This book is a dark, intelligent cosmic fantasy that serves as “Book 0” to The Forsaken Series, a trilogy that will follow Jimi Ogun, the Maroon Blood Priest, across branching destinies and broken worlds. It blends mythic tragedy, cosmic horror, and character-driven drama, tracing the fall of a world and the desperate gamble of a god who refuses to let the balance die.
At its heart stands Baron Samedi of Sangui-Mora, not as a caricature of death, but as grave-sovereign and keeper of balance, a being whose true purpose is to guard the traffic between life and death so that neither consumes the other. He is a devoted protector of his people, a lover, a strategist, and an aspect of cosmic order that many across the cosmos call a villain only because he stands at the point where all journeys end.
Around him coils an ancient war that predates stars. In the unlit silence before creation, a formless hunger screamed and tore the first cracks in reality. From those fractures emerged Xul’Nenkek, the Unmaking, the Hunger Between Stars, a primordial entropy given will. The Celestial Architects, beings who design and guard the laws of existence, have waged a timeless struggle against this hunger. Sangui-Mora, a living world steeped in ancestral power and blood-deep magic, becomes one of the front lines.
Over aeons, Xul’Nenkek infects the planet through subtler means than open war. It seeps into faith. It whispers into ritual. It reshapes devotion into extraction. The Holy Church, once a complex, morally gray institution built around Divine Light and hope, slowly becomes the perfect instrument for planetary exploitation. Its Pope and Twelve Saints wield blessings that appear miraculous to the masses, yet every “benediction” steals a fraction of Sangui-Mora’s life force, feeding an invisible symbiont and deepening the Geas of Entropy that shackles souls and soil alike. Beneath archbishops and cardinals, the knights, clerics, and village priests remain largely sincere, believing they heal when they are, in truth, harvesting. As the story progresses, this institution shifts from tragic moral ambiguity to pure, predatory evil, even as the ordinary populace remains blind to the cost.
The book unfolds in five broad movements:
Chapter 1: When the Sky Remembered Blood
The opening paints Sangui-Mora at the edge of catastrophe. A benediction of light sweeps across the planet as the Holy Church conducts a grand ritual. To the people, it is a festival of radiance and answered prayers. To Baron Samedi, standing on the steps of an obsidian mausoleum, it is the moment the sky itself starts to bleed. The light that floods the air feels wrong, hollow, too clean. Funerary fires burn lower. Graves feel empty. The Threshold between life and death, which the Baron has guarded for ages, suddenly stops receiving the souls that should be arriving.
The narrative voice is elevated and mythic, occasionally dropping into the Baron’s intimate perspective. Readers witness his subtle dread: not a panic, but a precise recognition that the accounting of the dead no longer balances. Thin funeral processions, grave candles that refuse to stay lit, and cathedrals that shine brighter as the cemeteries grow quiet become recurring images of an imbalance tightening around him.
At first, there is no single betrayal. There is only the slow creep of apathy among the living and the invisible tightening of cosmic chains. The Baron feels his authority over the Threshold eroding, not because he falters, but because the laws themselves are being rewritten behind his back. He stands between his people and a hunger they cannot see, and for the first time, the world begins to ignore him.
Chapter 2: The Geas of Entropy and the Subversion of a People
As life on Sangui-Mora continues, the Holy Church expands its influence. Its miracles become more spectacular, its cathedrals more ornate, its “Divine Light” more ever-present. The Pope and his Twelve Saints of Light, bearing names that echo imperial Rome and the hard consonants of Eastern Europe, craft a grand illusion: that every healing, every blessing, every crop saved from blight is the result of their intercession alone.
Behind that illusion lies Xul’Nenkek’s true strategy. The Church carries symbionts, fragments of the Devouring Incarnate, that bond with clergy and chosen faithful. The symbionts promise purpose, clarity, and a sense of elevation, while secretly turning their hosts into living conduits for planetary extraction. Through the Geas of Entropy, these living batteries allow Xul’Nenkek to harvest Sangui-Mora’s lifeblood without ever raising a sword.
