Gianna Cavendish had three months until her first show, and no fabric to put on the runway. She stood in the parlor of her London townhouse with a stack of swatches on the table, each one a variation on something a rival could copy by the end of the season. Silk from Como. Wool from Yorkshire. A jacquard she had loved on Monday and hated by Wednesday. The Cavendish name paid for the building, the staff, and the press list. It could not pay for a textile that did not exist. Critics would call her label derivative on sight, and her twin brother Herman would enjoy every word of it. She pulled the gold thunderbolt at her throat and turned it between her fingers. Then she called Hephaestus. He answered on the second ring and told her to come. By evening she was standing inside his forge, a bronze and marble hall that smelled of hot metal and cedar. He had cleared a corner for her: a worktable, a stool, cold water in a copper basin, and racks along the wall for spindles and dye. "Yours," he said. "For as long as you need it." She thanked him and did not mention the last time they had argued. He did not either. He set a hammer down and left her to it. She worked alone for two days and produced nothing she could use. The heat warped her yarn. Her drafts came out flat. On the third morning Athena walked in without knocking, still in her helm, and looked at the mess on the table. "You are trying to weave cloth like a mortal in a god's furnace," she said. "Start over." She pulled off her gauntlets and sat down across from Gianna. They talked until the coals burned low. Athena drew a pattern Gianna had never seen: a weave that locked its own threads, so any thief who unpicked one row would collapse the rest. Hephaestus built the loom to Athena's diagram in a single night. It stood on carved wooden posts with brass fittings and a beam etched with small thunderbolts he added without asking. Athena strung the warp. Gianna worked the treadles. The first sample came off the frame at dawn — a plain undyed square of wool, fringed and uneven, the test pattern running through it like a signature only the loom could write. Gianna held it up to the light. She could see the lock in the weave. She could not see how anyone else would copy it. She folded the swatch into her coat and stepped out of the forge. The fabric existed now. That was the easy part finished. Somewhere in London a buyer was already asking who her mill was, and she would have to answer before the question turned into a rumor. She started back toward the city with the sample against her ribs and a new problem waiting at the other end of the trip.