The slime demon ran, and Destruction followed close behind it.

[Ripheus23]

AKA The Horses and Their Two Riders?

Anyway... A major background condition is that ultimate/cosmic evil can't manifest as a fully unified evil god-monster. So there are the ur-abomination and the ur-destroyer, at odds, the latter hunting the other across the universe.

Volume One (or book one or whatever) would be about how the abomination is hiding in a specific star system. It would divide itself into two pieces and manipulate two people into "holding on to" those pieces over volume/book/w/e one. But by the end, the Ancreatus (some would call it) would find the Malessium(?) and would start performing the cosmic Ritual of Discreation to try to destroy what it self-lyingly believes to be the one true greatest evil, its lone eternal prey.

The Malessium would then open a transplanar gate to escape, dragging two large sections of the star system with it, into the Dark Anfract, a cosmic maze where the threshold of Hell itself shifts from corridor's end to corridor's end as the other aspects of the maze, along with the Ancreatus itself, hound the abomination down its infernal way.

(Sidebar: there are roughly two planes, the transcendent and the immanent ones so-called. The Anfract in fact occupies otherwise disconnected sectors of both planes.)

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I would guesstimate that the story could be sufficiently resolved in only two (long) books/volumes although first-half details and second-half outcomes elude me so far. Four major POVS seem like they might be enough but I think a decent smattering (10 or so?) of interlude POVs might be enough to "flesh out" the sociological world-building in-text.

Addendum: ran the above by two LLMs, and maybe I'm a sore writer but they don't seem to "get it." Their suggestions aren't awful but I think that they don't have a deep enough "feeling" for where I would want to go with the above.

Secondary addendum: a different, but similar in many ways, series idea I had would have had two large entries first and last, two smaller entries wedged between those. So say 1250 pgs. roughly per entries one and four, just 250 pgs. roughly per entries two and three. Then 3K pages overall, small enough font + margins-mostly-used up. Maybe that would be enough space for it. I mean, I would like to have some world-building-for-its-own-sake underneath the thematics.

Edited February 15 by Ripheus23