The summons from Thomas was not a note, nor a spoken word relayed through a servant. It was a resonance.
Ella felt it while attempting to meditate in her room three days after the wing manifestation. The exercises Aaron had given her—focusing the bond's energy flow, preventing spontaneous corporealization—were grueling mental work. She sat cross-legged on the cold floor, sweat beading at her temples as she visualized the glowing wing-patterns on her back as closed circuits, sealed and dormant.
Then, a vibration. Not through the air, but through the bond.
It was a specific, subtle frequency, a harmonic unlike the mansion's steady pulse or the Council's watchful hum. It felt like the quiet, insistent pull of a specific book on a shelf, a single clear note in a cacophony of noise. It originated from deep below, in the sub-levels she had only glimpsed on maps. The message was wordless but clear: Come. Now. Quietly.
Curiosity warred with caution. Thomas had been a neutral, enigmatic figure, his blue-white presence in the mansion's web a constant but distant point of curiosity. This direct call was unprecedented. Gathering her cloak, she slipped from her room, not toward the main stairs, but to a disused servants' passage she had sensed through her bond—a narrow, spiraling stone throat that plunged into the bedrock.
The air grew colder and heavier with each descending turn. The mansion's usual golden energy veins here were faint, overlaid with older, darker currents of silver and iron-grey. This was a forgotten circulatory system. After what felt like an age, the passage ended at a heavy, unmarked door of age-blackened oak. It was slightly ajar.
Pushing it open, Ella stepped into a chamber that defied the concept of a library. It was a geomantic archive.
The room was circular, its domed ceiling lost in shadow. No conventional shelves lined the walls; instead, living stone had formed alcoves, nodules, and crystalline outcrops, each cradling a book, a scroll, or a strange, non-geometric artifact. The air thrummed with a low, basso profundo vibration—the sound of the earth's own memory. Light came from drifting, self-contained globes of foxfire that cast a cool, blue-white luminescence.
Thomas stood at the center, beside a stone lectern that grew directly from the floor. He was examining a large, open folio, his fingers—stained with what looked like powdered lapis lazuli and iron oxide—resting lightly on the page. He did not look up as she entered.
"You felt the resonance," he stated. His voice was softer here, absorbed by the stone. "Good. The bond is integrating faster than projected."
"You projected this?" Ella asked, stepping closer, her eyes wide at the archive. The bond within her hummed in recognition, as if greeting an old friend.
"I calibrated a frequency to match your new signature. A test, of sorts." He finally looked at her, his grey eyes reflecting the foxfire. "And you passed. Your wings have changed your resonance, Ella. It is… louder. More complex. It draws attention from more than just the Council."
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature crept down her spine. "What kind of attention?"
Instead of answering directly, he gestured to the folio. "What do you see?"
She approached. The page was not parchment, but something like petrified hide. On it was a meticulously drawn circular diagram. At its center was a rose, rendered in exquisite detail, but utterly black, as if drawn with void itself. Its petals were full, almost overblown, but instead of thorns on the stem, the thorns curved inward, forming a protective, imprisoning cage around the bloom's heart. Delicate silver lines, like meridian pathways or energy circuits, traced from the thorns into the rose's core.
It was beautiful. It was horrifying.
"It's a binding diagram," Ella whispered, her training with Aaron allowing her to recognize the principles. "But it's… inverted. The restraint is internal, not external."
"Precisely," Thomas said, a note of approval in his voice. "This is one of the only surviving visual representations of the Covenant of the Black Rose."
The name landed in the silent room like a stone in a still pond. Ella's own inner flame, the borrowed sun at her core, flickered in response—not in fear, but in a strange, resonant recognition, like hearing one's own name in an unfamiliar language.
"A covenant? Like the Butterfly Covenant?"
"Older. Deeper. Foundational." Thomas turned a page, revealing text in a flowing, angular script that hurt Ella's eyes to look at directly. "The histories the Council teaches are sanitized. They speak of the Great Taming, of protocols and bindings imposed to control dangerous talents. That is the victor's tale."
He traced a silver line on the diagram. "The truth is messier. Before councils and wards, there were catastrophes. Sun-bearers who incinerated their bloodlines. Frost-weavers who froze continents. Their power was absolute, but their humanity… fragile. The Black Rose was not an imposed shackle. It was a path discovered by a few. A way to bind one's own power from the inside with a lattice of conscious will. The thorns are not to keep others out; they are to keep the power in. To give it form, limit, and meaning."
