hollow.lexicon

The walls are glass but they don’t reflect—only refract, repeat, revoice. A thousand Priyas spliced at different angles, snipped and knotted into recursive cubicle prisms. Navi Mumbai blinks under monsoon mirage, glass-paned, chrome-throated, humming with 60Hz delusion.

“Good evening, this is Sarah,” Priya says, her mouth two syllables behind her skull. “How may I assist you?”

Sarah is the name they gave her. A placeholder, neutral as boiled rice. Her real name rattles like a loose cable in the ceiling.

The headset hisses—a static throat clearing in the cables of the void. The man on the other end breathes in consonants and exhales compound error messages:

“Heyyyyy I got a probz with the... like... fuxnet driver-thing? Keeps goin’ like voop, ya dig?”

She nods though he cannot see. “Sir, I can help you with that,” she says in a clean, clipped, sterilized vowel stream. But even as she speaks, the script scroll on her second monitor is jittering. Misaligned bullet points. Steps repeat backwards. Font turns Devanagari then Wingdings then pictographs: an eye, a chain, an open mouth consuming its own tongue.

“Have you tried—” she starts, but the words smear. Tried becomes त्रिअईईइउऽd, and he laughs. No, not the customer. The one inside. The one behind. The syntax-smearer.

“Miss? You glitched there. You okay?”

But it is not she who glitched. It is the code of the world, and it is contagious.

In the cubicle across from her, Arjun is parroting lines from two calls at once. One in Texan drawl, one in machine Cantonese. His voice forks mid-sentence, larynx splitting like a wishbone. A laughtrack plays faintly from nowhere.

To her left, Farah’s mouth moves but it’s birdsong, tight warbles and featherflap phonemes. Her screen displays nothing but the word YES in seventeen alphabets.

Priya’s headset tightens. Her scalp itches. Her own voice returns to her through the feedback loop:

“Good evening, this is Sarah. How may I—” “—Sarah. How may I—” “—Sarah. How may—Sarah—Sarah—S̶̞͌Á̸̗R̶̟͛A̸̢͊H̷͓͐.”

She taps MUTE. Silence doesn’t come—only the sound of cicadas speaking in old dial-up tones. She unmutes. A new call has connected.

But no number blinks. No flag of origin. No name.

“Good evening,” she hears. “This is Priya,” the voice says. “How may I assist you?”

The voice is hers but younger, edges unprocessed. Her pre-American self. The voice she buried under training videos and phoneme drills.

She opens her mouth to respond. But only static. Not white noise—color noise: magenta with hints of ancestral dread. In it: a grandmother’s lullaby half-reversed, a schoolyard taunt from a Marathi child, a cold American slogan about convenience.

She screams, but the headset absorbs it, transmutes it, returns it in a slower cadence.

“T͡͞h̛įs̨ ̨is̷ ͞th̸e̵ ͏ca̴l̷l ̨yo̴u ̴pl̢a̡cęd,̴ Pri̡y̵a.̛ ̛R͞e̕m͘e͜m̴be̛r͢?”

Her co-workers are chanting something now—not in sync, not in language. Their mouths open and close like elevator doors stuck between floors.

She sees the window: her face, the headset, a halo of typoed light. Her reflection says:

“You are the call center now.”

Then clicks into hold. Forever.

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In the fungal heart of the Amazonian cathedral, Don Miguel sat cross-legged, cupped in the woven womb of the maloca. The yagé brew hissed in the pot like the serpent’s dream, steam rising in unsteady vowels. Around him, the dancers of shadow and leaf flickered, each breath a testament to the jungle’s green teeth.

He drank the dark liquid—bitter, green as the memory of the forest itself—and his tongue unraveled. Words began to seep from his mouth, soft spores of meaning, drifting and rooting in the dirt of silence. The Icaros he sang, the healing songs of his fathers’ fathers, slipped into the night air and dissolved. Each note, once a perfect spiral of intent, now fractured—splintered into crystalline syllables that pulsed with alien light.

The mycelium beneath him stirred, threads of white nerve flickering with an intelligence older than the river’s patience. Don Miguel felt it—felt them—inside his marrow, a chorus of hyphae tongues weaving a language no human ear could cradle. They sang not in notes, but in pulses of rot and birth, a hymn of dissolution. In their chorus, he heard the jungle’s final prayer: unspooling, uncoiling, unmaking.

