He knocked
The sound was loud in the profound silence of the Marches. For a long moment, there was no response. Then, the door creaked open a few inches, and a pair of sharp eyes peered out at him from the darkness within.
They were the eyes of a predator, wary and appraising.
"Go away," a woman's voice said. It was raspy, unused. "Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying. Especially not salvation."
"My name is Yohan," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "I'm a Harmonizer. I need to talk to you, Lyra."
Her eyes narrowed. The door opened a little wider, revealing a woman who was both older and younger than he had expected.
Her hair was a wild mane of grey and black, her face was lined and weathered, but her posture was straight, and her eyes burned with a fierce, unextinguished fire.
She was thin, wiry, dressed in simple, practical clothes. She looked like a hermit, a survivor.
"A Harmonizer," she scoffed, the word an insult. "Silas's little janitor. Come to check on the crazy old woman in the woods? To make sure she hasn't started whispering secrets to the floating rocks?"
"No," Yohan said. "I came because I read your report on the Psychic Squall. The real one. The one they buried."
That got her attention, and the hostility in her eyes was replaced by a flicker of sharp, dangerous curiosity. She studied him for a long moment, her gaze lingering on his right eye.
He had the unnerving feeling that she could see the crawling static, that his psychic scar was as visible to her as the nose on his face.
"You have the stain on you," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
"You've touched it, haven't you? The Great Sadness. The Despair. It's in your eye."
Yohan was stunned into silence. She saw it. She knew what it was. He simply nodded, unable to speak.
Lyra let out a short, harsh laugh, devoid of humor. "And so the chickens come home to roost. Silas can't keep the walls painted forever. The rot always shows through." She unlatched the chain and swung the door open. "Get in. You're leaking your panic all over my wards."
The inside of the cottage was a single, cluttered room, lit by an oil lamp that cast dancing shadows on the walls. Every surface was covered in strange, intricate diagrams and charts. They were not architectural plans or psychic theory.
They looked like star charts, but the constellations were unfamiliar. Scraps of paper were pinned everywhere, covered in a frantic, spidery handwriting, repeating phrases over and over.
The Dreamer sleeps. The Dream is the cage. We are the bars.
The place was the den of a paranoid obsessive. It radiated an aura of intense, focused madness.
Lyra gestured for him to sit at a small, rough hewn table. She moved with a twitchy, nervous energy, her eyes constantly darting towards the windows, as if expecting an attack.
"So," she said, sitting opposite him, her sharp eyes pinning him in place. "You fought one of his nightmares. An Echo. And you got bit. Now you've come to me, the madwoman, looking for a cure. There is no cure."
"I need to understand," Yohan pleaded. "What are they? What is happening to the city? Silas talks of a Rogue Harmonizer, but it's a lie. I know it is."
"Silas talks," Lyra mocked. "Silas is a gardener who thinks the weeds are a personal attack from a rival gardener, because he can't bear to admit that the soil itself is poisoned. There is no Rogue Harmonizer, you fool. There is no we. There is only Him."
"Him?" Yohan asked, confused.
"The Dreamer," she hissed, leaning forward, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe. "The one who is dreaming all of this. Aethelburg. You. Me. The sky. The Consensus. It's all a construct. A lucid dream created by a single, comatose, godlike mind to protect itself from a trauma it cannot face."
Her words were a direct echo of the insane theory he had proposed to Elara, but hearing it stated with such conviction, from someone who had seen the evidence sixty years ago, sent a shock of cold terror through him. His wildest, most terrifying guess was true.
"The frays," Lyra continued, her voice rapid and intense, "are the Dreamer tossing and turning in his sleep. The Dissonance Cascade was a seizure, and the Echoes are his nightmares, leaking out, given form and purpose by his breaking mind. They are fragments of his own repressed agony."
She pointed a trembling finger at Yohan.
"And you? A Harmonizer? You're not a protector. You're a white blood cell. A function of the dream, created by the Dreamer to fight his own infection, to maintain the illusion of health. Your purpose is to keep him asleep."
The revelation was a physical blow. Yohan felt the floor drop out from under him. His identity, his purpose, his entire life, it was all a lie, a function in a sick god's dream. He wasn't Yohan. He was a psychic antibody.
"And your memories?" Lyra's voice was relentless, stripping away his last defense. "Your idyllic past? Your precious Elara? They are not your own. They are constructs. Borrowed, implanted. The Dreamer is lonely, so he dreams of love. He gives you a partner, a history, a whole life you think you've lived. But it's just code. It's just a story he's telling himself."
She leaned back, a grim, triumphant look on her face, the look of someone who has finally found another person who speaks her insane language. "That's the lie of the We, little Harmonizer. There is no we. There is no city full of people. There is only one person. One mind, fractured into a million pieces, talking to itself, loving itself, fighting itself, and now, dying from itself. We are all just fragments of the Dreamer. We are all Him."
Yohan stared at her, his mind a maelstrom of denial and horrifying acceptance. The crawling static in his eye pulsed violently, a triumphant confirmation.
Everything she said, as insane as it sounded, fit the facts perfectly. The phantom citizens, the false memories, the foreign despair of the Echoes, the vast, lonely ocean in his dream.
It all clicked into place, forming a picture of such profound, existential horror that he felt his sanity begin to fray at the edges.