The name Lyra surfaced from the depths of his memory, a fragment from a conversation that now seemed a lifetime ago.
It was Elara, excited about her archival discovery, who had first mentioned it. Lyra, the architect's wife, the one who had supposedly lived in their apartment a century ago.
But Yohan's mind made a different connection. He remembered a file from his research into the Psychic Squall
. A field report, more insightful and heretical than the others, describing the anomalies not as products of panic, but as intrusions from a dreaming mind.
The report had been written by a senior Harmonizer named Lyra, and her name was on the list of those who had been retired shortly after the Squall.
The coincidence was too strong to ignore. He cross-referenced the names in the Harmonizer personnel files. Lyra, the Harmonizer, had been placed in a managed care facility in the city's outer suburbs after her breakdown.
The facility was a quiet, discreet place for Harmonizers who had been psychically compromised, a place where they could live out their days without threatening the Consensus.
It was a gilded cage, a comfortable exile.
But then he found another file, a more recent one. Five years ago, Lyra had been released. She had petitioned for, and been granted, a severance from the Consensus.
It was an extremely rare and dangerous procedure. A Harmonizer of her power would have to voluntarily undergo a series of psychic blocks, dulling her abilities, cutting her off from the network that connected all citizens.
She would be, for all intents and purposes, an outsider, an unregistered mind living on the fringes of the city.
The file listed her last known address as a small cottage in the Unrendered Marches, the wild, semi-stable land at the very edge of Aethelburg's reality field.
This was the heretic he was looking for. A former senior Harmonizer who had seen the truth of the Squall, who had been institutionalized for it, and who had then chosen to cut herself off from the world entirely.
She had not just been cast out; she had run.
The decision to seek her out was a momentous one. It was a direct violation of Silas's orders. It was consorting with a known unstable element.
If he were caught, it would be the end of his career, and he would likely be branded a traitor himself. But the crawling static in his eye was a constant, driving impetus.
The established methods were failing, with the official truth was a lie. He was desperate, and desperation breeds heresy.
He told Elara he was being sent on a multi-day assignment to monitor dissonant energy signatures in the outer sectors.
It was a plausible lie, and she accepted it, though the worry in her eyes was a physical pain for him to see.
He packed a small bag with a ration pack, a water purifier, and a psycho-static compass, a device that could navigate the unstable regions where reality was thin.
The journey to the Unrendered Marches took him out of the pristine, ordered heart of Aethelburg.
The further he went, the more the city's perfection began to fray at the edges.
The architecture became more utilitarian, the streets less clean. The psychic hum of the Consensus grew fainter, replaced by a kind of low-level static.
He was leaving the safety of the network, heading into the wild.
The Marches were not on any official map. They were a buffer zone between the stable reality of Aethelburg and the raw, unshaped chaos that lay beyond.
The landscape was a strange, dreamlike mixture of familiar and impossible. Trees grew with geometric precision, their leaves shifting colors with the wind.
Patches of ground were missing, revealing the starless void beneath. Small, harmless frays were common here: rocks that floated a few inches off the ground, streams that flowed uphill. It was a place where the rules were merely suggestions.
His psycho-static compass, which pointed towards the strongest, most stable concentration of conscious thought, was useless for finding a woman who had severed herself from the Consensus.
He had to rely on the last known coordinates from her file and his own instincts.
He walked for hours through the surreal, silent landscape, the crawling static in his eye feeling strangely at home here, as if it recognized the ambient chaos.
He finally found the cottage just as the sky was beginning to darken, painting the impossible landscape in hues of violet and orange. It was a small, stone building, hunkered down in a shallow valley, looking both ancient and out of place.
A thin tendril of smoke rose from its chimney. The cottage was surrounded by a fence that Yohan immediately recognized as a low-power psychic ward, designed not to keep people out, but to repel the minor frays and reality glitches that plagued the Marches.
It was the work of a skilled, if weakened, Harmonizer.
He approached the door, his heart pounding. He was about to knock on the door of a ghost, a woman who had been erased from the official history.
He was placing all his hope for answers, for a cure, on a madwoman in the wilderness. He raised his hand, the static in his eye pulsing with a strange, almost eager energy.
He was stepping off the map, leaving the world of comfortable lies behind and knocking on the door of a terrible truth.