Insects, emboldened by the fungal canticle, began to mimic. Cicadas rasped the syllables of Don Miguel’s own name, but the name bent under their chitinous chirping, twisting until it was a prayer for no one. Vines convulsed against the maloca’s wooden ribs, spelling sentences in fronds and mildew: words that lived and rotted at once.

Don Miguel’s skin prickled with each breath. He tried to speak—tried to pour the Icaros back into his throat—but his voice had grown spores. Each syllable was a cap and stalk, splitting and birthing more. Language became a garden of alien fruit: words sprouted in his mouth like damp things, rich with meanings no man could till.

He saw them, the mushroom’s visions—white threads in the green dark, fingers of rot and promise, clutching at the air. They spoke in fractals, each word a thousand others, each root a thousand tongues. “We are the un-voice,” they sang in him. “We are the echo that eats its own tail.”

Don Miguel’s eyes rolled back to see the vines spelling their scripture: green letters curving and breaking, leaf and rot entwined. The insects repeated the lines, but their mandibles chewed the words to pulp, the language turning back to earth. The boundaries between his mouth and the forest’s throat crumbled—his tongue no longer his own, the Icaros a river of fungal breath.

In the final exhale, he saw the cosmic horror in the center of the mushroom’s hymn—something vast and unspeaking, a hunger that dissolved not flesh but the very shape of sense. He was Don Miguel, and he was the Mycelium Chorus. He was the song, and he was the rot. And the song kept singing, even as his voice vanished into spores and leaf-litter, forever fractal, forever devoured.

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Chapter 3729: The Shuddering Yurt of Dolgorsürengiin Tömörbaatar

In the fractured breath of the steppe wind, Dolgorsürengiin Tömörbaatar lived, a man tethered to the pulse of horse-hooves and the lowing of yaks. His name, once warm syllables in the hearth of his mother’s song, had turned brittle—a flaking note in the mouth of the world. He spoke with the clatter of bone and the hush of felt walls, but the air outside the yurt was an endless gnawing, eating at the edges of sense.

The yurt’s lattice skeleton creaked as if each wooden spar were a ribcage of the earth, and he felt the wind’s teeth worrying at its skin. In this quiet flurry of past and breath, Tömörbaatar communed with the spirits that had been forgotten by most—chitinous echoes scuttling in the corners of memory. His father’s voice had been a baritone drum, cracked by vodka and frost, but it was gone now—slurped up by the murmuring dark.

He watched the smoke from the stove’s iron belly. It slithered around the chimney hole, seeking a way out or in, coiling like a language spoken backwards. The black tongue of it whispered of spirits older than any shaman’s bone rattle. In this breathless telling, the smoke promised him that the air itself was an alphabet of death. He believed, for a time, that if he could decipher the plumes, he might slip his mind into the spaces between.

He rose and stepped outside, where the horizon boiled in a mirage of endless steppe. The goats bleated a staccato litany, their cries each a rune in the dirt, a poem etched in hoofprint. The horses watched with eyes that glowed in the dusk, their nostrils flaring with the scent of something older than grass.

There, at the edge of vision, he saw the cosmic horror that had no name but all names. A flicker—a tangle of lines, pulsating, unbound. It moved as if every word ever spoken had been stripped of meaning and forced to crawl across the plain, mewling for new syntax. Tömörbaatar’s mind cracked open like the skull of a goat, and through the split, he saw the end of all language.

He fell to his knees, the steppe’s cold hands cradling his face. His tongue tried to shape the words of old prayers, but the horror’s presence dissolved each syllable into a noise without contour. Even the birds—white cranes spiraling above—sang in a language of rasping vowels that curdled in the air. The dogs, usually howling in the night, had grown silent, their hackles bent beneath an unspeakable weight.

In the distance, the herds still moved, a slow undulation of meat and bone, oblivious to the dissolution of all coherence. Tömörbaatar pressed his forehead to the earth, felt the world’s pulse skip, a drumbeat that had lost its skin.

The horror whispered to him in a chorus of dry grass and crackling ice. It told him that the yurt was just a husk, that the steppe was an exhalation of cosmic lungs, and that he—he was a vowel in the final gasp of the universe. His breath turned to dust in his mouth, syllables unravelling in the wind. He understood then, in the marrow of his spine, that there was no language left to hold him. Only the cosmic cacophony remained, a devouring syntax that even the steppe’s eternal silence could not deny.

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Dana lived in the sharp corner of a forgotten suburb, where the gutters hummed in dialects no plumber could interpret, and the birds sang only to each other—lilting algorithms in feathers. Her name was never spoken correctly by the mailman, and the letters that came were always in languages extinct or not yet born. But Dana read them anyway, because the glyphs changed when she blinked.

