“The room was curved, wide, and empty except for one enormous rock in the center. Easily twice Biddy's height, it glowed with faint green-gold shimmers beneath its smooth surface.
She had seen that light before. Flashes of it in the old oak, when Rowan drew magic through the skin of the tree. And once, in the scrying glass, as a glow on the wall illuminating Rowan as he lay in enchanted sleep in an underground room.
This was it, the room where Rowan had come to steal magic on the night he had nearly never come home. The vault, he had called it. The place where the Council hoarded its wealth like fairy gold.”