When tiredness hit, a feeling of extreme drowsy fall on him with difficulty keeping your eyes open and when it finally came, offered no respite.
It was a dark, heavy blanket that smothered him, pulling him down into a place where the waking world's horrors were not forgotten, but distilled into their purest, most symbolic form.
That night, for the first time since he was a small child, Yohan had a nightmare.
It did not begin with a dramatic fall or a terrifying chase. It began with silence and stillness. He was standing on the familiar cobblestones of Argent Street beneath the warm, golden glow of newly repaired lampposts.
The city of Aethelburg surrounded him, perfect and serene. The air was cool and clean. The distant ringing of the Central Spire marked an unknown hour. Everything was exactly as it should be.
But he was alone.
The bustling avenue was deserted. Cafes stood empty, chairs neatly tucked beneath tables. Silent trams rested motionless on their tracks. There was no sign of life, not even the distant murmur of the city's million minds.
The hums of the Consensus was gone. He was standing in a perfect, and beautiful but utterly dead city.
A profound sense of unease crept over him.
He began to walk, his footsteps echoing unnaturally in the silence. He called out,
"Hello? Is anyone there?"
The words were swallowed by the emptiness, leaving no echo behind. His walk became a run, his heart pounding as he moved through pristine streets, past elegant facades and manicured parks.
The city felt like a flawless, intricate dollhouse, and he was the only doll left inside.
Then he felt a tremor.
It was not an earthquake, rather the ground beneath his feet remained solid, and this was deeper, a vibration in the very substance of the dream itself, then he looked down.
A thin black crack split the cobblestones at his feet. It spread rapidly, branching outward like a spiderweb, racing down the avenue. These were not simple fissures in stone. They were gaps in existence. Through them, he saw not soil or pipes, but a vast, starless blackness.
The beautiful facades of the buildings began to crumble, not into rubble, but into dust, dissolving like sandcastles before a rising tide. The golden glow of the lampposts flickered and died, plunging the city into twilight gloom. The tremor intensified, and the ground beneath him began to feel thin, fragile, brittle.
He looked up at the Central Spire, the proudest monument of Aethelburg, the symbol of unity and stability. As he watched, it began to dissolve from the top down, its elegant form turning into a cascade of grey dust that scattered in a wind that did not exist.
The city was disintegrating around him, a magnificent illusion fading under the light of a terrible dawn.
The ground gave way, but he did not fall, with the cobblestones, the foundations, the very landmass of Aethelburg simply ceased to exist, revealing what had been beneath it all along, a vast, dark ocean, but it was not water more likely it was sort of a sea of pure black, viscous fluid stretching endlessly to the horizon beneath a bruised purple sky.
There were no waves, only a slow, oily swell. The silence was absolute, the air cold and lifeless, and he was not swimming or floating, it is more likely he is simply existed, suspended above the surface, a lone point of consciousness in an infinite void.
He looked down into the black ocean, and dread seized him. It was a primal fear of the deep,and he knew, with a certainty beyond logic, that this was the true reality.
The city, Aethelburg, his home, his life with Elara, his work as a Harmonizer, all of it was a fragile construct, a thin film of ice stretched over this bottomless, primordial sea of chaos.
The Inversion had not been an attack. It had been a thaw.
A single, slow bubble rose from the depths and broke the surface, releasing a sound. It was not a word, but a feeling given voice, a low, mournful, and unbearably lonely moan.
It was the sorrow of something vast and ancient, so alone that its despair had weight. The sound washed over Yohan, and an agonizing empathy filled him.
He felt the burden of endless solitude, the crushing despair of a mind trapped within its own eternal darkness.
Then something began to rise.
He could not see it, but he felt its approach.
A presence of unimaginable scale, its consciousness a vortex of madness and despair. It was the source of the moan, the dreamer within the dream, and it was stirring.
Terror seized him completely, and it was the terror of a single cell realizing the body it belonged to was dying.
He tried to scream, but he had no voice. He tried to run, but he had no body. He could only watch as the dark surface of the ocean bulged upward, heralding the arrival of the monstrous, sleeping thing beneath.
He woke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright in bed.
His heart hammered against his ribs, cold sweat slicking his skin. The familiar shapes of his bedroom lay shrouded in pre-dawn gloom.
Elara slept soundly beside him, her breathing soft and steady.
Outside, the city was quiet. Everything was normal, yet the feeling of the dream lingered.
The cold.
The silence. The vast, dark ocean beneath the city.
It felt more real than the bed beneath him, even more real than the room he is in. It felt like a memory, a truth he had always known but somehow forgotten.
He was a Harmonizer, a guardian of order. But the dream had shown him something else entirely.
Order was the illusion.
Chaos was the foundation.