The night did not sleep.
It hovered.
Elira knew this because the shadows inside the atelier moved even when no wind passed through the cracked windows. The candles trembled, their flames bending as if something unseen exhaled among them. She stood alone at the cutting table, her hands hovering inches above the royal fabric, afraid to touch it again.
The cloth pulsed.
Not visibly—not like a heartbeat—but with a presence. A wrongness. As though it remembered being alive.
Chapter Three had ended with the truth: the curse was not placed on the seamstresses.
It was woven through them.
Now, in the silence of the royal workroom, Elira finally understood what the other four had felt before disappearing—before becoming whispers in silk and screams in seams.
"You breathe," she whispered.
The cloth answered.
A shiver ran across its surface, subtle as a sigh.
Elira staggered back, knocking over a spool of gold thread. It rolled across the floor, spinning wildly before stopping at her feet, the end of the thread curling toward her like a finger.
"No," she said sharply. "Not me."
The loom creaked behind her.
She turned.
The loom—unused for years, its wood darkened by age—was moving. The pedals dipped on their own. The shuttle slid once, twice, weaving nothing but air.
Then a voice spoke.
Not aloud.
Inside her skull.
Finish what we began.
Elira clutched her head and fell to her knees. The voice was layered—five tones overlapping, familiar yet distant. She recognized them instantly.
Maelin.Rosa.Thyra.Old Senna.And Luthien—the first.
The cursed five.
"No," Elira gasped. "You're gone. You're trapped."
We are sewn in, the voices replied. Bound to patterns we never questioned.
Elira's eyes burned. "I will not join you."
Silence.
Then—laughter. Soft. Bitter.
You already have.
The cloth on the table lifted at the edges, rising like a chest filling with breath. Symbols shimmered across its surface—ancient runes Elira had never been taught but somehow understood. They were binding marks, layered and crossed in deliberate precision.
That was when it struck her.
The pattern.
The curse did not lie in the spell words alone.
It lay in the way the cloth was cut.
The other seamstresses had followed the royal pattern without deviation, honoring tradition, symmetry, obedience. Each stitch reinforced the prison. Each straight line sealed their fate.
Elira rose slowly.
Her hands stopped shaking.
"They crossed us," she murmured. "But crossings can be undone."
She grabbed charcoal and rushed to the pattern table, sketching furiously. Instead of mirrored lines, she drew interruptions. Breaks. Intersections that disrupted the flow.
If the curse was harmony—
She would introduce discord.
The atelier door slammed open.
Captain Varrek stood in the doorway, sword half-drawn, eyes wide with alarm.
"Elira," he said. "The Queen demands the garment by dawn. The court is—"
"Get out," Elira snapped.
He froze. "What?"
"This room is not safe. If you stay, the cloth will learn your name."
Behind him, the shadows stretched.
One of them whispered.
Varrek's face drained of color. He backed away without another word, slamming the door behind him.
Elira locked it.
Then she returned to the cloth.
She picked up her shears.
For the first time since the curse began, the fabric trembled in fear.
"You fed on obedience," Elira said quietly. "On beauty without question. On perfection."
She sliced.
Not cleanly.
Across the grain.
The scream that followed shattered every candle in the room.
The cloth bled light.
Voices wailed—angry now, panicked.
Stop! You'll unravel us!
"That," Elira said, tears streaming down her face as she cut again, "is exactly the point."
She crossed the pattern.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Each cut broke a line the others had never dared touch.
The loom shrieked.
The atelier walls cracked.
And for the first time in generations, the curse began to come undone.
Far beneath the palace, something ancient stirred—furious, wounded, awake.
And Elira knew:
Breaking the curse would not be quiet.
It would be a war.