Yohan sat in Lyra's small, dim cottage with the journal open on his lap.
The world outside no longer mattered.
One line from the journal stayed in his mind:
"The Sanctum of Concord… the source of the Great Lie."
He finally understood. The Harmonizer headquarters was not just an office. It was the center of the system that controlled their reality. The Sanctum, hidden at its core, was where the deception began.
It was where Silas and the founders built the system that kept everyone trapped in the illusion.
Lyra studied his face.
"You see it now," she said quietly. "Our perfect circle symbol isn't harmony. It's a closed loop.
A prison.
The network doesn't connect people. It lets the Dreamer regulate himself. The Sanctum is the control point."
Yohan looked down at the journal again. Lyra's research was clear and careful. She believed the Sanctum was not just machinery.
It was something organic which is a direct link to the Dreamer's brainstem, where the basic functions of their reality were controlled.
According to her theory, it produced the Consensus field, the force holding their world together. It was also the source of the Concordance Protocol.
Silas had not created a new system; he had simply pushed the existing one further which is maximizing stability while reducing complexity and free will.
If the Sanctum was the source, then it held the answers.
It might even contain a way to stop the Concordance Protocol and free Elara, but it was also the most protected place in Aethelburg.
No Harmonizer below Lead rank had entered it in more than a century, and trying to reach it would be considered absolute betrayal.
"You want to go there," Lyra said. It was not a question. "You think you can fix everything by changing something inside the system. You still think like a Harmonizer."
"I have to do something," Yohan said quietly. "I won't watch Elara disappear. I won't live in a city pretending everything is fine."
"Breaking into the Sanctum is suicide," Lyra replied. "Its defenses aren't just guards and locks. They attack the mind. The corridors shift. The walls trap you in your own thoughts. The guardians are projections backed by the network itself, and at the center is the raw power of the Dreamer's mind. Touching it without permission would destroy you."
Her warning did not change his mind. If the place was that heavily protected, it meant the truth was there.
The decision formed clearly in his mind, and he would enter the Sanctum of Concord.
Once he accepted it, everything felt colder but simpler. For weeks he had only reacted to events, but now he had a direction. Whether he destroyed the system or saved it, he would force the truth into the open.
He closed the journal.
"How?" he asked. "How do I get past those defenses?"
Lyra looked at him carefully, noticing the change in his expression. After a moment she nodded.
"You don't bypass them," she said. "You deceive them. The Sanctum's defenses act like an immune system. They destroy anything that doesn't belong. So you must convince it that you do."
She began pacing.
"The corridors react to expectations. If you try to control where you go, you'll get trapped. You must move without expectation."
"The guardians represent roles within the system as the Inquisitor, the Protector, the Judge. Fighting them won't work. You must answer them the way the system would answer."
She gave an example.
"If the Inquisitor asks whether you doubt the system, you say:
'Doubt is a dissonance to be harmonized.'"
Yohan understood. He would have to imitate the system perfectly while it tried to erase him.
"And the final seal?" he asked. "The one created by Silas?"
Lyra stopped walking.
"That one I don't know," she admitted. "It's built from his certainty that he is right. A wall made of pure conviction. To break it, you would need something stronger… or something so hopeless it destroys conviction itself."
The scale of the task became clear. If he failed, he would be captured or erased. If he succeeded, he had no idea what he would find, but he kept seeing Elara's empty smile.
That was enough.
He stood, holding the journal.
"Thank you, Lyra."
"Don't thank me," she said sharply. "I only showed you where the abyss is."
Yohan left the cottage and stepped into the fading light outside.
He was no longer just a Harmonizer.
He was a traitor to the system, and his first step would be going home and lying to the person he was trying to save.