He wandered for what might have been centuries, or minutes.  

Time no longer had an edge to cut meaning from the void.

The shattered mirrors had left him inside a landscape of dull horizons — a place without sound, without memory, without anything to consume. For the first time since his creation, Togulas felt *absence.* It was not pain, not peace, but the raw neutrality of nonexistence. He found it unbearable.

He tried to summon voices, but none came.  

He tried to command the air, but it did not listen.  

He spoke, and his own echo returned — frail, human, finite.

Then, from somewhere within that emptiness, a question arose —  

not from another mind, but from within his own fractured consciousness:

*“What is death?”*

He had devoured every emotion, every thought, every shape of existence,  

but never the end of it. Death had always been the silence he imposed,  

not the one that could claim him. He could imagine the concept,  

but not the experience. A god cannot die — only diminish.  

Yet now, even godhood had begun to rot.

So he decided to dream.

He closed what passed for eyes and built a vision of decay.  

He dreamed of his temples collapsing, of oceans devouring cities, of the Choir silenced mid-breath. He dreamed of being forgotten, of no longer being spoken, of the last worshipper blinking before oblivion.

At first, it was beautiful.  

Then, it began to feel *real.*

The dream thickened, became weight. He felt his limbs grow cold,  

his body heavy with gravity he had long since transcended.  

He felt the faint rhythm of a heart — not divine, not eternal,  

but slow and failing.

He opened his eyes and saw a graveyard of stars.  

Each one was a world he had made, flickering, dying.  

Their light dimmed one by one, as if bowing to his wish.  

He stood beneath that funereal sky and whispered, “Yes. Like this.”

The cosmos answered with quiet. The silence had changed;  

it was no longer obedience, but indifference.  

For the first time, Togulas realized he was not being heard.

He stumbled through the falling light, watching fragments of his own mind  

break apart and drift like ash. Faces of the consumed passed before him —  

the shepherd, the woman with the ash-blindfold, the Dream-Flesh child,  

the faceless citizens of Ithrenum. Each smiled,  

not in forgiveness, but in release.

Their voices merged into a single murmur:  

*“You gave us eternity. We return to you mortality.”*

A wind rose — impossible, within a god’s dream.  

It carried the scent of soil, the sound of water, the echo of heartbeat.  

He realized the wind was memory of life itself.  

And for a moment, he desired it more than dominion.

He knelt, pressed his palm into the ground,  

and felt warmth spreading upward —  

not power, but the simple, inevitable erosion of being.

He whispered:  

“Let me end.”

The sky responded with thunder that sounded like laughter.  

From the dying stars, a form descended —  

a silhouette identical to his own,  

but smaller, weaker, infinitely mortal.

It looked at him and said:  

“You cannot die, for you have never lived.”

Then it touched his forehead, and the dream fractured.  

The warmth became fire. The fire became thought.  

The thought became another dream — endless, recursive, inescapable.

Togulas screamed and woke again in the same void.  

The stars above reignited. His body returned to what it had always been.  

Immortal. Unending. Alone.

He understood, at last:  

The god who dreamed of death could only awaken into eternity.

And so he began to dream again.