Gods can be replaced.
Supplanted.
Refined into new forms.
Which meant one day…
Elder Gods could be surpassed.
Supreme God potential no longer felt theoretical.
It felt inevitable.
I whispered into the quiet of my dimension:
"Good. Clean the board."
Because now, with the chaos diminished and the corrupted eliminated…
I could grow in peace.
And when I finally emerge—
I will not be prey.
I will not be hunted.
I will be something beyond both Elder God and Sun God.