The public debut of the Echo changed everything.
Silas's "Rogue Harmonizer" narrative, once a secret theory shared in a secure chamber, was now the official, public explanation.
The city government, guided by the Harmonizer leadership, addressed the populace directly.
They spoke of a traitor, a powerful individual who had turned against the very principles of the Consensus, a terrorist who used psychic abilities to manifest these Echoes of Dissonance.
The story was frightening, but it was also empowering. It gave the citizens of Aethelburg an enemy to hate, a reason for their fear. They were not victims of a crumbling reality; they were a society under attack.
For Yohan, this public declaration was a source of profound unease.
He had fought the Echo, and he had felt the raw, undiluted despair at its core, and to attribute that cosmic agony to the malice of a single human being felt like a gross oversimplification, a convenient lie to make an incomprehensible horror manageable.
His doubts about Silas's theory were hardening into conviction. Something else was going on, something far larger and more terrifying than a single rogue agent.
Driven by this conclusion, Yohan turned his investigation away from the present and towards the past. If the world was truly coming apart, this could not be the first time.
The Dissonance Cascade, the Echoes, they felt like symptoms of a recurring illness, not a new one.
He needed to know if this had happened before.
He needed to research historical Dissonance events.
And This quest took him deep into the Harmonizer archives, a section of the Great Library accessible only to those of his rank and higher. It was a place of absolute silence, a stark contrast to the public sections of the library Elara so loved.
There were no paper books here. The records were stored on crystalline data shards, slotted into towering black shelves that stretched up into the gloom.
Each shard was a repository of information, accessible only through a specialized reading station that translated the psychic data into readable text and images.
He started with the last major event on record, the Psychic Squall of sixty years ago, the one Silas had famously quelled.
He slotted the corresponding shard into the reader.
The official report was detailed and heroic. It described a sudden, violent storm of collective panic, triggered by a severe economic downturn.
The squall manifested as powerful, chaotic frays, buildings melting, streets buckling. The report detailed how a young Silas, through brilliant and brave psychic engineering, had managed to calm the storm and restore the Consensus.
It was a story of order triumphing over chaos, but as Yohan delved deeper into the supplementary files, he began to find inconsistencies.
He found field reports from junior Harmonizers that described phenomena that did not fit the collective panic narrative.
They mentioned auditory phantoms and geometric distortions, descriptions that sounded eerily similar to the Whispering Shadows and the Echo he had just fought.
These reports were all marked with a footnote: Re classified as anecdotal. See primary report for official analysis.
He kept digging, pushing past the official summaries and into the raw, unedited data logs, and that was when he found the redactions.
Entire sections of the data were blacked out, rendered inaccessible.
He would be reading a detailed account from a Harmonizer on the scene, and suddenly, a paragraph would be replaced by a solid black block with a single, chilling label.
REDACTED: FOUNDATIONAL
PRINCIPLES VIOLATION.
His heart began to beat faster.
This was not the open, transparent record of a historical event, rather this was a cover up.
He cross referenced the names of the Harmonizers whose reports were most heavily redacted, and he found that a surprising number of them had retired or been reassigned to archival duties in the months following the Squall.
They had been silenced.
He moved further back in time, accessing records from the city's first fifty years.
The official narrative of Aethelburg's founding was one of utopian harmony, a group of enlightened, psychically gifted individuals coming together to build a perfect society from scratch, but the archives told a different story.
The early years were plagued by massive, violent Dissonance events. The records were filled with terms he had never seen in modern textbooks.
Reality Hemorrhages, Conceptual Voids, and Spontaneous Identity Erasures.
The frays of his time were pale imitations of these early catastrophes, and the redactions were everywhere.
They were like black holes in the city's history, swallowing crucial information.
He found a heavily censored report on an event called the Silent Collapse, where an entire district had simply vanished overnight, leaving a perfectly smooth, glassy crater behind.
There were no details on the cause, no analysis, just a few terrified eyewitness accounts followed by pages upon pages of blacked out text.
The official summary simply stated that the district had been decommissioned due to geological instability.
The most disturbing redactions were clustered around any mention of the city's founders, the First Harmonizers.
Their personal logs, their philosophical treatises on the nature of the Consensus, all were heavily censored.
Any discussion of where, exactly, they had come from, or what the world was like before Aethelburg, was systematically scrubbed from the records.
Yohan sat back from the reading station, a cold sweat on his brow.
He had come looking for answers, but he had only found a vast, carefully constructed void.
The history of Aethelburg was a lie.
It was a heavily edited, redacted, and sanitized version of the truth. The Harmonizer order, his order, was not just maintaining the present. It was actively suppressing the past.
Silas had not just quelled the Psychic Squall. He had buried the truth of what it really was.
The Rogue Harmonizer was not the first lie. It was just the latest in a long line of them.
The question was no longer if something like this had happened before.
It was what had happened.
What was the terrible truth that lay beneath those black bars?
What were the foundational principles that were so dangerous they had to be erased from history?
He knew, with a chilling certainty, that he could not find the answer in the archives.
The answer was being guarded by the man who had written the redactions.
Silas