The world began to think.

It started as a tremor in the air, a pressure that lived between breaths.  

Birds flew in erratic spirals, their wings beating to an unseen pulse. Rivers bent against their courses, carving words across the plains. Even the clouds aligned into geometry — vast circular sigils turning slowly above the temples.

Togulas watched from the summit of a mountain once called holy.  

He raised his gaze and saw thoughts threading through the atmosphere like veins of light. Every whisper from the Choir, every echo of the Feast, had climbed upward, weaving itself into the fabric of the sky.  

Now the heavens dreamed.

Bolts of lightning wrote sentences no one could read.  

Thunder spoke his name backwards. The sun flickered, losing its rhythm, and the moon bled a faint luminescence that dripped into the oceans below. Wherever the light touched, creatures began to hear each other’s terror. Consciousness became contagious.

At first it was wonder. Then, it was agony.

A fisherman on the southern coast screamed as he felt the pain of every living thing that died within sight of the sea. His mind swelled until his skull burst, releasing a luminous vapor that whispered before fading. Forests trembled as trees shared the memory of axes. Wolves hunted their own shadows, convinced they were betrayers.

The sky fractured — not in silence, but with an audible thought.  

A crystalline crack split the horizon, exposing a darkness that looked back.  

Through that wound, a reflection stared: a vast mirror of the world, reversed, trembling, sentient. Its surface rippled with the combined fear of all creation.

Togulas smiled. “It begins.”

He extended his hands and felt the reflection answer.  

The world beneath him pulsed, mimicking his breath.  

For a heartbeat, every mind, every living nerve, synchronized with his own — an orchestra of existence tuned to a single consciousness.

Then the reflection screamed.

The sound was light, raw and absolute. It shattered mountains, evaporated rivers, and etched new constellations into the night — constellations that moved when no one watched. Entire civilizations vanished into the scream, their identities absorbed into the echo that now filled the stratosphere.

When the echoes faded, only ruins remained.  

The survivors knelt beneath a sky broken into shards, each fragment reflecting a different memory of the same world. None of them aligned. None of them were real.

Togulas stepped forward, and his reflection stepped back.  

For the first time, the god of thought saw something he did not understand — a boundary.  

He reached toward the mirrored horizon, fingers brushing its cold surface, and the reflection whispered in his own voice:

*“You are the thought that should have never been born.”*

The wind died. The world held its breath.  

Above him, the splintered sky pulsed once more —  

not in worship, but in warning.