Chapter 74: Territories
The library was nearly empty, the footsteps echoing long before they reached him. Logan sat at a far table, his back to the wall, with a stack of books forming a barricade between him and the rest of the room.
He wasn’t here to browse. He was here to hunt.
The image he was looking for was fixed in his mind.
A three-eyed serpent curled around a perfect sphere. The memory of it was too sharp to fade. It wasn’t the picture he needed now. It was the name, the meaning, the history behind it.
He started with Encyclopedia of Magical Symbols, a three-volume set whose cracked leather bindings gave it an air of authority yet it wielded nothing.
The closest match was a "Watcher’s Coil," but the drawing was wrong. No pupil, no inner mark.
Next was Forgotten Heraldry of the Dawn Kingdom. Dozens of noble crests, military insignias, and ceremonial seals. None even close.
The serpent appeared often enough in different designs, but always with swords, wings, or crowns, never with the sphere.
He switched to older works; treatises on arcane rituals, religious iconography, and compiled field notes from explorers.
That’s when he found it: one sentence buried in the middle of a political essay from over a century ago.
"The eye sees beyond the veil, but those who gaze back are not the same."
It wasn’t much. No origin. No explanation. Just a single cryptic statement in a Chapter about maritime trade disputes between the Dawn Kingdom and Ziphron.