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She didn’t mean to start drawing again.
It began the way old wounds ache before rain—subtle, inconvenient, vaguely embarrassing… A pencil left too close to her coffee mug. A fabric swatch used as a coaster. Then, hours later, a curl of charcoal smeared across her thumb, a napkin defiled with looping lines, spirals, half-remembered sleeves and winged collars.
Rumi stared at it like it had been carved by someone else.
The sketch wasn’t good. It was frantic. Lines crossed over each other like nerves misfiring—clumsy, unsure, desperate to remember what they used to love.
Used to. That was the shame of it.
There had been a time when her fingers spoke in graphite. In mud scraped over stone, or the soft bark of temple trees. A language of instinct. A way to pin the world down before it unraveled.
But Celine had scrubbed that part clean. Not cruelly. Not even knowingly. With that tight-lipped kindness mothers sharpen like razors. A performance is not the place for mess, she’d said. Draw with your body instead, darling. And so Rumi did. She danced until her knees bruised. Sang until her throat blistered. And her hands… they learned not to want.
Until now.
The thread snipped itself back into her palm.
Around Rumi was a crime scene of craft supplies.
Tulle the color of old bruises, ribbon that shimmered like a rainbow caught in a fuel spill, pins shaped as if were forged by angry fairies…
Thread. So much thread. Enough to lasso a demon, or maybe just emotionally bind one to an outfit.
And in the middle of this nest of nonsense: the dress.
No, not the dress. Three. She hadn’t meant to make three. But sleep was for people with impulse control.
Mira’s was a murder of a dress, black and sharp and very do-not-touch-unless-you-want-to-bleed.
Zoey’s was a frenzy dipped in glitter, persian blue and moonstone with shimmer in weirdly beautiful places. It had no symmetry, but it had vibe.
And hers, Rumi’s, was silver net and wishful thinking. It didn’t quite match what lived in her head, but it’s okay! Like light, like music, like the part of her that always wanted to be the weird kid on stage and not just the girl taping her own hems in the dressing room.
Although she wasn’t sure what they’d say. Maybe laugh. Maybe cry. Maybe just blink at her and go, “Uh, we already have stylists, dummy.”
But this was for them.
And a little, perhaps, for the girl who used to draw suns with too many rays.
Rumi heard the door open, plus the inhale of surprise behind her.
Shoot.
Zoey blinked.
Mira blinked harder.
But neither said anything.
Miraculously, they just walked in like it was totally normal to find Rumi sitting statue-straight in the middle of a mysteriously clean room that still smelled faintly of thread and secrets.
Sniff… sniff…
Nevermind.
They didn’t bring it up again that night. Just made tea, quietly passed her the sugar without asking, and stayed up in the common room listening to the hum of city demons outside the warded windows.
But the next day, something shifted.
It started with Mira knocking gently on the studio door, cradling a sketchpad in one arm. “You mind if I—uh. Sit in? Just for a bit?”
Rumi gaped. She wanted to say something but Mira wasn’t the type to ask twice. Her whole aura screamed “former arsonist turned righteous blade” and Rumi had once seen her break a demon’s jaw with a clipboard. But here she was, chewing the end of her pencil like a high schooler about to crash art class.
“I guess…” Rumi said, surprised at the softness in her own voice. She slid the door shut.
Mira sat on the floor without waiting for a chair. She pulled her knees up, sketchpad balanced on her thighs. “I used to draw outfits for my Sims,” she muttered. “So don’t judge if this turns out cursed, ‘kay?”
An hour later, Zoey wandered in, balancing a bowl of cereal with one hand and her tablet with the other. “Excusez-moi, but if we’re making this a club, I want in!”
“You don’t even sew,” Mira said, glancing up.
“No, but I can draw a mean boot,” Zoey replied, already plopping down beside them. She flicked her stylus once and pulled up a screen filled with shoes. Chunky platforms, thigh-highs, demon-slaying stilettos. “Combat couture.”
That made Rumi grin. She hadn’t meant to. It just slipped out.
Suddenly they were all sprawled across the floor like kids at a sleepover, sketching exaggerated silhouettes and arguing about fabric textures. Mira insisted on too many belts. Zoey demanded zippers that did absolutely nothing.
And Rumi let herself suggest color palettes. She picked out thread from her old kits. She handed Mira her favorite tailor’s chalk and guided Zoey’s fingers through simple pleats. She didn’t realize her shoulders had dropped, that her voice had stopped shaking, until Mira tilted her head and said:
“You look lighter.”
“Yeah,” Zoey looked up from her tablet, stylus tapping a steady rhythm against her palm. “Like you’re not holding your breath anymore.”
There were no words for Rumi that wouldn’t sound brittle underfoot.
Instead, she turned back to the dress they had cobbled together from scraps and laughter and far too many pins—a strange, unbalanced thing with more heart than fashionable harmony.
A prototype, yes. But also, perhaps, a beginning.
And as the others bent back into their sketches murmuring about silhouettes and sequins, Rumi reached for her own page with the quiet surety of someone waking from a long dream.
She sketched slowly at first, coaxing the shape of the dress back onto the paper—but this time, her pencil moved with less fear. And a little later, without thinking, she drew a series of fine, soaring lines that split across the bodice and sleeves.
They were not neat, to be honest.
They had not been in the original design.
At the last minute, she’d threaded through her own dress a lattice of violet. Thin, trembling lines that forked across the sheets in branching arcs. Like nerves, or lightning, or the secret language her skin still whispered beneath makeup and stage lights. It hadn’t been in the original sketch. It had arrived by a gut reaction perhaps. And maybe it was foolish, maybe Celine would scoff if she were here, but it felt true. To wear the shape of her own strangeness. It wasn’t rebellion, exactly. And Rumi, pencil still clutched in sore fingers, swayed it there with quiet reverence—so when she moved under the lights, she would shimmer in the pattern of her own becoming.
To echo what was once hidden, and make it gleam.
She barely noticed Mira and Zoey leaning in to look, until Zoey let out a low gasp, the kind one gives when lightning leaps across a dark field and for a moment, everything is remade in silver.
“You drew this?!” Zoey whispered, eyes wide.
Mira stared, then broke into a crooked smile. “Damn, it’s electric.”
There was a silence—brief, reverent—before the two of them scrambled for their own sketchpads with the energy of a match struck against stone.
“I’m doing something with sparks!” Zoey cheered, already dragging lines that spiraled and flickered like bursts from a broken fuse.
“Mine’s gonna have a bolt cut across the chest,” Mira added, tongue between her teeth. “Sharp enough to make the demons flinch.”
Zoey gave a dramatic squeal, holding her design up like a prized artifact. “A-ha! But what if we actually pitch these next time? Who knows, maybe the costume team’ll fall in love with our genius!”
Rumi snorted. “Please. Bobby’s more likely to give us a full-blown lecture on ‘focus and discipline’ for doodling during rehearsal.”
“Joke’s on him. We’re on hiatus, baby. Long hiatus.” Mira simply grinned.
Then Rumi sat among them, pencil still warm in her fingers, and watched as something beautiful caught fervor across the room. She did not need to explain it. They had seen it.
They had understood the assignment.
As Huntrix, as one.