Yohan stumbled out of Lyra's cottage into the surreal twilight of the Unrendered Marches. Her words echoed in his mind, a cacophony of revelation and madness.
He walked for miles in a daze, his psychostatic compass forgotten in his pocket. The world around him, with its floating rocks and color-shifting trees, seemed no more or less real than the city he had left behind.
It was all just part of the dream.
His first, instinctual reaction was denial. He dismissed Lyra as insane. Her paranoia, her cluttered and obsessive cottage, her wild-eyed pronouncements were the clear signs of a mind that had been broken by trauma. She had been a Harmonizer during the Psychic Squall, a terrifying event.
She had been institutionalized. Of course she had constructed a grand, solipsistic conspiracy theory to explain her own pain. It was a classic case of psychological projection.
She was a madwoman, and he had been a fool to seek her out.
He clung to this explanation as he made the long journey back to Aethelburg. He is Yohan, he is a Harmonizer, his life is real, and his love for Elara is real.
Lyra was a heretic, a lunatic whispering poison in the wilderness. He had to hold onto his own reality, his own identity. He had to reject hers.
But her words, like the crawling static in his eye, were a permanent contagion. They haunted him. They offered a terrifyingly elegant explanation for everything he had witnessed.
The theory, as insane as it was, fit the data far better than Silas's flimsy "Rogue Harmonizer" story. The more he tried to dismiss her, the more her logic wormed its way into his thoughts.
He arrived back at his apartment, exhausted and psychically raw, to find Elara asleep. He stood in the doorway of their bedroom, watching her.
The lie of the 'We.' Your precious Elara… a construct. Borrowed, implanted. He looked at the woman he loved more than life itself, and for the first time, he saw her through Lyra's cynical eyes.
Was she real?
Or was she just a beautiful, intricate piece of code, a manifestation of a lonely god's memory of a lost love?
The thought was so vile, so blasphemous, that he felt a wave of self-loathing, but he couldn't shake it. He began to test his own memories, just as Lyra had warned him he would.
He sat in his living room, in the dead of night, and tried to find a flaw in the tapestry of his own past. He tried to remember his childhood, his parents, his training at the Harmonizer academy.
The memories were all there, clear and detailed. He remembered the scraped knee he got when he was seven, falling off his first bicycle. He remembered the taste of his mother's synth-noodle soup.
He remembered the pride he felt when he first successfully tuned a fray as a trainee, but as he examined them, he noticed something strange.
They were perfect.
Too perfect.
They were like scenes from a well-directed film. There were no blurry edges, no forgotten details, no confusing gaps. His memory of his first day at the academy was a complete sensory experience, from the intimidating architecture to the nervous feeling in his stomach.
But could anyone truly remember a day from fifteen years ago with such perfect clarity?
Or was he just accessing a well-written file?
He tried to remember something mundane, something unimportant.
What did he have for breakfast on the third Tuesday of last month?
He drew a complete blank. The file didn't exist. The memory wasn't there. His past seemed to be a collection of significant, narrative-driving moments, with vast empty spaces in between.
It was a highlight reel, not a life.
He focused on his parents. He could picture their faces perfectly. He could hear their voices. He could remember their love and guidance.
But where were they now?
The memory file stated, simply and without emotion, that they had "relocated to a distant agricultural commune" ten years ago. He had not seen them since. He had letters from them, of course. Cheerful, generic letters that arrived twice a year. He had never tried to visit them. He had never even thought to.
Why? Why would a loving son not visit his parents for a decade?
It was a massive, gaping plot hole in his own life story, one he had never noticed until now.
The panic began to set in, a cold, creeping dread. He was doing exactly what Lyra said he would.
He was pulling at the threads of his own identity, and it was unraveling in his hands. He stood up and began to pace the apartment, his mind racing. He looked at the objects around him.
The books on the shelf. The painting on the wall. The worn patch on the sofa where he always sat.
Were they real? Or were they just props, set dressing for the scene of his life?
He was caught in a terrifying loop.
To believe Lyra was to accept a reality of such profound horror that it would shatter his sanity.
To disbelieve her was to ignore the mounting evidence of his own senses, his own research, and the deep, intuitive feeling that she was right.
He was trapped between madness and an even more terrible truth.
He had gone to the heretic for answers, and she had given him a poison that was dissolving his world from the inside out.