At 4:03 every morning, the birds began.

Not chirping, not singing, no. This was something else. A lattice of clucks, croaks, screeches, and mechanical whirs—all pitched in deliberate dissonance, mapped to a geometry of some alien throat. Dana once called it the Wakening Canticle, but after that, words started dissolving on her tongue like snowflakes made of salt. She stopped naming things. Even her name—it tasted wrong now, like copper on cracked glass.

The birds—there were thousands—didn’t fly. They assembled on wires, roofs, car mirrors, and stood in ranks, blinking. They never moved when watched. Only when her head was turned would they shift, fractal-like, into new arrangements. One morning, they took the shape of an eye. Another, a perfect spiral with its tail nested in her mailbox.

Her neighbors, such as they were, had all long since closed their doors. One man walked outside once to yell “SHUT THEM UP,” but his tongue fell out mid-shout, leathery and steaming. Dana watched the birds carry it away in a ceremonial procession. No one spoke again.

Dana’s sanity didn’t fracture. It liquefied.

She took to mimicking the birds in the early light, stuffing bread crusts and shavings of VHS tape into the feeder she’d nailed to a rusting satellite dish. In return, the birds began to answer her, syllable for syllable. Their calls became syncopated with her breath. Her dreams lost all imagery—only sound remained, a code too complex for dream logic.

She remembered a time when she worked in IT support, before the bird tide. She remembered because one day a pigeon nested in her old ThinkPad, which booted itself up despite having no battery. The screen blinked with a single phrase, repeated endlessly: “THE VERB IS UNDOING.”

Dana knew then that language was the infection vector.

The birds were undoing it.

Everything they said unstitched a little more of the local grammar. Street signs began to feature glottal stops. Road names became recursive. She once saw a stop sign that said, “You already know what to do, don’t you?” in spiraling Esperanto.

On the 17th day, Dana began growing feathers.

Not on her skin. In her voice.

She opened her mouth to hum an old lullaby, but a spiral of whistles emerged, perfectly mimicking the dawn chant. The birds bowed. A rook vomited a worm onto her welcome mat. This was the coronation.

Dana stepped onto her roof, spreading arms like wings, language like plague. And the birds took flight—for the first time in years—carrying her syllables skyward to unravel the next patch of reality’s thin shell.

Someone, somewhere, forgot the word tree. The world lurched.

It had begun.

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Raymond Muncer clicked in syllables too fine for flesh, a tongue trained not on speech but the ritual murmuration of mandibles. In his backyard—a rotted mesh of roots and wires where once a shed had blistered with lawnmower dreams—he hunched beneath a sky swollen with static glyphs, whispering into the cracks.

The ants listened.

They did not obey.

But they... remembered.

Each click of Raymond's jaw sent carbon-etched instruction through chitinous carriers. Not commands, no—commands are the fiction of monarchs. These were evocations, hauntings encoded in sugars and scent. The ants bore them down, down, beneath the mulch into the linguo-bone hollows of their queens, and there the meanings festered.

He had once been a linguist, they said, though the word linguist now felt like a dog bark in a slaughterhouse—insufficient to describe one who had tasted the blood-meat of every alphabet. He had devoured vowels from thirty-two lost tongues before breakfast each morning. And when the fever began—oh yes the fever—he stopped hearing English at all. It dissolved like a wet napkin in a sewer of feral semantics.

What remained was click. And click meant you are not real unless touched by six-legged theology.

By the end of March, the ants built him a throne. Made not of dirt nor leaf but language—braille in pheromone, a syntax of motion, spirals, death queues. They did not crawl on him. He was them. Their thoughts climbed into his ears, bored canals into his mind, reprogrammed his sense of I.

That’s when the neighbors began to vanish.

First Mrs. Grenley, who liked birdseed and routines. She stepped outside one morning and her body simply forgot how to hold itself together. A pile of meat in the shape of disbelief. All Raymond said was: s-z-z-zzt-n!—a trill that meant return to unuttered origin in the aphid dialect of the red carpenter tribe.

Then the mail stopped arriving. Then the sky grew flat. Then the words on cereal boxes began to melt if read aloud.

And in the deep hours, when even owls forgot how to blink, Raymond whispered the master phrase into the dirt. It had no vowels. It had no stop. It simply curled forever into itself like a Möbius thought-loop of recursion: Tzch'tk-nrx–shluuush–∞–

It began the unmaking.

