The psychic scar did not manifest as a memory or an emotion. It was a permanent glitch in his perception, a corruption of the source code of his senses.
The world no longer looked the same to Yohan. The immediate aftermath of the library battle was a blur of debriefings and medical checks.
The other Harmonizers hailed him as a hero. He had single-handedly defeated an Echo of a new and terrifying kind, and he had done it by developing a new, if reckless, technique.
They studied his report, trying to understand the psychic grappling maneuver he had used. They celebrated his victory, but Yohan felt no victory, rather he felt only a profound and chilling violation.
The cold spot in his mind was a constant presence, a patch of psychic frostbite that would not thaw, and it had a visual component.
From the moment he had absorbed the Echo's attack, the corner of his right eye, the very edge of his peripheral vision, was permanently occupied by a crawling, black static.
It was not a floater, nor was it a trick of the light. It was a constant, writhing patch of visual noise, like a television tuned to a dead channel.
It moved when he moved his eye, a persistent, inescapable artifact burned into his sight. If he tried to look at it directly, it would skitter away, always remaining at the very edge of his perception. But it was always there.
A small, personal patch of the void, a souvenir from his encounter with pure despair.
The world, once so clear and solid, now had a tear in it, a hole that only he could see. It was a constant, maddening reminder of the battle, of the alien nature of the enemy, and of his own growing instability.
He tried to explain it to the Harmonizer medics, but they could find nothing wrong. His eyes were fine. His brain scans were normal.
They dismissed it as a temporary symptom of psychic shock, a kind of mental afterimage that would fade with time, but it did not fade.
It became a part of his new reality. When he looked at Elara, the crawling static at the edge of his vision seemed to mock the beauty of her face. When he walked through the harmonious streets of Aethelburg, the patch of chaos followed him, a personal fray that he could not tune.
It was a constant, physical manifestation of his doubt, a visual representation of the idea that the world was not as it seemed.
The static was more than just a visual annoyance. It was psychically active.
Sometimes, late at night, when the world was quiet, he could almost see shapes in it. Writhing, insect-like forms, or fleeting, screaming faces, similar to those in the first Echo.
It was as if the scar was a window, a tiny portal back to the place of despair from which the Echo had come. It whispered to him, not in words, but in feelings.
It fed him tiny, homeopathic doses of the nihilism he had fought in the library. It would murmur suggestions of pointlessness, of hopelessness.
It was a constant battle to keep the static at the edge of his vision from creeping into the center of his mind.
His work as a Harmonizer became almost impossible.
How could he mend the small tears in the world's fabric when he carried a permanent one in his own eye?
When he tried to tune a fray, the static would pulse and writhe, distracting him, feeding on the dissonance. His once-precise and empathetic touch became clumsy and strained.
He grew more withdrawn, more paranoid. He avoided mirrors, afraid of what he might see in his own reflection.
He found it hard to meet people's eyes, afraid they might see the crawling darkness in his.
Elara knew something was deeply wrong. He had told her he was shaken by the library fight, but he could not bring himself to describe the scar.
How could he explain that a piece of the monster was now living in his eye?
It sounded like madness. Their conversations became strained, full of his evasions and her worried, unanswered questions.
The easy intimacy they had shared was being eroded by his secret.
The scar was a brand. It marked him as different, and it was proof that he had touched the void and that the void had touched him back.
It was a constant, terrifying reminder that the enemy was not just outside, in the city. It was inside him now, a part of his very perception. He was contaminated, and he knew, with a growing sense of desperation, that he could not find a cure within the Harmonizer order.
They did not understand the disease, and they were still treating the symptoms, hunting a fictional rogue, while Yohan carried the pathogen in his own head.
He needed to find someone who had been cast out, someone who had seen the truth and been broken by it.
He needed to find a heretic.