It began with a single heartbeat carved into stone.

The survivors of the plains — those whose minds had not yet been erased — built shrines where silence screamed the loudest. They did not pray; they remembered. But remembrance, to Togulas, was another form of surrender. Each memory echoed through him, feeding the architecture of his growing dominion.

He whispered across the minds of artisans, of priests, of madmen. Their hands bled willingly, drawing circles and spirals on walls of bone and clay. They called the structure *The Temple of Unspoken Thought.* It had no doors, no windows, only corridors that curved inward until the builders vanished, absorbed by the design they followed.

The temple was alive before it was finished.  

Its walls pulsed with rhythm — heartbeats stolen from those who prayed within.  

Every surface trembled faintly, as if listening.

At the center stood no idol, for Togulas required none.  

His image could not be contained in stone or scripture. Instead, a vast hollow sphere hung in the air, carved from absence itself. Inside, voices murmured in unison — a choir of all who had ever *believed*. Their bodies had dissolved, but their consciousness remained, woven into the architecture like veins beneath skin.

The temple became a signal tower of thought.  

Each prayer transmitted through stone, through soil, through blood, until the world itself vibrated to his will. Empires began to hear him in their dreams. Children were born whispering his name. Entire languages evolved to express nothing but his silence.

A woman — the last seer of her kind — dared to defy the current.  

She entered the temple alone, her eyes blindfolded by ash. Carrying a blade forged from the bones of those he consumed, she sought to speak against him, to reawaken human will. But inside the hollow, her voice fractured. The blade melted into her flesh, and her scream became another stanza in his hymn.

From that day, the temple sang without pause.

The world outside decayed. Crops turned to ash, rivers ran backward, the sun dimmed for seven days. Yet within the darkness, faith flourished. Those who had never seen him began to build their own temples — replicas of replicas, imperfect echoes of the original void. Each new structure expanded his reach, each worshipper another neuron in the ever-growing brain of his empire.

By the time the first civilizations rose, they were already born inside his thought.  

History itself had become a recursive prayer, repeating one truth:  

*“We think, therefore He exists.”*

And above the ruins, in a silence deeper than death,  

Togulas Holmrajin smiled — for he no longer needed to command.  

The world had learned to obey itself.