The fabric of Aethelburg was fraying faster now, the anomalies growing not just in frequency but in strangeness.
The city's descent into quiet madness was accelerating. Two days after his unsettling conversation with Elara, Yohan was called to a public plaza near the university district.
The report was vague, mentioning only a recurrent auditory phenomenon.
The plaza was a wide, open space, usually bustling with students and academics. Now it was sparsely populated, the few people present hurrying across it with their heads down and their shoulders hunched.
There was a palpable aura of unease, a collective desire to be somewhere else. The source of the disturbance was not visible, but it was immediately audible.
It was a whisper, a dry, sibilant sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Yohan stood in the center of the plaza, closing his eyes to focus. The whisper was not a physical sound carried on the air.
It was a psychic broadcast, a thought being inserted directly into the minds of anyone who entered the area. It was a single, nonsensical phrase, repeated over and over in a dry, genderless, utterly emotionless mental voice. The reflection eats the light it is shown.
The phrase looped endlessly, a broken record of the mind. It was meaningless, yet profoundly unsettling.
It was a piece of syntax with no semantic value, a sentence that was grammatically correct but logically void.
It was a mental irritant, a cognitive splinter that was impossible to ignore. The students and professors who had to cross the plaza were feeling its effects: headaches, nausea, a creeping sense of paranoia.
Their minds were trying to solve the riddle, to find meaning where there was none, and the effort was causing a low level psychic strain across the entire district.
This was a new type of fray. It was not a physical distortion like the liquid street, nor a simple emotional residue like the frustrated lamppost.
This was an idea, a viral, weaponized piece of nonsense. Yohan had never encountered anything like it.
He scanned the area, trying to locate the source. He expected to find a node of energy, a psychic knot he could untangle.
But there was nothing. The whisper was diffuse, ambient. It had no epicenter. It was as if the air itself had learned to think this one maddening thought.
Then he sensed it, not with his eyes, rather with his Harmonizer's perception.
In the corner of the plaza, near a statue of the city's founder, was a flicker, a distortion. It was a patch of shadow darker than it should have been, a piece of night lingering into the day.
It clung to the base of the statue, and as Yohan focused on it, he realized it was moving, writhing like a piece of black cloth in a nonexistent wind.
This was the source. A Whispering Shadow, the field report had called it.
It was a new classification of anomaly, one he had only read about in theoretical manuals.
It was a fray that had achieved a kind of rudimentary, semi sentience. It was not just a passive symptom of dissonance. It was an active, he moves.
He approached it cautiously. The closer he got, the louder the whisper became in his mind, the words trying to hook into his own thought processes.
The reflection eats the light it is shown. He had to actively build a mental shield to keep the phrase from taking root, a task that felt like trying not to think of a pink bear.
He stood before the writhing patch of darkness. It was about the size of a large dog and had no discernible shape or form. It was a moving shadow.
He prepared to tune it with his usual method relied on empathy and persuasion, on finding the core emotion and harmonizing it.
But what was the core emotion of a nonsensical phrase? What pain lay behind this whispering madness?
He reached out with his mind, not with calm or synthesis, but with a simple, direct question. What are you?
For a moment, the whispering stopped. The shadow stilled, then a new presence pushed into his mind, sharp, cold, and utterly alien. It was not a phrase.
It was an image, a feeling.
The concept of a mirror facing another mirror, a recursive, infinite regression collapsing into absolute blackness. It was the sensation of an identity being lost not through destruction, but through endless, meaningless reflection.
It was overwhelming. Yohan recoiled as his mental shields buckled, and the Whispering Shadow seemed to feed on his shock.
It pulsed, and the whisper returned, louder and more insistent than before.
He had to stop it. This thing was a psychic poison, so he abandoned subtlety.
This was not something to be persuaded. It was something to be destroyed, to be silence.
He gathered his psychic energy, his sense of self, of solid and meaningful reality, and forged it into a single, powerful idea. I am. It was the antithesis of the shadow's recursive void, a declaration of singular, unreflected identity.
He projected the concept with all his strength. It was like shining a floodlight into a dark corner of the mind. The shadow convulsed.
A silent psychic scream, carrying the impression of agony, tore through Yohan's thoughts.
The darkness thinned, becoming translucent. The whisper fractured, the words breaking apart into meaningless psychic static.
Yohan pressed the attack, pouring his will into the projection.
I am. I exist. I am real.
The Whispering Shadow could not withstand it, and with a final violent shudder, it imploded, collapsing inward and vanishing completely.
It left no trace as It was simply gone.
The plaza fell silent, with the whisper in Yohan's mind vanished, and the oppressive atmosphere lifted as though a storm cloud had passed.
A few students slowed their pace, glancing around in confusion, as if waking from a bad dream.
Yohan stood panting, a cold sweat slicking his skin. He had won. He had destroyed the anomaly.
But it felt like a hollow victory. He had not harmonized it. He had not healed it, rather he had annihilated it.
It was a crude, brutal solution, and even worse, he had not truly understood it.
The terror of infinite mirrors lingered in his thoughts, like a clue to a puzzle he could not yet solve.
He had tuned a lamppost, solidified a street, and now destroyed a sentient shadow. The progression was terrifying.
The frays were evolving, and he was being forced to evolve with them, from a healer into something far more unsettling: an executioner.