Baron Samedi resists in all the ways he can. As grave-sovereign, he commands three distinct incarnations, each a different mask of his nature. One speaks for thresholds and graves, another for revelry and decay, another for judgment and underworld law. The book distinguishes these incarnations clearly in visual style, powers, and temperament, yet keeps them united under the Baron’s core identity: the one who ensures that nothing, not even life, gets to hoard forever.
Alongside him stands Koreth, his shadow-knit second in command, a being woven from the Baron’s own power, utterly loyal and terrifyingly efficient. Also central is his soulmate, the love whose presence reveals his warmth, humor, and stubborn tenderness. Through their eyes, readers experience the last days before the fall: the rising tension with the Church, the small victories, the desperate compromises, and the creeping realization that the war is already being lost in the hearts of the people.
The Holy Church’s hierarchy, at this stage, is portrayed as layered and textured. Many of its knights and village priests genuinely protect their flocks; some archbishops waver between doubt and ambition. The Pope and the Twelve Saints, however, harbor a more intimate connection to Xul’Nenkek’s will, one that slowly pulls them across the line from misguided zeal to knowing collaboration.
Chapter 3: The Last Battle of Sangui-Mora
The third movement brings the slow-burn horror to a tragic crescendo. After centuries of attrition, more than eighty percent of the Baron’s forces, his children, and his court are subverted or bound through the Geas. The Holy Church orchestrates a final, vast sacramental war, a conflict that looks, from the ground, like a crusade of light against supposed darkness.
From the Baron’s perspective, it is the desperate defense of an already half-emptied world. The three incarnations take the field in different theaters, each confronting aspects of the Church’s might. One duels a Saint of Light whose armor burns with stolen planetary aura. Another infiltrates cathedrals whose altars hide siphoning engines powered by bound souls. A third negotiates with wavering clergy, trying to break the Geas without damning the hosts.
These sequences blend epic warfare with claustrophobic dread. The Baron's forces fight not just soldiers, but their own families, neighbors, and former allies, now hosting Xul’Nenkek’s symbionts. Koreth’s loyalty is tested amid shadow-thick corridors and catacomb skirmishes, while the Baron’s soulmate leads a last stand that embodies the stubborn, marooned spirit of warriors left behind. The term “maroon” begins to gather mythic weight here, not as a color alone but as a state of exile and defiant endurance.
At the climax, betrayal seals the planet’s fate. It is not a single knife in the dark, but a convergence of broken trusts and manipulated faith. The Baron is captured, his incarnations shattered or bound, his people nearly fully subsumed under the Church’s light-drunk triumph. Xul’Nenkek’s influence tightens; the Holy Church begins constructing a gate that will extend this devouring to other worlds, including E.A.R.T.H.
Chained in a sanctified prison, the Baron experiences something worse than physical torment. The Church refines a rite to siphon his very essence, using his own power as the finest fuel to feed the Hunger Between Stars. Each extraction is both an attack and a theft, accelerating the construction of a multi-world gate and turning his legacy into a weapon against the balance he once preserved.
Chapter 4: The Celestial Alliance and the Gamble in The Veil
With Sangui-Mora on a slow countdown to extinction, Maat-Zul, one of the Celestial Architects and Lord of the Underworld, finally intervenes. Maat-Zul has long recognized that Baron Samedi, though often misnamed a villain, is an indispensable instrument of cosmic balance. Guided by that recognition, Maat-Zul forms a Celestial Alliance: he invests aspects of his authority into three goddesses who will act as his proxies on Sangui-Mora and in the struggle against Xul’Nenkek.
Anuket, nourisher of fields and floods, embodies the planet’s capacity to regenerate. Ma’at stands for truth, justice, and harmony, weighing the hearts of souls against a feather to determine their rightful place beyond. Seshat governs record, architecture, and the mathematics of time, ensuring that memory itself cannot be easily rewritten. Through them, Maat-Zul keeps a hidden foothold on Sangui-Mora even as the Church seems triumphant, and the book begins to explore how their domains intersect with the Baron's own duties.
Yet even Maat-Zul cannot touch the Baron directly while Xul’Nenkek’s corruption spreads through him. The only sanctuary left is The Veil, the last realm the Hunger cannot yet penetrate. Maat-Zul petitions the Celestial Architects to take the Baron’s soul into protective custody inside this liminal space. The Architects, wary of his history and the danger of his power, debate the wisdom of this rescue. Eventually, they agree, and the Baron is removed from immediate reach, his energy drain slowed but not fully stopped.
In The Veil, the book’s frame crystallizes. The Baron stands before a council of Celestial Architects, wrapped in a translucent world between realities. Here, the style leans deeply into cosmic, lyrical language as he presents not arguments but visions. Xul’Nenkek’s shadow stretches through timelines, toward Sangui-Mora’s absolute devouring and a coming fracture that will ripple into the broader cosmos and toward E.A.R.T.H., a small but strategically critical world in the great ledger of reality.
The Baron, whose anchor has always been his obligation to maintain balance, refuses to accept passive extinction. He proposes a desperate alternative: allow him to choose a mortal champion, train that champion, and send them to confront the Holy Church, heal the laws of nature, and contest Xul’Nenkek’s influence.
Throughout this plea, his personality comes fully into focus. He does not grovel. He does not apologize. He cares little for his reputation as a cosmic villain. He speaks instead as a sovereign who knows his duty and refuses to abandon his people, even if they have largely been turned against him. He acknowledges, in the smallest of asides, that his disdain for opinion and his unwavering confidence helped create conditions the Church exploited, but regret does not define him. Resolve does.
The Alliance with Maat-Zul and the goddesses becomes more than a tactical pact; it is a structural agreement that will reshape how the Celestial Architects perceive balance itself. Through subtle foreshadowing, the book suggests that this Alliance will complicate the cosmic hierarchy, introduce new checks on the Architects’ authority, and ripple forward into the coming trilogy.
In one of the most crucial scenes, the Baron speaks an old proverb tied to his name, a Forsaken line that carries the power to manifest destinies. He evokes marooned warriors at the edges of dying skies, priests of blood caught at thresholds where life and death blur. These words, spoken during the Veil plea and echoed while he later comments on the futures he shows, seed the core image of the Maroon Blood Priest and the notion that those labeled “forsaken” are not abandoned, but chosen in the silence after gods turn away.
Chapter 5: Branching Futures and the Birth of a Blood Sovereign
Once the Architects consent, reluctantly, to hear his gamble, the Baron reveals the Crossroads Trial of a man named Jimi Ogun on a distant world called E.A.R.T.H. Jimi, a 36-year-old CEO, hematologist, and inventor living in Kyoto, is introduced not as a heroic archetype but as a quietly driven man of science, logic, and controlled routine. His life revolves around two gravitational wounds: the loss of his fiancé Makaeda to medical negligence and the slow, relentless decline of his younger brother Baki, whose rare blood disorder resists conventional treatment.
Jimi’s invention, the BioInk Rapid Plasma Delivery System, represents the apex of his earthly genius and his desperate hope to save Baki. His days are tightly regimented, his emotional range deliberately narrowed to the tasks at hand. He does not dream of destiny. He dreams of one more year, one more treatment, one more data point that might push a real cure over the line.
The Baron presents Jimi’s Crossroads Trial as a sequence of branching lifetimes rather than a single vision. In The Veil, time behaves elastically. The Architects witness Jimi live out whole lives in different permutations, each path ending in death and then resetting, as if the universe itself is testing the resilience and moral tenor of his soul.
In one timeline, Jimi clings to science, refuses all supernatural bargains, and dies with his work incomplete, leaving Baki and countless others without the benefits his research could have delivered. In another, he accepts a narrower pact that grants him power but at the cost of his own ethical core, leading to a future where he becomes another extractor rather than a healer. In a third, he embraces the full mantle of Blood Sovereign, wielding a Grimoire that interweaves ancient magic with modern medicine and networked information, learning to command every aspect of blood, from healing to elemental weaponry.
The Architects, watching, recognize the danger in what the Baron proposes. This champion could save worlds, or he could become a Sovereign Without End, another devourer in a different, subtler form. The Baron does not show them every possible failure. The narrative makes clear, through tone and small hints, that he edits these futures into a kind of legal argument. He proves that Jimi can choose sacrifice, can bear the weight of impossible decisions, can die and rise again with his moral center intact. He omits, or glides quickly over, the iterations where Jimi’s pain becomes a vector for entirely new forms of catastrophe.
Still, the Architects are not fools. They suspect he is not showing all his cards. Yet the alternatives are worse: a guaranteed timeline where Sangui-Mora dies within five centuries, where the Holy Church fractures the cosmos to establish a firmer foothold on E.A.R.T.H., and where the Hungry Between Stars feeds uninterrupted. Jimi’s best paths, imperfect as they are, offer a chance at disruption.
The book ends on a double-edged, tragic-hopeful note. The Celestial Architects grant the Baron permission. Jimi Ogun’s path as a future Maroon Blood Priest, Forsaken Cleric of the Threshold, begins to crystalize, though he will not yet understand any of it. The Baron remains imprisoned, suspended in The Veil, his power still being siphoned in the material plane, his body captive while his soul navigates cosmic courts. The Holy Church continues to devour Sangui-Mora’s life, and the countdown to planetary death, set at roughly five centuries, quietly ticks on.
In a final, haunting coda that frames this entire narrative as only one of many possible outcomes, the perspective briefly shifts to entities beyond even the Architects: the Collective and the Saints of the Threshold, beings almost equal in stature to the Celestial Architects yet laced with fragments of Xul’Nenkek. They watch the termination of an E.A.R.T.H.-based timeline and log it as a “clinical observation” rather than an apocalypse. The end of a world comes not with screaming stars but with measured, sterile reports and a soft exhalation of bureaucratic relief. Just before the portal closes, nearly a thousand streams of light escape back through, their nature left unexplained, hovering as mysteries that later books will reveal as seeds, shards, and Variants tied to Jimi, Sangui-Mora, and the fate of the cosmos.
In that anomaly, in that one detail the Collective cannot quite reconcile, readers glimpse the thin line between inevitability and intervention. It is the line the Baron has chosen to walk. It is the line on which the entire Forsaken Saga will balance.
Across its five chapters, Maroon Blood Priest: Prelude of the Forsaken offers:
- A richly textured portrayal of Baron Samedi as grave-sovereign, lover, strategist, and misunderstood guardian of cosmic balance, rather than a simple death-god cliché.
- A slow, chilling account of how a world’s faith can be weaponized to feed an alien hunger, turning miracles into mechanisms of extraction.
- A nuanced Holy Church that begins in moral grayness, with sincere believers and noble intentions, and descends into orchestrated evil under the influence of Xul’Nenkek and its symbionts.
- The foundation of the Celestial Alliance between Maat-Zul, the Baron, and the goddesses Anuket, Ma’at, and Seshat, whose interplay will shape the politics of the cosmos.
- A haunting introduction to Jimi Ogun, whose quiet, grounded life on E.A.R.T.H. becomes the unsuspecting fulcrum of multiple timelines, and whose Trial at the Crossroads hints at three whole novels’ worth of diverging futures.
For readers of fantasy, horror, and isekai who crave an intelligent, layered narrative about exploitation, faith, and the cost of defiance, this prelude sets the stage. It does not offer simple comfort. It offers a marooned ember in a drowning cosmos and asks whether one man, one god, and one world can ignite more than their own extinction.
