Chapter 71 : The Cult Symbol
Revantra had never been particularly good at sketching.
It wasn't that she lacked artistic talent—she did—but more that she had never seen the point. When you could conjure fire with a snap or bend shadows to your will, why waste time with pencils? And yet, here she was, hunched over Elias's borrowed notebook, tongue poking slightly out of the corner of her mouth in deep concentration, drawing what looked disturbingly like a lopsided fried egg.
"Ugh," she muttered, erasing half of it with the side of her hand. "It looked more sinister last night."
The real symbol had glowed like veins of fire through the stone, intricate and precise. Her recreation, by contrast, had all the menace of a poorly iced pastry. She tapped her pencil against her chin, then sighed and started again, trying to recall every line, every curve, from the memory still burned behind her eyelids.
The sketch took twenty minutes, four erasers, and the sacrifice of her pride.
When she finished, she stared at the symbol.
It was circular, but not perfect—a spiral nested within a six-pointed web, with thin spokes radiating outwards. There was something jagged at the edges, like a broken wheel or a sun that had been shattered and stitched back together. It hummed in her mind, even now. Not loudly. Just there.
She shivered.
Then, she did what she had been putting off all morning.
She took the sketch and slipped out of the house before Elias could wake up.
The capital's library was three stories of quiet judgment and ancient dust, held together by thick beams, thicker tomes, and the even thicker silence of angry old librarians who remembered when people respected paper. It wasn't open to students this early, technically, but Revantra had long since learned the secret to gaining entrance: