The Unadorned Chamber

The doorway was too small for a palace.

That was what unsettled Teren most.

The maps had promised grandeur—sweeping courtyards, vaulted halls, monuments swallowed by vines. The ruins along the coast had delivered exactly that: toppled columns, amphitheaters collapsed into green bowls, mosaics cracked by roots.

But this door was set into a low hill at the island’s center, barely tall enough for a man to stoop through. No ornamentation. No sigil of conquest. Just a smooth arch of pale stone, unmarred by time.

The air beyond it was cool and dry.

“Storage, perhaps,” said Maelin, brushing dust from her sleeves. “A vault.”

Teren ran his fingers along the interior wall. The stone felt wrong—softly warm, like sunlit skin. Faint lines traced across it, not carved but grown, looping in patient spirals.

They followed a narrow corridor that sloped gently downward.

There were no torches. No braziers. Yet the chamber ahead glowed.

It was circular and shallow, no larger than a modest cottage. In its center stood a basin carved from the same pale stone. Above it hovered a thin veil of light, rippling like water disturbed by breath.

Teren stepped closer.

The light shifted.

Not randomly. Not like flame.

It responded.

He lifted a hand without thinking, sketching the simplest cantrip he knew—an academic trick, barely worth ink in a primer. A whisper of force to stir dust.

The veil trembled.

The dust at his feet rose, not in the pattern he intended, but in something… better. The particles wove themselves into a shape that held for a heartbeat: a bird, wings outstretched, formed from nothing but air and intent.

Then it dissolved.

Maelin stared. “You didn’t cast that.”

“I know.”

He tried again—this time only imagining warmth.

The light thinned, then deepened in color. The chamber’s chill softened. The stone beneath their boots bloomed faintly gold, like late afternoon caught indoors.

No incantation. No sigil.

Only thought.

Teren felt it then—the difference between what he had been taught and what this place remembered.

Magic, as he knew it, was careful. Indexed. Bound in diagrams and footnotes. Each gesture measured, each word precise.

Here, there were no words.

He let his mind wander—not to a spell, but to a memory. His mother’s garden at the edge of the capital. The stubborn little figs that refused to fruit until the second year. The way she would hum while watering them, as though coaxing a child.

The basin brightened.

From its smooth interior rose a slender shoot of green. It unfurled two leaves, then a third, impossibly quick. A fig bud formed, swelled, ripened in moments.

Maelin laughed—a small, astonished sound.

The fruit fell from the stem and struck the stone with a soft thud. It was warm in Teren’s hand.

The plant faded back into light.

Silence returned.

“They didn’t command it,” Maelin whispered.

“No.”

He looked around the chamber—the unadorned walls, the humble doorway. No throne. No altar.

A workshop.

Not of tools, but of imagination.

The art they had pieced together from scattered scrolls—fragmented, rigid—was only a shadow. Here, magic was not summoned like a servant. It was invited, shaped as easily as clay between thoughtful fingers.

Teren felt suddenly embarrassed by the heavy satchel of copied runes at his hip.

“They must have built empires with this,” Maelin said.

“Perhaps,” he replied.

He studied the basin again.

Or perhaps this was why there was no empire left.