I had a fun idea for a short story once.

Animals have become intelligent. They live in the ruins of a once great civilization. They are about Medieval level of technology. Magic exists. They know very little about the people that built the civilization before them.

The way magic works is that you speak the magic language out loud and you get the effects.

But what the animals do not know is that they are simply activating the nano-machines that are ever-present in these ruins of the great civilization.

The more-proficient wizards of this new era are just better at prompt engineering and describing what they want the nano-machines to do. Maybe they found an ancient English dictionary or something, and treat it as a wizard's tome.