He built the city from echoes.

On the edge of his living world, where the valley’s veins reached the ocean of clouds, Togulas sculpted a sprawl of architecture that breathed and listened. Its streets were arteries; its towers, spiral cochleas that reached into the upper air. Each brick was a fragment of perception, taken from those who once dreamed and now could not.

It was called *Ithrenum* in the lost tongue of its builders — The City That Hears.

From a distance it shimmered like wet obsidian, pulsing in rhythm with unseen heartbeats.  

When wind passed through its corridors, it did not whistle; it whispered. Every sound ever made — the birth cry of civilizations, the sighs of the dying, the murmur of shifting dust — was trapped within its walls, replaying endlessly.

Togulas walked through the streets, barefoot on the trembling stone.  

With each step, memories surfaced. The laughter of a woman he had never known.  

The final prayer of a child drowned in the Feast.  

The whispered terror of the Dream-Flesh before dissolving back into thought.  

He realized the city was not built from matter. It was built from *remorse.*

And yet it was beautiful.

The inhabitants of Ithrenum did not speak. They were living conduits — beings with ears where mouths should have been, their entire bodies tuned to receive vibration. They slept standing, heads tilted toward the sky, absorbing the murmurs of reality like a cathedral absorbing light.

Whenever a thought was born anywhere in the world, the City heard it.  

Every desire, every scream, every forbidden name — all converged within its heart, a sphere of pulsating glass known as **The Resonant Core.**

Inside that core, a sound formed — low, continuous, growing.  

At first it resembled music, then a voice. His voice.  

But it was not under his control.

Togulas entered the central chamber, where the Core hung suspended in liquid silence. The walls dripped with soundless rain. He reached out to touch the sphere, and the vibration pierced him like a thousand needles of memory. The voice from within spoke not to him, but *as* him.

“I am the echo of your thought,” it said.  

“I am what you left behind in every mind you touched.”

The City began to tremble. Its inhabitants fell to their knees, bleeding from their ears, yet smiling in ecstasy. The sound became unbearable — not loud, but *intimate,* as though the air itself remembered being human.

Togulas staggered. The voice grew louder.

“You thought the mind was yours to shape. You thought silence was obedience. But every thought you consumed left a shadow, and shadows listen when gods sleep.”

The Resonant Core cracked, spilling waves of audible memory that flooded the city.  

Every street sang, every building screamed, every listener wept. The City That Hears was no longer a monument — it was a confession.

He fell to his knees and pressed his palms to the trembling floor.  

Within that chaos, he sensed something forming — an intelligence not his own, composed of countless overheard thoughts, bound together by pain.

It spoke again, in the voice of everyone he had ever silenced:

*“Now we hear you, Togulas Holmrajin.”*

For the first time since creation began, he covered his ears.

And still, he could hear everything.