The seed pulsed faintly in Orion's hand.
Not with light.
Not with heat.
But with intention.
It wasn't like holding a thing—it was like holding a beginning. He could feel its heartbeat, slow and steady, echoing against the rhythms of his own. It did not speak, yet its silence was louder than any of the Nameless One's words.
Kael watched with narrowed eyes. "That's no ordinary seed."
Lyra tilted her head, eyes flickering violet. "It's dreaming."
Orion blinked. "What?"
She didn't answer right away. Her gaze had drifted—fixed on the seed as though it revealed things only she could see. "It's… seeing futures. All of them. Ones that never happened. Ones that still might."
Orion turned back to the Nameless, who stood unmoved among the shifting geometries. "You said this came from us."
The Nameless didn't blink, didn't breathe. "The multiverse is a wound. You were never meant to arrive here. Your choices tore a gap, and from that gap, possibility leaked through. Possibility has form now. It took root."
Kael's jaw tensed. "We came to stop the unraveling. Is this how?"
"No," said the Nameless. "This is how it continues. Differently."
The pedestal beneath the seed dissolved, like a choice never made. The other three remained.
The cracked crown.
The entropy blade.
The mirror of selves.
Options fixed in fate, etched into prophecy. But the seed—this anomaly—was different. It resisted definition.
Orion looked at Kael and Lyra. "If we take it… what happens?"
Lyra's voice was soft. "We plant something. Not in soil. In reality."
Kael shook his head. "It's a gamble. That seed could grow into salvation… or the final collapse."
"I don't think it grows into either," Orion said. "I think it grows into choice."
He closed his hand around it.
And the tower reacted.
Not violently. Not as a prison rejects an intruder.
It breathed.
The air shifted. Time cracked, then mended. Symbols on the walls rearranged themselves—no longer chaotic, but forming a sequence.
A memory began to play.
Not a vision. Not an echo.
A truth.
The chamber blurred and bent, and suddenly they were standing somewhere else.
The Tower That Remembers was gone.
In its place: a garden. Or what had once been a garden—now broken, with plants fossilized mid-bloom and colors leeched to grayscale. At its center stood a woman made of glass and shadow, her form flickering as though trapped between dimensions.
She turned to them slowly.
"You brought the seed," she said.
Orion took a step forward. "Who are you?"
"I was once called Aeledra. I was a Weaver."
Kael froze. "You're supposed to be gone. Extinct."
"I am." Her voice held no bitterness, only resignation. "But this garden remembers. And the seed… is remembering me."
Lyra whispered, "She's not alive. She's potential."
Aeledra nodded once. "That's all that's left of us. Possibilities unfulfilled. Choices never taken. We created the Veil to bind the Nameless, to contain the uncontainable. But in doing so, we severed our futures."
The seed pulsed in Orion's hand again.
"Why show us this?" he asked.
"Because the Veil is dying. The Nameless will return. But the seed gives you something we never had."
She stepped back, and a withered tree behind her cracked open—inside it, a spiral staircase of crystallized memory leading down into shifting light.
"A path not written. One that rewrites the script."
Kael looked at Orion. "Are we really going to follow memory into madness?"
Orion gave a wry smile. "When haven't we?"
Lyra touched his arm. "We do this together."
And so they descended—into the roots of forgotten futures, following the seed that dreams.
The Nameless did not stop them.
It only watched.
And for the first time since its unmaking, it hesitated.