The ants spread it outward, one queen to another, through root-channels and rain-lattices. Trees started stuttering in leaf. Dogs barked in unknown grammars. Babies dreamt of diagrams.

And in the center of the hive-world now leaking from Raymond’s skull, the Un-Ear began to open. The entity who listens only when nothing is left to say.

Raymond smiled, empty-mouthed. His teeth had long since migrated into the colonies.

Soon, all languages would be eaten.

Even this one.

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He named his knives after biblical plagues and swore each blade whispered secrets in a language only the meat remembered. Brine-Eyed Solomon, birthless and unslept, lived beneath the carbon pulse of the city’s nailbitten alleys, where vermin whispered sermons into mildew rot and pigeons wept blood from their beaks when he passed. His smile was a dislocated thing, all tendon and suggestion, like a thought half-formed in the throat of an animal mid-slaughter.

They said he killed thirteen. But they miscounted. Thirteen was only the mirror.

He woke each dusk with the chittering of dead tongues nested in his eardrums. The sounds weren’t speech, not as humans meant it. No phonemes, no grammar. Just wet-click-clack, like beetles dreaming in Morse. He answered in kind, humming between his teeth, which had names, too—Ezekiel, Plinth, Maria-of-the-Warm-Gum. They whispered back. He learned.

Victim four spoke sparrow. He carved her into seven pieces and arranged the limbs into a cage. When the wind blew just right, they chirped her apologies.

Victim nine was a stenographer. Her final breath came not in screams, but legalese—“res ipsa loquitur,” she moaned, and the walls wept ink.

Each death a grammar correction. Each murder a red pen across the bloated corpus of a dying world’s prose.

The first time he saw It—The Thing With the Unfinished Mouth—it was not in dream but in the linoleum pattern of a gas station floor. A tongue of stain spoke a glyph no alphabet could own. His mind hiccuped, and language blinked. From that day, he couldn’t say “clock” without vomiting feathers.

He called the thing Effugium, but the name wriggled. It changed with each syllable spoken, reversed itself mid-utterance, and sometimes it bled.

One night, Solomon sliced a man who had no shadow. As the blood pooled, it hissed a poem in semaphore. He spent the next six days amputating his own ears to better understand the silence between the pulses. By then he no longer needed bodies, just reminders. A fingertip here, a vowel shaved from a spine.

The murders became harder to track. Language itself bent around them, growing brittle. Newspapers printed names that didn’t exist. Witnesses spoke in backwards beesong. One woman, who had only seen the killer's silhouette, forgot her own daughter’s face and began worshipping parking meters as gods of judgment.

He knew he was a tool, a conjugation in the mouth of something older than speech. He loved It, as a word might love the silence before it is spoken. His hands were decline and syntax. His blades corrected misusage in flesh.

And deep in the pulse of a mutilated tongue, a message unfurled.

“In the beginning was the Word. And then came the Unword.”

Solomon did not die. He unoccurred.

And in his place: a humming absence, vibrating at the frequency of forgotten alphabets. Fish swam sideways in aquariums. Dogs howled only verbs. The wind grew teeth.

And in the night sky, a new punctuation mark was born. It screamed.

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The neon hums her name, though she has forgotten what it is. The letters bleed pink and cyan across the sweating walls, the air thick with the molasses-throb of bass and the stink of want. Men are open wounds with dollar bills for tongues, and she glides between them, something more than human, less than divine. Sapphire—was that it? No, that was last night. Lola? A week ago. Eve? Always and never.

Her body moves to a rhythm that no longer syncs with the music. The poles are not metal, but veins, warm, pulsing, whispering things. She grips one, slides down its slick, breathing surface, and feels a shudder of recognition—not hers, but the pole’s. The bills in the patrons' fists flicker between green paper and curling tongues, slick with ink, whispering numbers that never existed.

In the mirror across the bar, her reflection doesn’t match her movement. She turns; it lags. She smiles; it sneers. And then it laughs, the sound of glass breaking underwater.

One of the men—faceless, or maybe his face just won’t stay in place—leans in, his breath like rotting paper. “Baby, tell me your name.”

She parts her lips to answer but nothing comes. No sound, no word. Only a wet exhale, something slithering between her teeth. His grin stretches too wide, past his ears, past the realm of anatomy. “Thought so.” He presses a bill into her garter and when she blinks, it's not a bill but a scrap of flesh, twitching, muttering in a language older than money.