Ella stared at the inward-curving thorns. "A self-imposed restraint."
"The ultimate restraint," Thomas corrected. "One that requires perfect understanding of one's own destructive potential. It is a covenant of brutal, unwavering responsibility."
"Why is it called a rose?" she asked, captivated and repelled in equal measure.
"Because it is supposed to bloom," he said simply. "The restraint is not the end. It is the structure that allows something beautiful and controlled to grow from chaos. Or so the theory goes."
"Theory?"
Thomas's expression grew shadowed. "Complete records of a successful Black Rose covenant are… absent. The diagrams, the principles survive. Evidence of its attempted use appears in fragments—in the logs of 'contained' disasters, in the genealogies of lines that suddenly went dormant, not extinct. It is the ghost in the machine of our history."
He closed the folio gently. "The Council does not speak of it because it represents a terrifying idea: that the ultimate control does not come from their laws, but from within the individual. It undermines their entire authority. And Aaron…"
Ella's head snapped up. "What about Aaron?"
Thomas met her gaze. "His methods—the brutal conditioning, the breaking down to rebuild with perfect control—they are a grotesque external mimicry of the Black Rose principle. He tries to forge the thorns through pain and discipline, to cage the sun he fears in you. He does not trust the flower to grow its own restraints."
The pieces clicked into place with devastating clarity. Aaron's fear, his relentless control, his focus on precision over expression—it was all a reaction to this lost, internal ideal.
"You think the Butterfly Covenant is related to this," Ella stated, feeling the truth of it in her bonded threads.
"I know it is," Thomas said. "The Butterfly Covenant is about potential, transformation, becoming. The Black Rose is about the form that potential must take to be sustainable. They are two sides of the same coin. I believe the mansion's oldest memory, the spark that birthed covenants, contains the seed of the Black Rose. And your bond… your wings… they are stirring that ancient memory."
The chamber seemed to grow darker, the foxfire dimming. A new vibration began, not from Thomas, but from the stone itself. A slow, deep, grinding shift, like tectonic plates moving in sleep.
Ella felt it through her soles, a tremor that traveled up her spine and made the nascent wing-scars on her back tingle. The bond flared, and for a second, her vision doubled. She saw the stone walls of the archive, and overlaid upon them, a vast, ghostly network of silvery roots, pulsing with a slow, dormant light. They coiled around the chamber, through the books, into the earth below.
"What is that?" she breathed.
"The roots of the idea," Thomas whispered, his face pale in the dim light. "The conceptual lattice of the Black Rose covenant itself. It is not a metaphor, Ella. It is a psychic architecture woven into this place's foundation. And it is… responding to you."
The silver root-network pulsed once, a wave of light that was cold and clear. In that pulse, Ella felt a presence. Vast. Patient. Asleep, but dreaming. It was not the mansion's conscious will. It was something older, a framework upon which the mansion's will had been built.
A sudden, sharp chime echoed down from above, piercing the deep silence. It was the brass bell in the Council antechamber, ringing once in a specific, urgent pattern.
Summons. Immediate.
The ghostly root-network faded instantly, as if withdrawing.
Thomas's hand closed over the folio. "They feel the disturbance. The resonance from your bond interacting with this place… it created a ripple."
Ella's heart hammered against her ribs. "What do I do?"
"Go. Say nothing of this. What you felt here, what you saw, is older than their authority. It is not theirs to give or deny." His voice was urgent. "But Ella, understand this: the Black Rose is not a power to claim. It is a choice to make. A daily, perpetual choice to be your own warden. The covenant, if it ever truly awakens, does not grant freedom. It exchanges one cage for another of your own design."
She turned to leave, the image of the black rose with its inward thorns burning in her mind.
"Thomas," she said from the doorway. "If it's so dangerous, why show me?"
He looked at her, and for the first time, she saw a crack in his scholarly detachment, a glimpse of something like desperate hope. "Because the world has enough broken suns and imprisoned flames. It could use a rose that has chosen to bloom."
Ella fled up the spiral stairs, the Council's bell still echoing in her bones, but a new, deeper echo resonated beneath it—the slow, patient heartbeat of an ancient, thorned flower, waiting in the dark.
She had come seeking knowledge. She had found a mirror.
And in its dark, silver-veined glass, she saw not just what she could become, but the shape of the prison she might have to build for herself to survive it.