The city's held breath was finally, violently, released. The next Dissonance event was not localized to a plaza or a library. It was global.
It was an attack on the sky itself.
It happened in the late afternoon, during the busiest part of the day. Yohan was in a cafe, trying to force down a cup of coffee, the crawling static in his eye making the steam from his cup writhe like a nest of white snakes.
He was trying to ground himself, to force a sense of normalcy onto his fractured perception.
Then, a collective gasp went through the cafe. Everyone was looking out the window, their faces a mixture of confusion and alarm.
Yohan looked up.
The sky, which had been a clear, placid blue, was changing color. It was not a subtle shift, like at sunset.
A deep, sickly crimson was bleeding into the blue, spreading from the horizon like a tidal wave of blood. Within a minute, the entire sky was a uniform, nauseating shade of crimson.
It was the color of an infected wound, of old blood. The city, with its clean, pastel-colored buildings, was plunged into a hellish, red twilight.
The light that filtered down was thick and oppressive, painting everything and everyone in its ghastly hue.
The psychic effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The sky is a fundamental constant, a cornerstone of reality.
To see it so violently and unnaturally altered was a profound shock to the collective consciousness.
The carefully constructed calm that the Harmonizers had been maintaining for weeks was shattered.
A wave of pure, primal terror, the likes of which Yohan had never felt, swept through the city.
Mass panic erupted.
It was the Grand Concourse, magnified a thousand times. People poured out of buildings, screaming, their faces stained red by the sky, contorted in fear. Cars crashed as their drivers stared, mesmerized and horrified, at the sky.
The city's placid hum was replaced by a deafening roar of sirens, alarms, and human screams.
Yohan was thrown back in his chair by the psychic shockwave. The raw fear of a million minds hit him like a physical blow.
He and every other Harmonizer in the city were instantly overwhelmed. Their attempts to soothe the panic were like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol. The fear was too great, too universal.
He stumbled out of the cafe into a scene from a nightmare. The world was a sea of red light and screaming people.
He tried to focus, to do his job, to create a small island of calm in the chaos. He reached out with his mind to a small group of people huddled in a doorway, trying to project a feeling of safety.
But his efforts were drowned out by the tidal wave of terror. It was like trying to whisper in a hurricane.
He could feel the other Harmonizers, all across the city, fighting the same losing battle. He could feel their desperation, their fear, their minds straining to the breaking point.
The psychic grid, the shimmering web of light he had seen in the Concordance Chamber, was being torn to shreds. The Consensus was not just fraying; it was disintegrating.
The crimson sky was not a passive change. It was an active Dissonance event. It seemed to radiate a feeling of sickness and decay.
It made people feel ill, paranoid. Fights broke out in the streets as the raw fear curdled into aggression. The city was turning on itself.
And then, for seven minutes, the world held its breath.
The crimson light pulsed once, a deep, resonant throb that everyone felt in their bones. In that pulse, a new image was superimposed on the sky, faint and ghostly but unmistakable.
Two suns.
One was the familiar golden sun of their world. The other was a smaller, whiter, more intense star, burning beside it.
The image lasted only a few seconds, but it was seen by everyone. A vision of an alien sky, a sky that did not belong to their world.
Yohan stared at the two suns, his blood running cold. Lyra's diagrams. The strange, unfamiliar star charts in her cottage. This was it.
This was the sky of the Dreamer's world. The dream was breaking down so completely that the memories of the real world were starting to bleed through.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The crimson color receded, draining from the sky like water down a drain.
The familiar blue returned. Normal afternoon sunlight streamed down, washing the red tint from the streets.
The two suns vanished.
The sky was normal again.
The event had lasted exactly seven minutes, but in those seven minutes, the city of Aethelburg had been broken.
The panic subsided into a stunned, whimpering shock. People stood in the streets, staring at the now-blue sky, their faces streaked with tears.
The illusion of safety, of a perfect, predictable world, was gone forever.
Everyone had seen the monster now. They had seen the sky bleed.
They had seen the two suns.
They knew, in their bones, that the world was wrong.
The Harmonizers, battered and psychically bruised, barely managed to avert a total societal collapse.
They guided people back to their homes, tended to the injured, and began the monumental task of trying to stitch the psychic fabric of the city back together, but it was a futile effort.
They were patching a garment that had been ripped in two.
The memory of the crimson sky and the two suns was now a part of the Consensus, a shared trauma that could not be erased or soothed away.
The lie was over.