There came a night when no one could remember how to dream.

The Temple’s song had spread beyond language, beyond sleep. Every creature — from insects trembling in the dust to kings dying in their marble beds — began to hum the same vibration. It was not a melody, but a rhythm of absence, a pulse without origin or end. The sound built cities of echo inside the skulls of the living.

Within that endless harmony, Togulas listened.

He walked through nations that had forgotten speech. Their faces were pale masks, eyes hollow, throats trembling with the same mechanical chant. He did not need to speak anymore; the Choir of the Hollow Mind was his voice made manifold. Each mind a string, each heartbeat a note. Humanity had become his instrument.

He raised his hand, and the air froze into a thousand translucent shapes — souls stripped of individuality, suspended in mid-breath.  

When he moved his fingers, they twitched in unison, producing waves of thought too dense for sound. The very landscape rippled. Mountains bowed, oceans stilled, the wind itself bent into compliance. Reality adjusted to rhythm.

The Choir swelled, a tide of consciousness devouring silence.  

There were no screams, no prayers, only resonance.  

Children were born singing. Corpses continued after death, mouths moving, lungs refusing decay. Time faltered as the sound wrapped around it like a serpent consuming its own tail.

From the highest peak of the eastern continent, the Choir’s vibration reached the upper atmosphere, engraving a pattern across the aurora — a lattice of golden sigils visible only to those who no longer possessed fear. Those who looked up too long went blind, not from light, but from revelation.

Togulas knelt amidst his symphony, the ground rippling like water beneath his knees. For the first time since his awakening, he felt something unfamiliar — fullness. The weight of every mind he had consumed pressed against his being, voices pleading, whispering, laughing, weeping all at once.

He smiled and whispered,  

“Sing louder.”

The earth obeyed.

Entire continents shuddered. Seas boiled into vapor. The moon cracked into crescents.  

For three days and nights, the Choir sang until matter itself became translucent. The fabric of existence thinned, revealing glimpses of thought bleeding into geometry — impossible shapes folding within themselves. Beneath it all, Togulas’ reflection multiplied endlessly, a fractal god observing itself through infinite mirrors.

When at last the song subsided, the world was changed.  

The survivors awoke to find themselves scattered, speechless, unable to recall who they were.  

Only one phrase remained, etched into their bones, murmured even in sleep:

*“The hollow mind shall echo forever.”*

And in the distance, within the ruins of the first Temple,  

a new sound began to form — soft, rhythmic, almost human.  

The next evolution of silence had begun.