The Mage's Chamber

The room was wrong. Not wrong in the way my grades were wrong, or wrong in the way my anvil toss was wrong — those were reassuringly familiar kinds of wrong. This room was wrong in a way that made the hairs on my neck stand up and my brain stutter like a cart with a broken wheel.

The ceilings were too high.

That was the first thing. Dwarves build low — it's practical, it's efficient, and it means we don't have to look at all that uncomfortable empty space above our heads. But this chamber soared. The ceiling arched upward in a graceful vault that peaked at least four times my height, maybe five. The stonework was smooth and pale, carved in flowing lines rather than the sharp geometric patterns of dwarven architecture. There were no runes on the walls. Instead, there were paintings — faded murals in colors that dwarves didn't use, depicting scenes I didn't recognize. Tall figures in robes. Stars arranged in patterns. A tree with silver leaves.

Human work. This was human work.

I'd read about this. Centuries ago, before the Sundering Compact, humans had been allowed to live and work within the great dwarven fortresses. Mages, mostly — the kind of humans who could make themselves useful underground, lighting tunnels and reinforcing walls with spells that the dwarves grudgingly admitted were "not entirely useless." They'd had their own quarters, their own workshops, their own chambers deep in the fortress where they practiced their arts.

Then the Compact happened, and the humans left, and the dwarves sealed up their rooms and pretended they'd never been there. Because that's what dwarves do with things that make them uncomfortable — we put a wall in front of them and change the subject.

But this room had been forgotten rather than sealed. The garbage chute I'd fallen through had punched right into the ceiling — or rather, my arrival had finished a job that centuries of neglect had started. The stone above was crumbling, and a ragged hole now marked my entrance, surrounded by debris.

I stood up. Glass crunched under my boots. The table I'd landed on had been a workbench of some kind — I could see the remains of glass vessels, copper instruments, and what might have been a mortar and pestle, now thoroughly ground into the floor by my backside.

"Sorry," I said to the empty room. Polite. Even to abandoned furniture.

The chamber was large — easily the size of the Underpeak library, which I realize is not an impressive comparison to most people, but to me it was enormous. Shelves lined the walls, still holding books and scrolls in various states of decay. A human-sized desk sat in the corner, covered in yellowed papers. Crystals in iron brackets provided a faint, stubborn glow — magical light sources that had somehow persisted for centuries, like a candle that refused to accept it was supposed to go out.

I picked up a book from the nearest shelf. The binding crumbled at the edges, but the pages inside were intact — preserved by some enchantment, probably. The text was in Old Common, the human trade language. I could read it. Slowly, and with the kind of pronunciation that would make a human scholar weep, but I could read it.

A Treatise on the Practical Application of Aetherial Conduits, it said. Below that, in smaller script: Being a Guide to the Construction and Operation of Trans-Spatial Bridges, Commonly Called Portals.

Portals. The book was about portals.

I should have put it down. I should have climbed back up the chute — or tried to, at least — found Warden Grit, reported the chamber, and gone back to mopping. That is what a sensible dwarf would have done. A dwarf who respected rules. A dwarf who had learned his lesson about curiosity and physics books and doing things just because they seemed interesting.

I opened the book to chapter one.

I read for — I don't know how long. Time does that when I read. It folds up and puts itself away, like a tablecloth after dinner, and when I look up again hours have passed and I've missed at least two meals.

The book was fascinating. The mage who'd written it — a woman named Aldara, based on the notes in the margins — had developed a method for creating stable portals between two fixed points. The theory was dense, full of terms I only half understood (aetherial resonance, spatial membrane tension, the Helvray Constant), but the practical sections were clear enough. You needed a stone arch of specific proportions, carved with specific runes, powered by a specific crystal. The arch served as the doorway. The runes defined the destination. The crystal provided the energy.

I looked up from the book.

In the center of the chamber, directly across from me, stood a stone arch.

It was taller than any doorway I'd seen — built for humans, not dwarves. Its surface was carved with runes that spiraled inward toward the apex, not in dwarven angular script but in the flowing curves of human magical notation. At the base of each pillar sat an iron bracket. One bracket was empty. The other held a crystal — pale blue, roughly the size of my fist, still faintly glowing after all these centuries.

The second crystal, I realized, was on the floor near my boot. It must have been knocked from its bracket when I'd crashed through the ceiling. I picked it up. It was warm. Not unpleasantly so — warm the way a stone feels after sitting in the sun, except there was no sun down here and hadn't been for several hundred years.

I looked at the crystal. I looked at the empty bracket. I looked at the arch. I looked back at the book, open in my other hand to a diagram labeled Figure 7: Activation Sequence.

"Don't," said the sensible part of my brain.

"But what if," said every other part.

I placed the crystal in the bracket.

The arch lit up.

Not slowly, not gradually — it ignited, all at once, like someone had set fire to the air itself. The runes blazed with pale blue light. The air inside the arch shimmered, rippled, and then tore open with a sound like a sheet of parchment being ripped in half by a giant. Through the opening I saw — not the wall behind the arch, but somewhere else entirely. Green. Bright. Impossibly bright. Sunlight and sky and colors I had no names for.

A wind blasted through the portal, warm and sweet and utterly alien, carrying the smell of grass and earth and something floral. It hit me square in the face. My hair blew back. My mop clattered to the floor.

I should have stepped away.

Instead, I stepped forward. One step. Just to see. Just to peek through the impossible doorway at the impossible world on the other side.

The portal, it turned out, was not interested in letting me peek.

It pulled. A gentle, insistent tug, like a current in a river. My boots slid on the dusty floor. I grabbed for the arch's pillar, missed, grabbed the mop instead — which helped not at all — and then I was through, tumbling forward into light and wind and a sky so blue it hurt to look at.

The portal snapped shut behind me.

I lay face-down in grass. Real grass. The kind that grows under sunlight, not the pale cave moss I'd been mopping with for the past twelve hours. It was green. Overwhelmingly, aggressively, almost rudely green.

I lifted my head.

I was on a hillside. Below me, a forest stretched to the horizon. Above me, the sky — the actual sky, which I had seen exactly twice in my life and never from this close — blazed with late afternoon sun. Birds sang. A breeze rustled through the trees. Everything was warm and bright and open and completely, terrifyingly outside.

I was holding my mop.

I had no idea where I was.

And something in the forest below was grunting.