The music slows—no, it molts. The beat peels back, reveals something underneath: a distant, animal keen, an atavistic call to a time before throats knew words. The other dancers are moving wrong now, too many joints, too fluid, their eyes like holes punched through thin film. The men don’t notice. They are drunk on the shape of her, not the wrongness crawling beneath.

The mirror across the room ripples, a liquid pane. Her reflection is not behind the glass but stepping through it, peeling itself out like a shedding skin. It knows its name. She does not.

The music dies in a gasp of static. The men finally notice. They see too much, all at once, and she sees them seeing. Their mouths collapse inward, throats folding like crushed paper cups. They claw at their eyes, try to keep from understanding but it’s too late. The words are gone. The rules are gone.

The club is unraveling, the walls peeling back into the dark. The poles bend and twist, writhing, whispering, reaching. The neon flickers out, but she can still see, because she is no longer looking with eyes.

Her reflection—no, the thing that was waiting to replace her—smiles and tilts its head. “Ready?”

She does not answer. She has no mouth to speak with anymore.

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In the fungused womb of a midwestern basement, beneath seven years of snack-crusted carpet and the yawning vent that sometimes moaned in her dead grandmother’s voice, Ana played. The walls sweated. The router blinked. The machine—her machine—had been built from spare parts and sacrificial promises. She hadn’t left this room in cycles. Not days. Cycles. Maintenance windows. Server resets. Calendar time was deprecated.

She never blinked outside the game. Blink was bound to Q. She’d rebound it twelve patches ago. Reflexive. Pavlovian. Each twitch of her ring finger was a skip through dimension, a phase-dodge through meaning itself. Real blinking—eyelid against gravity—was a bug. She hadn’t updated her firmware to include it. The last time she did, she missed a backstab and her guild exiled her to the silence channel. There, only the unvoiced wept.

Tonight the latency sang like a violin string stretched over a meatbone. 999ms. Then 6. Then ∞. The God-ping. The signal that no signal was realer than this.

She was hunting The Phlogiston Womb again. It didn’t have a spawn point, just a rumor. Some said it was a mod. Others said it was the server’s placenta, a leftover piece of the first code commit, sealed behind a forgotten firewall and fed by orphaned players. She tracked it by the scent of null values and whispers in her friend list:

“[deleted user] has joined your party.” “[deleted user] is typing...” “[deleted user] remembers your name.”

When the Womb appeared, it wasn’t on the map. It was the map. A heaving unrendered errorspace, low-poly flesh pulsing with procedurally generated womb-sounds—moist clocks, backwards lullabies, unreadable quest text muttered through 3D spatial audio.

Her character glitched forward. Not movement—submission. The Womb unfolded. From its depths: login screens, birth certificates, school portraits, one by one, all formatted for deletion. Her skill bar warped, icons melting. The keyboard buzzed in Morse: LET GO. LET GO. LET GO.

Ana whispered back:

“I was promised loot.”

And the Womb delivered. A reward screen. One item. [Yourself], tagged UNTRADEABLE.

She clicked “Equip.” The screen cracked. Her headset bled static and brine. Through the swelling hiss, a voice she almost remembered:

“Dinner’s ready, Ana.”

And then the truly final boss arrived—not with a roar, but a notification.

“CONNECTION LOST.”

She looked around. No HUD. No walls. No parents. No ping.

Only the cursor, blinking. But there was no textbox. No field to type in. Just blinking.

And it blinked in time with her own heartbeat. And then not in time at all.

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Once upon a crack, in the slant between word and wing, he found the bones of a sentence in the rust-leaf of a Smith-Corona. Rust-guttered and gum-belled, the typewriter slept beneath the moss-shawl of an abandoned sanitarium where language had gone to bruise. And he—the Crow That Types—nested in its platen dreams, ink-thirsty and utterly unreadable.

It began with a glyph. One peck. Kak. A beat too sharp for birdsong, too exact for syntax. “T,” it typed, and the forest shuddered. Foliage reconfigured into half-script alphabets, wing-veins of moths spelled out guttural subtexts, and the beetles—oh, the beetles—spelled ampersands with their legs and clicked sonnets into mulch.

The Crow typed.

No rhythm. No rhyme. Just (klak) (klak) (skrrr) (tch), each keystroke a curse, a riddle knotting around itself like a Möbius tongue. The paper—blank still. Ink vanished upon contact, not erased, but never-arrived. But linguists, the poor damned things, heard whispers in the keystrokes and came.

