Nova Quinn dreamed in color.
Zephyr Vale dreamed in silence.
They were opposites in every way — Nova, all light and laughter and motion; Zephyr, all shadow and stillness and restraint. But the school had always placed them near each other. Same classes. Same dorm wing. Same tower.
Not by accident.
By design.
The First Thread
It began in Dream Theory.
Professor Umbra asked them to project their earliest emotional memory.
Nova projected a burst of joy — a kaleidoscope of laughter, music, and stitched sunlight.
Zephyr projected nothing.
But Nova saw something in his silence.
A root.
Twisting. Ancient. Alive.
The Root
They began to see it everywhere.
In the cracks of the Reflection Pool.
In the velvet seams of the Whisper Theatre.
In the shadows beneath the fifth tower.
A root — not of a tree, but of memory.
It pulsed when they stood near each other.
It whispered when they touched.
The Shared Dream
One night, they dreamed the same dream.
A room with no walls.
A thread of light and a thread of shadow, twisting around each other.
A voice — not Calyx, not the tower — something older
> "You are not stitched. You are grown."
They woke at the same time.
Their hands were glowing.
The Theory
Maris called it impossible.
Cassian flipped his coin. It landed on its edge.
Lyra whispered, "You're not stitched. You're rooted."
Nova and Zephyr began to remember things they'd never lived.
A garden beneath the school.
A ritual that predated stitching.
A bond that wasn't made — it was planted.
The Book Again
That night, the book pulsed with a different ink — green, alive, curling like vines.
It wrote:
> "Before the towers, before the stitching, there was the Root. And it remembers them."
Nova whispered, "We're not echoes."
Zephyr nodded. "We're seeds."