The city felt different after Silas's declaration. The subtle, reassuring hum of the Harmonizer network had been replaced by something colder and more clinical.
The psychic screenings began immediately. It was a strange, invasive procedure. Yohan had to report to a sterile white room in the headquarters, where a team of internal affairs specialists conducted a deep probe of his mind.
They sifted through his recent thoughts, his emotional state, his loyalty to the Consensus. It was a violation, a stripping away of his innermost privacy, but it was mandatory.
He passed, of course, with his loyalty to Aethelburg and its preservation was absolute, but the experience left him feeling raw and exposed.
He was now a suspect in his own home, his own mind a potential crime scene. The trust that had bound the Harmonizers together was being replaced by a corrosive suspicion.
The paranoia began to seep into his daily life. He found himself analyzing his own thoughts, questioning his own feelings.
Was this flicker of anger his own, or a dissonant echo?
Was this moment of sadness a genuine emotion, or a psychic bleed from a nearby fray?
The line between his self and the world he was supposed to be managing was becoming dangerously blurred.
The breaking point came on a grey, drizzly afternoon.
Yohan was walking home, his mind heavy with the day's work, a series of small, anxiety fueled frays that felt like aftershocks of the city's growing fear.
He was passing a row of shops, their windows dark and reflective in the gloomy light.
He glanced at his own reflection as he walked past a bakery, and for a few, terrifying seconds, the man who looked back at him was not him.
The reflection was of a stranger. A man he had never seen before. He was gaunt, his cheeks hollowed out as if by starvation or illness. His eyes were wide with a frantic, hunted terror, dark circles bruised beneath them, and his hair was matted with sweat, and his lips were pulled back in a silent scream.
He was wearing clothes Yohan did not recognize, a kind of simple, drab uniform. The man in the glass was a portrait of pure fear, a soul at the very edge of annihilation.
Yohan stopped dead in his tracks, his heart seizing in his chest. He stared, frozen, at the terrified face in the window.
The man's eyes met his, and in them, Yohan saw a desperate plea for help, a silent scream from across an impossible divide.
The reflection raised a trembling hand, pressing it against the glass from the other side, as if trying to break through.
The moment stretched for what felt like an eternity, a frozen tableau of impossible recognition. This was not a memory flash, nor is this was not a psychic echo, rather this was a direct, real time distortion of his own person.
His sense of self, the one thing he had been desperately clinging to, was being violated before his very eyes.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the image vanished. The terrified stranger was gone, and Yohan's own familiar, shocked face was looking back at him.
The reflection was normal again. He was just a man standing on a rainy street, staring into a bakery window.
He stumbled back, gasping for air, his hand flying to his chest, and he looked around wildly.
A woman walking her dog gave him a strange look and hurried on. No one else had seen it. It had happened only to him.
Was it a fray? Had he imagined it? Was he finally losing his mind?
He leaned against a wall, trying to steady his breathing, trying to force logic onto an experience that defied it.
The Rogue Harmonizer theory offered no explanation for this. A rogue could create a Whispering Shadow or destabilize a street, but could they reach into Yohan's personal reality and change his own reflection?
This felt different. It felt more personal, more intimate. It was an attack not on the city, but on him.
On his very identity.
The face of the stranger was burned into his mind, just as the inside out houses had been. The sheer, undiluted terror in the man's eyes. It was a fear that went beyond the fear of death. It was the fear of non existence, and the most terrifying part was the flicker of recognition he had felt.
In the depths of those panicked eyes, he had seen a sliver of himself.
He pushed himself off the wall and began to walk again, his pace hurried and unsteady. He did not know where he was going. He just had to move.
The city around him, with its placid citizens and its illusion of order, felt like a cruel joke. He was a Harmonizer, a pillar of this reality, but his own reality was cracking. The reflection in the window had shown him a terrible truth.
There was a terrified stranger living inside his own skin, screaming to get out, or perhaps he was the stranger, and the man he thought he was, Yohan, the Harmonizer, the lover of Elara, was just a reflection, a mask, and the mask was beginning to slip.