He awoke inside himself.

There was no world now — only reflections.  

A vast ocean of mirrored surfaces stretched in every direction, each one rippling with fragments of what had once been reality: faces, temples, mountains, eyes, and the endless repetition of his own form. Every reflection moved a fraction slower, a fraction faster, as if each belonged to a different time.

Togulas Holmrajin stood at the center, surrounded by infinite versions of himself.

He reached out to touch one. The reflection smiled before he did.  

He spoke, and a thousand mouths whispered back in unison, their tones slightly altered — some kind, some cruel, some trembling like children, some calm as gods. The sound twisted through the air like a spiral, converging into meaning.

“Which of us is real?” one reflection asked.

Togulas hesitated.  

He tried to answer, but his voice scattered, shattering across the mirrored plain into countless overlapping truths.

“I am thought,” said another reflection.  

“I am what remains when silence dreams,” said a third.  

“I am you,” said all the rest.

He realized, with slow horror, that the reflections were not imitations — they were memories.  

Each mirror held a version of him that had existed for only a heartbeat before dissolving back into the collective. Every action he had taken, every cruelty, every hesitation, every whisper of doubt had become a separate self.  

And now, they were all awake.

They began to move toward him, crawling, walking, floating across the surface of the glass. Their footsteps left no sound, but each contact sent tremors through his mind. He felt every movement, every thought, every difference as if it were his own heartbeat multiplied by infinity.

“Return,” he commanded.

The reflections laughed. It was a beautiful, broken sound — like glass singing under pressure.

“Return to what?” one asked.  

“There is no center left,” said another.  

“You are the reflection that dreamed you were real.”

He tried to flee, but there was nowhere to go. Each step only led into another reflection, another self. The horizon folded inward; the sky bent into a dome of liquid mercury. When he looked upward, he saw himself falling from above — endlessly, beautifully, forever.

He screamed, and the mirrors screamed with him.  

The sound became a cascade of images: a shepherd’s eyes turning white, the first temple built from bone, the Feast of the Internal Eye, the Splintered Sky, the City That Hears. Every epoch, every atrocity, every thought replayed as light upon glass.

He saw himself devouring minds.  

He saw himself creating worlds.  

He saw himself afraid.

And in the smallest, deepest reflection — one barely visible through the fractal storm — he saw something new: a man, kneeling, alone, weeping. Not a god. Not a monster. Merely *human.*

He reached toward that reflection with trembling hands.  

The man mirrored the gesture.  

Their fingers met.

The mirrors shattered.

Light flooded in — not divine, not blinding, just real. Warm. Soft.  

He felt it against his face for the first time, not as an idea, but as sensation. The glass beneath him dissolved into dust, and he fell through a field of silence that no longer obeyed him.

As he fell, a voice whispered — his own, yet not his:

*“To be all minds is to have none. To see all truths is to believe nothing.”*

When he struck the ground, it was no longer glass, but sand.  

The reflection was gone. The world was empty.  

And somewhere above him, unseen, another pair of eyes opened — identical to his, yet awake in ways he was not.

The Mirror Mind had been born.