Like a city it had always lived in silence.
Not quiet.
Erasure.
Its streets were stitched with forgetting, its people taught to walk without memory. The towers hummed above them, guardians of lies, keepers of silence.
But now, the thread had flown.
And the city remembered.
The First Awakening
It began with whispers.
A merchant dropped his scales, staring at the glyph that appeared on his stall.
A child cried, not from pain, but from recognition of a lullaby no one had sung in centuries.
An elder collapsed, clutching her chest, as the memory of her stitched brother returned.
The city pulsed.
Not with magic.
With truth.
The Flood of Memory
The towers glowed.
Symbols spilled into the streets, hovering like lanterns.
Every wall became a page.
Every stone, a sentence.
Every person, a book.
They saw what had been erased:
- The stitched ones walking among them, not as monsters, but as kin.
- The academy sealing truths in blood and silence.
- Aurex Vell forging the pact of forgetting.
- Cassian Thorn flipping the coin before he was born.
The Fear
Not all welcomed it.
Some screamed, clawing at the glyphs that burned their skin.
Others fled, terrified of the stitched ones who now glowed with fire.
The headmasters tried to silence the flood, but their voices fractured, their authority unraveling.
The city was no longer theirs.
It belonged to memory.
The Joy
But some wept with relief.
Families reunited with names they had lost.
Songs returned to throats that had forgotten melody.
Lovers remembered promises buried in silence.
Children remembered stories stolen from their dreams.
The stitched ones walked among them.
And for the first time, no one ran.
The Sky
Above Evershade, the sky burned with glyphs.
Nova's fractured symbol rewrote itself into constellations.
Lyra's mark pulsed across the horizon.
Cassian's coin hovered, glowing like a second moon.
The stitched child raised their hand.
The city looked up.
And the sky spoke:
"Remember."
The Turning
Evershade was no longer a city of silence.
It was a city of memory.
But memory is not mercy.
It is fire.
And as the people remembered, they saw not only truth — but betrayal, blood, and the cost of forgetting.
The city trembled.
Because remembering was only the beginning.