---
The tower's chime vibrated through Lila's bones, shaking dust from the rafters. In the sudden silence that followed, the sunflower seed in the broken watch pulsed with a slow, deliberate rhythm—like a heartbeat counting down.
The darkness around her shifted.
Not the empty dark of night, but something thicker. Something *aware*.
A match struck somewhere above her, the flare of light revealing Elias—or the thing wearing his face—perched on the clocktower's gears. His white eyes reflected the flame as he lit an oil lantern. The light spilled downward, illuminating the tower's interior for the first time.
Lila's breath caught.
The walls weren't made of wood or stone.
They were made of *lockets*.
Thousands of them, fused together like scales, each one slightly ajar. Inside each, a tiny, withered sunflower turned toward the light.
Elias tilted his head. "You finally made it to the heart." His voice echoed strangely, layered with whispers that weren't his. "Took you long enough."
The seed in Lila's palm itched. She clenched her fist around it, feeling the sharp edges bite into her skin. "Where's Clara?"
Elias—*not Elias*—smiled. "Where she belongs." He gestured to the lockets. "With the others who woke up."
A metallic *click* sounded as one of the lockets near the base snapped fully open. Inside, the sunflower had crumbled to ash.
The thing wearing Elias's face sighed. "Another one gone." He leaned forward, the lantern swinging from his fingers. "But you—you're different, aren't you?"
The lockets began to tremble. A chorus of whispers seeped from them, overlapping, indistinguishable—except for one.
A voice Lila knew.
"Don't listen to him," Clara whispered from somewhere among the thousands. "He lies with every breath."
Elias's smile widened. "Ah. There she is."
The seed in Lila's hand split open. A single, razor-thin root pierced her skin.
The tower's clock struck once.
And everything went black.
---
The darkness lasted only a heartbeat before dissolving into fractured memories—not hers, but *theirs*. The Keepers who came before.
Lila saw:
- A woman in a bloodstained apron
burying her locket under the rosebush as the town burned behind her
- A child no older than six weeping as silver threads stitched her lips shut
- Clara, standing in this very tower, plunging her hands into the gears to stop them turning
The visions vanished as suddenly as they came. Lila gasped, finding herself on her knees, the root from the seed now coiled up her forearm like a vein. The lockets on the walls rattled violently, their sunflowers withering to dust one by one.
The thing wearing Elias's face dropped the lantern.
It shattered at Lila's feet—but instead of fire, black liquid pooled outward, reflecting not her face, but hundreds of others. All of them screaming.
"Interesting," Not-Elias murmured. He crouched beside her, tilting his head as the root burrowed deeper into her arm. "You're fighting it."
Clara's voice hissed from the walls: "She's stronger than you."
A locket near the ceiling burst open. Then another. And another.
Ash rained down as the whispers grew louder, more distinct—
—until they weren't whispers at all.
They were *commands*.
"RIP HIM OUT."
Lila's body moved before she could think. Her infected hand shot forward, fingers sinking into the hollow of Not-Elias's throat. His skin tore like paper, revealing clockwork beneath—gears grinding, springs straining—and something else.
Something *organic*.
A single, shriveled sunflower where his heart should be.
The tower shook as Lila closed her fist around it.
The moment Lila's fingers closed around the sunflower heart, the tower screamed .
Gears shrieked as they ground to a halt. Lockets exploded in showers of tarnished metal, their ashes swirling like angry ghosts around her. The thing wearing Elias's face convulsed, its skin peeling back in jagged strips to reveal the hollow clockwork beneath—each rusted component etched with names of forgotten Keepers.
Clara's voice rose above the chaos, sharp as broken glass: "Pull it out!"
Lila yanked.
The sunflower came free with a wet, metallic tear—its roots were copper wires, its stem a frayed silver chain. The moment it left the clockwork body, the thing that wasn't Elias collapsed into a pile of grinding cogs and yellowed parchment.
Silence.
Then—
A click.
The sunflower in Lila's palm bloomed, its petals unfolding to reveal a tiny, beating heart nestled within. The same heart that had been in the pocket watch. The same heart she'd seen beneath the town.
It pulsed once, sending a wave of silver light through the tower.
The remaining lockets snapped open in unison.
And the *real* screaming began.
---
**Chapter 6 Part 4 (Finale)**
The screaming wasn't sound—it was memory.
Raw, unfiltered moments from every Keeper who had ever been trapped in the lockets poured into Lila all at once. She saw:
- The First Keeper — cutting her own heart out with silver shears, planting it in the earth where the rosebush would grow.
- Generations of women and children — lured into the tower, their names etched into gears, their souls pressed into sunflowers.
Clara , not as a victim, but as the last rebel—the one who had torn her own locket open from the inside.
The heart in Lila's palm pulsed faster, burning through her skin, fusing with her scars. The tower shuddered, its foundations groaning as the great gears beneath Hollowbrook finally, *finally* ground to a halt.
The lockets fell silent.
Then, one by one, they *shattered*.
Not into pieces, but into light—silver and gold, swirling upward like fireflies escaping a cage. The ashes of the sunflowers lifted with them, painting the tower's interior in fleeting constellations before vanishing through the cracks in the wood.
Only one locket remained.
It hung at the center of the tower, slightly larger than the others, its surface engraved with a single word:
FINISH
Lila reached for it.
The moment her fingers brushed the metal, the heart in her palm *stopped*.
And the clocktower's bell tolled one final time.
To Be Continued....