The forsaken god and Levian circled each other, each aware that the other was his equal in this war of extinction. Only retreat or cunning treachery could shift the balance now. The forsaken god was a being of honor — he had never once struck an opponent's back after a stalemate. Levian carried no such restraint. He was evil to his marrow, and he had long since stopped caring what shape his methods took.
Before the battle had even begun, Levian had already set his contingency in motion. He had gifted one of his transcendent entity commanders an orb seeded with a sliver of his own consciousness — a weapon meant to detonate the instant their duel showed signs of deadlock. That commander, waiting only a few light-years from the forsaken army, surged forward the moment the signal came. He crossed the gap in mere microseconds and materialized before the forsaken ranks.
The forsaken god sensed it too late. The commander detonated himself where he stood.
The blast of a transcendent entity's self-destruction was catastrophic enough to erase everything below the beyond realm from existence, and any transcendent caught unprepared by such a strike could suffer wounds beyond the reach of even millions of samsaras to heal. In that instant, every royal transcendent entity standing with the forsaken god surged forward and threw their own bodies into the blast's path, shielding the ranks below them. No barrier could have withstood that detonation — their bodies were the only thing strong enough to try. It was a selfless act, and it cost them dearly. Sharing the force of the explosion as a single collective spared any one of them from annihilation, but even divided, the toll was brutal: their combined power was cut by 30%, a wound that for a lesser transcendent could have been fatal, and for the strongest among them still left barely 10% of their former strength.
Seeing his kin broken before him, the forsaken god's composure shattered. His gaze swept to Levian's armies — and to Levian himself — and in an instant he vanished from where he stood, reappearing directly within one section of Levian's forces. It was the most elite formation Levian commanded: 72 transcendent entities, 700 peak entities, 7,000 late-stage entities, and 70 million mid-stage entities, the very heart of his war machine.
Levian's expression twisted into a grim, reluctant smile. He needed the forsaken god drawn away from his own army, far enough that the god couldn't intervene before the second orb — the one already buried among the forsaken ranks — could detonate. And detonate it did. A gray fog of contamination burst outward, corrupting the minds of the hybrid monster forsaken and a portion of the royal forsaken, twisting them into bloodthirsty abominations that turned on their own kin without hesitation.
The forsaken god watched his people fall to madness, and something in him broke.
His elegant crystalline form unraveled and reformed into something else entirely — a velvet cloud pierced by seven billion holes, with a twelve-winged crystal figure suspended at its center, crowned in velvet, his face utterly blank: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Each beat of his twelve wings released trailing clouds of velvet mist that pooled and coiled around his feet like living extensions of his own body.
Levian's heart lurched. This form was a full level above him. He had no way to contend with it.
The forsaken god spread all twelve wings wide, and every soldier of Levian's army caught within that radius was sealed inside a prison of velvet mist — a trap that drained life force and consciousness alike, feeding it back into the god at its center.
Levian didn't wait to see more. He called his armies back into his internal world and fled at a speed no transcendent entity should have been able to reach, not even with the aid of forbidden artifacts. But the forsaken god had not endured this humiliation only to let him walk away unpunished — not after being forced to reveal the true form he'd spent so long concealing to preserve his standing in the beyond realm.
Fast as Levian was, the forsaken god was faster. A single beat of his twelve wings closed the distance in an instant. He seized Levian bodily and slammed him into the walls of the beyond realm, spinning a full three hundred and sixty degrees before opening a clean cut across Levian's abdomen — not to wound him, but to deliver something far worse: infection. He seeded Levian's own internal world with a contamination drawn from a level above Levian's own reach, a feat that should have been impossible to perform. Task complete, he released Levian and let him go, then turned back toward the forsaken realm.
He raised a single hand. The realm began to contract, shrinking rapidly inward, and every contaminated forsaken caught within it froze mid-motion, locked in place.
Then came his declaration: "From today, my forsaken realm ceases to be part of the beyond realm. All its medicines are forbidden to be sold outside the realm without my explicit permission. Any being who seeks out my realm, who dares to invade it, will be given only two choices — death, or the contamination of everything they call kin."
With that, he vanished, his wings folding shut behind him. Where he went, none in the beyond realm could say — his power had surpassed every being there, and tracing him was now beyond their reach.
—
Solanky's trio watched, stunned and electrified in equal measure. The memory fragment shifted — the perspective wrenching into first person, into the forsaken god's own eyes. A voice followed:
"After my armies were polluted by Levian, the corrupted lost all sanity. Their inner devils and demons broke free. I went, in secret, to the true ancient gods and devils, hoping to cleanse what had taken root in them — but they were already too far gone, consumed by their own hunger to destroy everything in reach. The godhead and the divahead of the true ancient gods and devils gave me only two paths: control them as puppets, or end every one of them before disaster came. I could not bring myself to destroy my own creations — beings who had stood to defend everything I built. So I chose control. And I could not bring myself to call them puppets. I named them instead the forbidden forsaken horde nest."
Hearing this, Solanky finally understood the true origin of the forbidden forsaken horde nest.
The memory carried them further — the forsaken god descending into the void, using one of the many holes beneath his velvet-clouded knee to tear open a portal onto a drifting continent several billion light-years wide. Beside his true scale, the continent was nothing. He halted its drift with a word, commanding it to hold its position against any force that might try to move it.
Then he summoned one of his injured generals and ordered a commander — a being of peak-stage entity strength — to strike the continent with everything he had.
The commander obeyed. The continent should have shattered, or at least been thrown from its place. It did neither. Where the blow landed, the ground gave way instead into a dark abyss — the very abyss where the calamitous entities would come to dwell.
Before stepping through the portal himself, the forsaken god raised a hand, and every contaminated forsaken being appeared before him at once. Among them, the royal forsaken still clung to a sliver of clarity, and with what remained of their minds, they begged him for one mercy: to erase their consciousness entirely and cast them out from the living forsaken forever.
He granted it. He understood that doing so would purge the contamination completely, freeing the bodies to be claimed by other beings in some future age — and in the act, he would gain an ally of terrifying strength. He sealed them within a forbidden horde nest, binding it with a restriction that only one of true ancient god or devil ancestry could command — or pass command to another they trusted absolutely.
The horde nest drifted through the infinite source space for countless years, unclaimed and unseen, until the first ancient devil-god, Morogun, finally found it.