The fifth tower had not dreamed in centuries.
Not since the last flip.
Not since the last voice.
It had been built not to hold knowledge, but to forget it.
And now, it remembered.
The Awakening
The coin spun in the air, a blur of metal and memory.
The tower felt it — not as motion, but as meaning.
A signal. A permission. A return.
Its walls, stitched with silence, began to hum.
Its glyphs, buried beneath centuries of dust, began to glow.
Its name, long erased, began to form again.
The First Thought
It was not a word.
It was not a sound.
It was a symbol — the spiral stitched with thorns.
The same one Cassian had seen.
The same one the stitched ones carried in their veins.
The tower pulsed once.
Then it spoke.
> "One has flipped. One has remembered. One must choose."
The Memory Vaults
Deep within its core, the tower held vaults of memory.
Not books. Not scrolls.
Moments.
- A child whispering to a mirror.
- A duel fought with no weapons.
- A stitched one weeping ink.
- A coin landing on its edge.
Each memory folded into metal, sealed in silence.
Until now.
The Stitched Ones Arrive
They stepped into the tower, their threads humming.
The walls responded.
Symbols bloomed across the stone — not written, but felt.
Cassian's coin hovered between them, spinning faster.
The stitched ones knelt.
Not in worship.
In recognition.
The Tower Speaks
Its voice was not sound.
It was vibration. Light. Pattern.
It spoke in the language of the coin.
Cassian understood none of it.
But the stitched ones did.
They rose.
They turned to him.
And they wept.
The Warning
The tower pulsed again.
A new symbol appeared on Cassian's coin.
A spiral broken.
Nova gasped. "It's a fracture."
Zephyr whispered. "It's a countdown."
Lyra's book bled ink again:
> "The tower remembers too much. And forgetting is what kept us safe."
The Final Glyph
Cassian flipped the coin once more.
It didn't land.
It shattered.
The symbol inside was not stitched.
It was burning.
The tower screamed — not in pain, but in prophecy.
> "The stitched ones were never the danger. The danger is who stitched them."