The silence after the storm was never just silence.
It was stitching.
All across the capital, the fabric of power began to rethread — not with Venna's code, but with something older, something buried.
Something Sloane's name had awakened.
"Do you feel that?" Cassien asked beside her, voice quiet as the Vogue Obelisk's lights flickered off one by one.
"I do," Sloane replied. "But I don't know what it means yet."
"Then we find out together."
She turned toward him, unsure why the way he said together made her heart hesitate.
---
Back in the underground atelier, the mood was brittle.
Dax was already dismantling the hijacked Vogue node, typing commands into a floating weave-terminal. Lines of code flared and dissolved like burning lace.
Ari chewed her lip. "The signature you created onstage… Sloane, it didn't come from Silhouette. Not fully."
Sloane blinked. "What do you mean?"
"It was fused with something else. A thread buried deep in the weave." She tapped her lens-screen. "I traced it. The origin's not from your mother's line or House Calyx."
She turned the hologram toward Sloane.
"It's from a design strain that hasn't existed in over 150 years."
Cassien looked up. "That's impossible. No fashionline lasts that long without active weavers."
"Unless it was locked," Dax added, not looking up. "Suppressed. Buried in the Empire's archive system."
Ari nodded slowly.
"There's only one House powerful enough to suppress a fashionline that strong."
Everyone turned to Cassien.
He didn't deny it.
"House Vogue," he said.
---
Sloane sat in the quiet, holding the holographic projection of the thread signature in her hands. It pulsed gold and rose, fluttering like static fire.
Her mother had told her bedtime stories about fashionlines so powerful they could shift reality.
But they were just myths. Legends.
Or so she'd thought.
"What was it called?" she asked finally. "The line you say I pulled from?"
Ari hesitated. Then answered.
"House Era."
Sloane's heart clenched.
"I've never heard of it."
"Exactly," Ari said. "No one has. Which means someone wanted it erased."
Cassien stood, his expression unreadable. "There are stories… whispered in the Capitol Loom Court. About the Era Effect. A thread so strong it broke the laws of fashion physics. Designers began to warp time and memory. Some even claimed to stitch moments from alternate timelines into fabric."
"That's fantasy," Sloane said.
"It was," Ari muttered. "Until you wore it onstage."
---
Dax leaned against a loom cabinet, arms crossed.
"You've become dangerous, Sloane. Do you realize that?"
She met his gaze.
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"Power never asks permission," he said. "It just shows up. Like an outfit you never ordered but suddenly fits you too perfectly."
Cassien stepped between them. "She didn't activate the signature alone. We all stood with her."
Dax smirked. "Protective, huh?"
Cassien didn't flinch.
But Sloane saw it. The subtle change in his eyes. The tightening jaw. He knew something about House Era.
Something he wasn't saying.
She filed the thought away like a loose pin near skin — close enough to pierce later.
---
That night, as the city slowly returned to order, Sloane stood on the roof of the atelier.
The stars above shimmered like scattered sequins. The wind curled around her cloak, now recalibrated to carry fragments of the Era design — a cloak that moved as if it remembered something.
Ari joined her, sipping synth-cocoa from a black-glass mug.
"You should rest," she said.
"I can't," Sloane replied. "It feels like something is pulling at me. Like threads I haven't found yet."
Ari glanced sideways.
"Is it about Cassien?"
Sloane blinked. "What?"
"You're doing that thing again. The eye thing. Like you're searching someone's stitches for hidden meaning."
Sloane looked away. "He's not telling me everything."
"Of course he's not. He's royalty. They never do. But he's loyal. That counts for something."
Sloane hesitated. "And Dax?"
Ari smirked. "That counts for trouble."
---
In the days that followed, whispers rippled through the fashion Houses.
The Vogue Obelisk had fallen. Venna was in hiding. And a new signature had been born — unaligned, unclaimed.
A threat.
Sloane began receiving anonymous invitations to high-tier galas and secret couture councils. Some asked for alliances. Others offered veiled warnings.
But one stood out.
A red-thread envelope, sealed in wax bearing a sigil she'd never seen — a double-helix needle threading an ouroboros.
"The Temple of Fabric," Dax said when she showed him.
"They're real?" she asked.
"Real. And ancient. They don't join the fashion war. They watch it. Judge it. And sometimes… they choose champions."
Sloane exhaled. "So now I'm in a tournament?"
"Not quite." Dax's voice darkened. "They're testing to see if your power is too strong. If you threaten balance, they'll come for you."
"And if I don't show up?" she asked.
"They'll assume you're weak."
---
That night, Sloane and Cassien stood in the dressing chamber of Myrrh's ceremonial vault.
A new gown awaited her — one stitched from living threads, calibrated to bond with her newly awakened fashionline.
"I don't know what I'm walking into," she said.
"You never do," Cassien replied, offering a hand. "But you never walk in alone."
She stared at his hand.
Ari was right. There was something steady about him. Solid.
But her heart?
It beat fastest when she looked at Dax.
Chaos.
Unfinished.
Unforgiven.
Sloane took Cassien's hand.
For now.