The chamber did not sleep.
It breathed.
Not with lungs, but with stone—temperature rising and falling in long, deliberate cycles that had nothing to do with light or time. The illumination embedded in the walls dimmed toward a bruised, reddish low-glow, then slowly returned, just bright enough to suggest edges without ever defining them. Distance felt uncertain here. Depth was implied rather than seen.
The sigils woven into the bedrock never revealed themselves outright. They pressed instead—behind the eyes, against the sternum—an awareness of pattern without symbol, structure without ornament.
Containment without spectacle.
Caution, Talzin had called it.
The ichor that had bound him at the ritual ground was gone, drawn back into the seams of the floor until only a faint green sheen remained, like residue left behind by something alive that had passed through and chosen not to finish the meal. But the restraint had not ended.
It had refined itself.
Tein stood precisely where they had placed him, boots resting on stone that warmed subtly beneath his weight. The warmth was not comfort. It was calibration. The chamber knew his mass, his balance, the way his center of gravity shifted when he inhaled.
Stillness was rewarded.
Movement was corrected.
Whenever his stance drifted beyond an invisible tolerance, the air tightened—not as a wall, not as pressure—but as ownership. The space claimed him back into alignment the way a hand corrected a tool set down improperly.
He had not wasted the first cycle testing it.
He had listened.
The coven's magick did not behave like a Jedi construct. It was not a barrier sustained by individual will or concentration. It was braided—many minds, many rituals, many repetitions agreeing on the same truth and embedding it into place.
Consensus as restraint.
No single thread to cut.
No single anchor to break.
Brute Force would only confirm the system's assumptions.
So Tein gave it nothing to confirm.
Hours passed. Perhaps more. Time thinned until it became texture rather than sequence. His breath slowed. The ache in his legs settled into something distant and manageable. He mapped the chamber the way he had mapped hostile structures on Shadow assignments—by how it reacted, not how it appeared.
Pressure gathered more quickly at ankle height than at the knees.
The stone beneath his left foot warmed a fraction more than beneath his right.
The sigils responded more strongly to sharpened intent than to motion itself.
Not flaws.
Seams.
The chamber did not punish movement.
It punished assertion.
Tein lowered his gaze. His posture softened—not slack, not defeated, but neutral enough to read as acceptance. To the magick, he was no longer a variable demanding correction.
Then he reached inward.
Not outward.
Not toward the chamber.
Not toward the Force as projection.
Toward himself.
He folded his presence the way he had learned to on extended Shadow operations—Force circulation tightened, emotional surface flattened, intent smoothed until it was indistinguishable from ambient background. The connection did not vanish.
It compressed.
For a Jedi, shrinking one's presence too far bordered on spiritual suffocation. The Order taught expansion, clarity, flow.
Shadow work taught disappearance.
Tein had learned both.
The Nightsisters' magick hesitated.
For the first time since confinement, the sigils did not immediately correct.
They searched.
The restraint did not weaken—but it lost definition, its braided certainty blurring as it attempted to bind something that was no longer asserting itself as there. The working was built to respond to will, to resistance, to intention.
For a heartbeat, Tein offered none.
Then—carefully, precisely—he expanded again.
Not outward.
Downward.
He let the Force flow from his core into the stone beneath his boots, not as pressure, not as command, but as resonance. He matched the frequency embedded in the chamber's bedrock, aligning himself with the sigils rather than opposing them.
The stone warmed.
Recognition stirred.
Not acceptance.
Acknowledgment.
The restraint reasserted itself instinctively, pressure threading upward through the air and stone—
—but it did so after the chamber had already classified him as part of its pattern.
The magick bound him.
And found nothing to bind.
Tein opened his eyes.
He lifted one foot.
The restraint slid aside, intact but irrelevant—like a net cast into water where the fish had already moved on.
The sigils flared sharply, realization snapping through the system. Pressure gathered fast now, abandoning subtlety for force as the chamber attempted to reassert dominance.
Too late.
Tein stepped forward.
This time, the stone did not resist him.
He crossed the chamber in three controlled strides, presence still folded, resonance intact. The wards at the threshold stirred sluggishly, layered bindings attempting to reroute intrusion that never arrived.
Tein raised one hand.
Not in attack.
In denial.
He severed his connection to the wards entirely—a precise act of Force suppression rather than penetration. The system could not reroute what was no longer entering it.
The wards failed to trigger.
At the chamber's edge, the stone gave a soft, organic shift.
A narrow fissure opened—no wider than a man's shoulders.
Not a passage.
A maintenance artery. A throat of bedrock meant for runoff, smoke, ichor—structures beneath notice, beneath dignity, and therefore beneath guarding.
Tein slipped into it without hesitation.
Behind him, the sigils snapped back into alignment, pressure slamming shut where he had stood a heartbeat earlier.
Empty.
Containment had not been broken.
It had been bypassed.
The passage constricted immediately, stone grinding against itself as if realizing too late what it had allowed. Tein moved anyway—boots barely touching rock, hands finding holds where the stone permitted them. The air stank of mineral rot and old ritual memory, layers of residue compacted into surfaces never meant to be seen.
Here, the Force felt different.
Less shaped.
More honest.
And ahead—like a distant drum beneath stone—he felt the coven stir.
Closer now.
Tein's breath stayed even.
He did not look for his lightsaber.
Not yet.
A weapon reclaimed too early was a signal.
He moved like a thought instead.