The silence in the east gallery had a different texture. It was older, dustier, a quiet that spoke of disuse rather than watchful tension. This was a part of the mansion Ella had consciously avoided, a wing where the portraits were darker, the subjects' eyes seeming to hold not observation, but a forgotten grief. It felt like a lung the great house no longer breathed with.
She came here for the solitude, for the respite from the feeling of being perpetually measured. Her footsteps, soft on the worn runner, were the only sound. Her mind replayed the cold burn of silver, the invasive hum of the Council's relays. She needed space where she wasn't a data point or a student. Where she could just be, even if that being was confused and afraid.
She turned a corner into a long, narrow hall lined with closed doors and stopped.
He was there.
Not like Aaron, who occupied space like a glacier—immense, inevitable, cold. This presence was more like a carefully placed statue, so still he seemed part of the architecture. A young man, perhaps in his late twenties in mortal years, seated on a marble bench beneath a stained-glass window depicting a forgotten saint's martyrdom. The fading evening light, filtered through crimson and cobalt glass, fell across him in fragmented hues.
He was dressed simply, dark trousers and a grey tunic, his hair the colour of old bronze, tied neatly back. His hands rested palms-up on his knees, a posture of meditation or profound patience. He wasn't sleeping. His eyes were open, gazing at the opposite wall with a focus so absolute it was unsettling.
Ella's first instinct was to retreat, to melt back into the shadows from which she'd come. This was a private moment, an intrusion. But as she shifted her weight, the floorboard gave the softest sigh.
His head turned. Not with a jerk, but with a smooth, unhurried pivot. His eyes met hers. They were a clear, quiet grey, like morning fog over a still lake. There was no surprise in them. No alarm. Only a deep, placid recognition, as if her appearance was not an interruption, but the arrival of an expected guest.
"The east wing is seldom walked," he said. His voice was mellifluous, softer than Aaron's cutting clarity, warmer than Silas's velvet threat. It was simply… present. "The air here is not tuned for training. It remembers other things."
Ella stood frozen, caught between politeness and primal caution. "I… didn't mean to disturb you."
"You haven't." He gestured with a slight nod to the space beside him on the bench. It wasn't an invitation, precisely. More an acknowledgment that the space existed. "Solitude is a shared commodity in this house. We merely take our portions in different rooms."
There was an ease to him, an unflappable calm that was utterly foreign to her experience of the mansion. He carried no scent of predation, no crackle of dormant power, no frost of ancient authority. He felt… neutral. And in a world of extreme polarities, neutrality was the most suspicious state of all.
"I haven't seen you before," she said, not moving closer.
A faint smile touched his lips, there and gone like a ripple. "I am not often in the seen places. My duties are of a quieter nature."
"Duties?" The word slipped out, laden with her own reality of lessons and performances.
"I tend the archives. The physical ones. The books and scrolls that even the Council's relays cannot digest. Dust and vellum and fading ink." He looked back at the wall, his profile serene. "I am Thomas. A scribe, of sorts. A keeper of quiet histories."
A scribe. The title disarmed her slightly. It explained the calm, the dust in the air around him, the lack of sharp edges. But it didn't explain why he was here, in this forgotten wing, or why his presence felt so deliberately placed.
"You know who I am," she stated, feeling it was true.
"I know what you are becoming," Thomas corrected gently, his gaze returning to her. There was no judgment in it, only a gentle, profound curiosity. "The house speaks of little else, if one knows how to listen to the stones. They hum with the residue of your flame. The portraits in the main gallery whisper your name to their listeners. You are the current."
She took a tentative step forward. "And what do the archives say about currents?"
"That they are powerful. That they reshape the banks they flow through. And that they often do not see the rocks beneath the surface until they are dashed upon them." He shifted slightly, a whisper of cloth against stone. "Aaron teaches you the fire. A necessary, brutal education. He is forging a weapon. But a weapon is only as useful as the hand that knows when not to strike."
The words resonated with a truth that vibrated against the recent lesson of silver. Knowing when not to strike.
"And you?" she asked, her guard still up, but her curiosity a live wire now. "What would you teach?"
"I would not presume to teach." He shook his head, a slow, deliberate motion. "I might… provide context. The fire is a moment in a story. I know the story that came before. The stories of other suns, other flames. How they burned, how they warmed, how they were… extinguished." His grey eyes held hers. "Power without history is a flame in a vacuum. It burns bright but illuminates nothing but its own consumption."
Ella was silent, weighing him. He wasn't offering power. He wasn't offering protection or alliance. He was offering knowledge. The one currency Aaron doled out sparingly, always filtered through his own objectives.
"Why?" The single word held all her suspicion.
Thomas was quiet for a long moment, his gaze drifting to the martyred saint in the window. "Because archives are meant to be read. Because stories are meant to be heard. And because the girl who learns why the last sun with eyes like hers chose to drown herself in the northern sea, rather than be Claimed by the Court of Whispers, is a girl who might make different choices. Better ones. Or at least… informed ones."
A chill that had nothing to do with temperature crept over Ella's skin. He spoke of a specific death. A historical precedent. He wasn't dealing in theories, but in tragic, concrete facts.
"You think I'm heading for a similar choice?"
"I think," he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper that seemed to blend with the dust motes dancing in the colored light, "that you are being given a single, narrow path. The path of the flame. It is a true path. A powerful one. But it is not the only path that has ever been walked. My only desire is that you know the map of the entire forest, not just the trail your guide is cutting."
He stood then, moving with a fluid, silent grace that belied his scribe's title. He was taller than he'd seemed seated, but still without imposing physicality. "I am in the lower archives, three levels below the main library. The door is oak, bound in iron, unmarked. It is never locked." He gave her that faint, ripple-like smile again. "The dust there is older. It does not report to anyone."
And with that, he inclined his head—a gesture of respect, not subservience—and walked past her, down the corridor. His footsteps made no sound. He turned a corner and was gone, as if absorbed by the silence of the east wing.
Ella stood alone in the kaleidoscope light of the saint's window, her heart pounding a slow, heavy rhythm. The encounter had lasted minutes, but it had shifted the axis of her world.
Aaron was her master, her warden, her forge-master.
The Council were her auditors, her judges.
Silas was a predator, a danger.
Thomas… Thomas was a mystery. A keeper of stories. A man in the shadows offering not a weapon, but a lens. A way to see the trap from the outside.
Her curiosity, that restless flame, burned brighter than ever. But it was tempered now by a new, sharp caution. This felt like a test, but one set by an unknown examiner. Was he an ally? A provocateur? A agent of the Council playing a deeper game? Or simply, as he claimed, a scribe who believed in the power of a forgotten story?
She looked down the empty corridor where he'd vanished. The unmarked oak door. Three levels down.
It was a risk. It was deviation from the disciplined path Aaron was carving for her. It was a step into the unknown archives of her own fate.
A slow, determined breath filled her lungs. The flame in her chest flickered, not with the urge to burn, but with the need to see.
She had learned to control fire.
She had learned the touch of silver.
She had learned she was constantly watched.
Now, it seemed, she had an invitation to learn everything they weren't teaching her.