Orin'Dral Mug

When we arrived, I froze.

It was… beautiful, in a way I didn’t have a word for. Circular. Ancient. Embedded flush into the stone corridor, as if it had always been there but somehow forgotten by time itself. Its surface shimmered with shades of orange and amber - glass, maybe, or something like it - arranged in circular shapes. Spirals within spirals. No hinges. No latch. Just there.

Naire tentatively placed her hand on the surface. “Cold... But it hums like something alive.”

This was a mystery too great to ignore.

We opened it.

The door gave with less effort than I expected. It didn’t creak or grind—it breathed, almost. A soft exhale of old air, not stale but deep. Like memory. Beyond, a corridor unfolded.

Dark obsidian stone. Unlit, but not dark. The walls caught what little ambient light trickled in from the open door and held it in soft ripples, like moonlight reflecting in deep water. Spirals carved into every surface, looking like amber mosaics. Repeated. Layered. At first decorative, then insistent.

It wasn’t threatening.

It was… nostalgic...

We moved slowly. No GPS signal. No tech response. But none of us wanted to turn back. The corridor led us past stained-glass windows - large, narrow, rounded like the petals of a closed flower. The same colors as the door, the same dizzying spiral patterns. Light shone through them from no visible source, painting the floors with moving, ethereal color.

The deeper we went, the more it felt… familiar.

We reached a hall - oval, with seating carved directly from the stone walls. Smooth benches, their backs etched with odd sigils. At the center, three long tables of the same dark obsidian stone, their surfaces polished to a mirror finish. Perfect height. Too perfect. Like it had been made for us.

Our lead, Eleanor whispered, “I feel like I'm in a café”

There was no danger here, so we let our guards down, and pondered.

It really did. Tables made for setting drinks down. Benches that invited conversation. A gentle hush in the air like morning before the first light breaks. As if this place had waited.

Then he appeared.

Dravendir.

No sound. No warning.

He stepped out from a far corridor with his hood lowered, that signature dark cloak of his sweeping silently behind him. I can't even remember the last time I saw him. But here he was, the same as ever, with those piercing green eyes looking straight through us...

We watched him as he paced around, almost with reverence, like someone returning to a sacred place.

Then he turned, slowly, regarding us all with the barest flicker of a smile.

“Orin’Dral… this is Orin'Dral” he said, almost expecting us to know what on earth he was talking about.

And for a moment—just a moment—I understood.

Not with my mind, but with something buried deep in my bones.

He didn’t finish his sentence. Didn’t need to.

We felt it.. this was something older than Veylins. We cataloged everything we could. Measurements. Myst readings. But the data doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the door remains, and the feeling stays.

And when you walk past it now, you feel it watching. Or calling.

For who - or what - I do not know. But I’ve started drinking my coffee in that spiral hall. Feeling far away, yet exactly where I belong.

Resarch will continue of course, but lets see if we can't share this feeling with the world...