Dawn was just breaking when the call came, the sky washed in soft rose and grey.
Yohan was summoned to the Artisan's Quarter, a maze of narrow streets filled with workshops and studios.
The report was brief: material instability on Carmine Lane.
Still unsettled by his meeting with Silas, Yohan accepted without hesitation.
No fray is minor, focus on everything.
Carmine Lane was usually charming. Its cobblestones were worn smooth by centuries of footsteps.
Small shops lined the alley, their brightly painted doors opening onto displays of handmade jewelry, blown glass, and delicate clockwork toys.
In the early morning light, it should have felt peaceful. Instead, something was wrong.
The air smelled of wet earth and ozone. A twenty-foot stretch of the street was cordoned off by shimmering energy ribbons from the Harmonizer containment team.
And the cobblestones were moving.
Not melting.
Not flooded.
They kept their shape and color, but flowed slowly.
The street rose and fell in a lazy rhythm, as if breathing.
A discarded newspaper floated on the surface, slowly sinking, as though into a bog.
The sight defied every natural law.
Yohan stepped closer and Lyra, a junior Harmonizer who had made the call, stood nearby with her face was pale.
"I've never seen anything like this," she whispered. "It's not aggressive… but it feels huge."
Yohan nodded. He could feel it too.
This fray was nothing like the frustrated lamppost from before. Its dissonance was slow and heavy, filled with confusion.
The street no longer knew what it was supposed to be, was it solid ground or flowing river ?
The two ideas clashed, creating this unclear state.
Remembering Silas's warning, Yohan didn't start working right away but rather he closed his eyes and extended his senses.
He listed everything : the sharp scent of ozone, a low hum vibrating in his teeth, and beneath the confusion there is something deeper.
Loss?
A vast and old sadness.
He knelt at the edge of the liquid stone, his hand hovering just above it.
"Full spectrum analysis," he murmured, pushing his psychic senses further.
He sifted through the chaotic energy, searching for the source.
The city's collective consciousness buzzed constantly in the background, a static he had to filter out.
Minutes passed and he found it, it is a memory and inhumane one, it belonged to the stone itself, where was a time before the city existed, and before civilization started here.
He felt immense pressure, the slow passage of millennia and this stone had once been part of a deep underground river, flowing in darkness, then came its time to cut and shape.
The stone was torn from its natural state and forced into a new role which is a street and this memory carried profound dislocation. A violation of its identity, but one question remained.
Why now?
Yohan pushed deeper and the trigger was recent which is two nights ago, a geologist at the university had casually wondered about the bedrock beneath the Artisan's Quarter.
That harmless thought, amplified by growing instability in the Consensus field, had unlocked this ancient trauma.
This was what Silas meant.
A single thought could now unravel reality.
The system was becoming dangerously sensitive.
Yohan began the tuning.
This time, it wasn't simple and he couldn't just project the idea of street. This fray ran too deep.
Instead, he projected synthesis.
He acknowledged the stone's past without erasing it. He showed it its present and the children who skipped across it, the artists who walked it daily, the history it now carried.
He reframed its purpose.
It was no longer a river of water but a river of people, commerce, and art but this cause the conflict to intensifies.
The stone churned violently.
The air crackled with psychic energy.
Lyra stepped back without realizing it but still Yohan held firm, he focused on coexistence, on a new identity built from the old and this went well as slowly the turmoil eased.
The sadness faded into acceptance and the movement softened result in the stone hardened and the gaps between cobbles reappeared.
Within a minute, Carmine Lane was solid once more.
Only the faint smell of air remained and the newspaper, half-trapped in stone like a modern fossil.
Yohan stood, exhausted.
This "minor" fray had drained him more than a dozen simple ones. It felt like he had mediated a conflict billions of years old.
"It's stable," he said, his voice strained. "Write the report. Full spectrum analysis. Note the geological memory and the academic trigger. Send it directly to Silas."
Lyra nodded, awe and fear in her eyes.
"I will."
As Yohan turned to leave, he glanced once more at the trapped newspaper.
The headline read:
"City Prepares for Centennial Celebrations: A Century of Perfect Harmony."
The irony was suffocating.
He told himself this was routine.
But he knew better.
This was not routine.
The sickness Silas warned of ran deeper than anyone had imagined and it is down to the very stone foundations of the city.