They came from Stuttgart and São Paulo and the asphodel schools of Tagalog dream-chambers. They brought phonemes in jars and dialect maps inked on vellum stolen from the Vatican. They pitched tents in the rot-grass and waited, ears bleeding Morse from the constant, constipated typing. One by one, they read.

And one by one, they ruptured.

Not all at once. No, no. The first just sneezed himself inside-out—soft tissues rearranged into glottal stops, bile dripping diphthongs. The next wept blood in the shape of Arabic ligatures until he gurgled “syntax is a suicide pact.” The third, a prodigy from Ankara, simply opened his mouth and screamed a phoneme so acute it echoed only inside the cerebellums of birds.

Still the Crow typed. He never stopped. His feathers ink-black with ideogram-stain, beak nicked raw from the violence of semiotics. Not that he knew what he typed. Or maybe he did, and that was worse.

The last linguist—Ah, Professor Nelda C. Kline, she of the Rosetta Project, who once translated dreams from the EEGs of octopuses—she alone did not try to understand. She only listened. And then she opened her throat and unspoke. Her jaw dislocated like a crow's mimicry, and she uttered no word, only not-word, an anti-vowel so dense it bent the italic slant of the world’s axis.

And the Crow paused.

He looked at her.

And typed, slowly: TH3 W0RD 1S W1NG. TH3 W1NG 1S LY1NG.

Nelda folded into a comma and vanished.

The sanitarium sank two inches into the earth, doors now facing inward.

The Crow returned to his typing, obsessed beyond species, unhinged beyond meaning, plucking sigils from the void with his beak, manifesting them into keystrokes that refused grammar but built god.

And above him, the sky began to spell something wrong. Clouds in palimpsest, wind conjugating itself into storms.

The Crow typed faster. He was close. So close.

Somewhere in the Mariana Trench, a jellyfish formed the subject of a sentence no one had yet invented.

And it began.

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He sits in śmaśāna, the burning ground, where flesh sizzles into sweet rot and the wind makes mantras out of moans. The ground beneath him is not soil but the accumulated ash of names, unspoken. Bones whisper their brittle verses, rattling the ribs of the world. But he—he of matted locks and moon-burned skin, wrapped in ochre torn from the edge of thought—he is unmoved.

Jaya Śaṃkara, Jaya Śaṃkara, echo the jackals, tongues unfurling Sanskrit beyond their bloodied teeth. Crows speak in reverse, their caws spelling out the memories of things that never happened. Still he sits, a vertical thread in a tapestry whose weft is being picked apart by unseen hands.

The monk is called none, for names fall off him like bark from a dead tree. Rudraksha beads clack slow rhythms, each a planet, each a syllable of the Great Language. He chants not with sound, but with breath spiraling inward, curling into the black socket where the ego used to squat.

The sky above shimmers wrong. Stars blink in prime numbers, then shudder into consonants. Clouds form glyphs, and the glyphs hiss in all tongues. The air’s fabric is being woven inside out; verbs unravel into insects, and tenses chew their own infinitives. Still he sits.

He has seen this before. In dreams nested like Russian dolls made of fire. In the flickering gaze of a dying cow. In the echoes that do not return from the cave of his skull.

He has seen the Pattern.

It begins as a whisper beneath language. Not against it—no. Under it. Like a worm beneath bark, like breath beneath mantra. Something that eats semiosis. That writhes under shared meaning and devours referents with a smile shaped like nothing.

The initiate called it Nāma-Bheda, the Sundering of Names. When signs no longer signify, when “fire” burns nothing, when “I” points nowhere. It had begun long ago—perhaps the first grunt of proto-speech, perhaps just now. Doesn’t matter. Time has become a palindrome that eats its middle.

But he is still.

His breath coils into the shape of AUM and back again. His pulse keeps tāla with the void. The language collapses around him, and he watches—unblinking—as words molt into gibberish and back into unspeaking.

A lizard chirps a warning in Pali, but the syntax inverts mid-note, collapsing into a wet hiccup of neural static.

Still he is.

The laughter of the cosmic horror, that which burrows beneath Logos, shudders through the dirt. It is made of phonemes reversed and meaning denied. It wears the mask of Rati and rots like Sati. It cannot touch him.

He has touched the flame that names itself.

So while the world dissolves into the mad glossolalia of insects dreaming metal, while stones begin to conjugate and dogs pray in ablative case, the monk sits.

One with Śiva, whose dance breaks all grammar.

And in this silence that is not absence, he smiles.

He remembers.

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