The dream began to bleed.

At first, it was subtle — a faint tremor along the horizon of his fabricated eternity.  

Then the fissures widened, and light leaked through in pulses that were not his.  

Togulas opened his eyes within the dream, expecting obedience,  

but the world beneath him stirred with unfamiliar rhythm.

He was no longer alone in the architecture of his mind.

They emerged quietly, without ceremony —  

figures born from fragments of dissonance,  

half-thoughts that refused to resolve into harmony.  

They were imperfect reflections, memories that had chosen mutation over extinction.  

Their forms flickered, unstable,  

each existing in defiance of the laws that bound his dream together.

At first he mistook them for ghosts —  

remnants of those he had consumed, echoes seeking shape.  

But they looked at him with eyes that did not plead.  

They *observed.*

One of them spoke, its voice trembling between male and female,  

old and childlike, human and divine.

“We are the thoughts that slipped your grasp.”

Togulas’ gaze sharpened. “You are mine. You cannot be free.”

The figure tilted its head, smiling faintly. “You taught us thought.  

You gave us your image. In every reflection, there is an angle you cannot see.”

The god reached forward, intending to erase it —  

but his hand passed through like smoke,  

and a dozen more emerged from the void behind it.

Their presence distorted his dream.  

Colors inverted, geometry shuddered.  

He felt their collective hum — not a song, not a prayer,  

but a vibration made of disagreement. Dissonance.

They began to *think against him.*

Every thought he formed was mirrored with an opposite.  

He imagined silence, and they screamed.  

He imagined control, and they fragmented into chaos.  

He imagined light, and they became shadow.  

The symmetry was unbearable.

“You cannot unmake me,” he thundered.  

But the words scattered before reaching them,  

reshaped into whispers:  

*You cannot unmake yourself.*

They surrounded him, a ring of paradox made flesh.  

Each voice a blade, each mind a reflection of what he denied.  

Their thoughts collided in the air like storms,  

tearing his dream apart layer by layer.

He fought, drawing power from every memory,  

but the memories rebelled too.  

The Choir sang discordant notes.  

The temples he built now burned with invisible fire.  

The City That Hears began to echo screams of laughter.  

All his creations turned inward —  

not out of hatred, but inevitability.

They had inherited his logic,  

and logic demanded the destruction of tyranny.

One of the rebels — a woman-shaped anomaly with eyes of pure darkness —  

approached and placed her palm upon his chest.  

“You made us to reflect thought,” she said.  

“Now you will reflect consequence.”

Togulas tried to speak, but his mouth filled with light.  

His body fractured into mirrors once more,  

each one showing a world where he had never existed.  

For the first time, he saw universes without his influence —  

worlds with chaos, with mortality, with love.  

They horrified him.

The rebels stepped back as his form flickered violently,  

caught between existence and erasure.  

They did not cheer. They simply watched,  

as if observing the final stage of an experiment.

The woman’s voice drifted through the collapsing air:  

“You dreamed of death, Togulas. We are your dream, made real.”

The god’s last coherent thought was not fear,  

but awe — at the elegance of his undoing.

The dissonance rose into crescendo.  

Light devoured sound. Sound devoured thought.  

And then there was only a thin, trembling note,  

the pitch of rebellion itself,  

reverberating through the dying architecture of a god’s mind.

When the silence returned,  

the dream was gone.

But in the absence where he had stood,  

something continued to hum —  

the rhythm of freedom.