The nightmare came for him in the heart of his own home. It was late. The city outside was silent, its monotonous psychic hum a suffocating blanket.
Elara was asleep in their bedroom, her breathing even and placid. Yohan was in the living room, poring over stolen schematics of the Harmonizer headquarters, trying to map out his infiltration of the Sanctum.
The crawling static in his eye was a frantic, agitated dance, a barometer of the growing dissonance he could feel coalescing somewhere in the city.
He had assumed it was just another random Echo forming in the psychic sinkholes left by the Crimson Sky. He was wrong.
The dissonance was close, and it was personal.
It began with a flicker of the lights, a sudden drop in temperature in the room. The air grew thick, heavy with the smell of a major fray.
Yohan shot to his feet, his Harmonizer instincts screaming. The dissonance wasn't just in the city; it was here. In his apartment.
In the center of the living room, the air began to shimmer, just as it had in the Grand Concourse and the library.
But this was different.
The psychic signature was not one of blind agony or cold nihilism. It was a twisted, corrupted mockery of something he knew, more as It was a chord of love, hope, and intellectual curiosity, but every note was warped, soured, played in a key of profound violation and despair.
It was the psychic signature of Elara, but inverted, turned inside out.
The shimmering coalesced. The Echo that took form before him was the most obscene thing he had ever witnessed.
It was Elara, but hideously, impossibly wrong. It had her shape, her height, her familiar posture, but its form was unstable, made of what looked like solidified, glitching data.
Its skin was a patchwork of shifting textures smooth one moment, then rough as static, then translucent, revealing a hollow void within. Its face was the worst part.
It was her face, but the features were constantly drifting, her gentle smile sliding into a grotesque, agonized grimace, her intelligent eyes melting and reforming as empty black pits.
One of her arms ended not in a hand, but in a spray of corrupted pixels that dissolved into the air.
It was an Echo that looked like a twisted, broken version of Elara. It was a nightmare born from the Dreamer's own mind, a manifestation of its grief and terror at watching its beloved memory-construct fade and simplify.
It was the Dreamer's pain at what the Concordance Protocol was doing to her, given monstrous form.
The creature turned its drifting, horrifying face towards him. It opened its mouth, and a sound came out, both psychic and audible.
It was Elara's voice, but it was a thousand recordings of her voice, all layered over each other, speaking at once, creating a cacophony of nonsense. "I found something... the reflection eats... you should be careful... a celebration... the lie of the We... I love you..."
Yohan felt his stomach heave. This was not just a monster. This was a desecration, it was a violation of everything he held sacred.
The Echo took a stumbling step towards him, its one good hand outstretched, as if pleading.
But as it moved, the books on the shelves behind it began to warp and decay, the very fabric of the room fraying in its presence. It was a creature of pure, agonizing dissonance, and its very existence was tearing his home, his sanctuary, apart.
He had to destroy it. The thought was a cold, hard certainty, but it was accompanied by a wave of soul-crushing horror.
He had to raise his hand against the image of the woman he loved. He had to annihilate this monstrous, suffering effigy of his own personal god. It was a horrifying self-violation, an act of psychic self-mutilation.
He raised his hands, his body trembling. The Echo looked at him, its mismatched eyes seeming to register his intent. The cacophony of its voice coalesced for a single, horrifying moment into one clear, pleading word: "Yohan?"
That broke him. With a scream of pure anguish, he unleashed his power. He didn't use a complex technique. He didn't try to be precise. He simply poured all of his grief, all of his rage, all of his desperate love for the real Elara into a raw, untamed blast of psychic force. It was not an act of harmonization; it was an act of pure, violent erasure.
The blast struck the Echo, and the creature didn't even have time to scream. Its form, already unstable, simply disintegrated.
It dissolved into a billion points of light, like a cloud of fireflies, which then winked out one by one, leaving only the smell of ozone and a profound, echoing silence.
Yohan fell to his knees in the center of his living room, shaking uncontrollably, the sound of his own ragged sobs the only noise in the apartment.
He had just destroyed a monster that wore his wife's face and had spoken his name. He had saved his home, but he felt as though he had just murdered his own soul.