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.

Logan leaned back, tapping the page with a finger. This wasn’t just something that had slipped through the cracks of history. This was deliberate. Entire symbols didn’t vanish by accident.

He closed the book and stacked it aside. If written records gave him nothing, maybe geography would. Sometimes the location of a thing, or the absence of it, tells you more than the name.

The cartography alcove occupied the far corner of the library, the air cooler there, smelling faintly of parchment and chalk. The Academy’s enchanted world map lay beneath a sheet of crystal, its ink dormant until touched.

When his fingers brushed the surface, the continents flared into view.

Four main landmasses. Countless islands are scattered like debris between them.

Three of the continents surrounded the fourth like silent sentinels.

The Dawn Kingdom, his home, sprawled across fertile plains, rolling hills, and jagged mountain ranges to the north.

The monarchy had ruled for over four hundred years, balancing tradition with enough reform to keep the nobility from tearing each other apart.

For decades, it had avoided major wars, not through weakness, but through carefully timed displays of power.

The capital glowed bright on the map, with lines of light marking major trade routes branching outward like veins.

Its primary rival was directly west.

The Aereon Empire was marked in deep red on the map, its borders were perfectly drawn, too clean to be natural.

Every major city bore a fortress emblem, and faint lines indicated military supply routes stretching across the entire continent. The Emperor’s grip was absolute, and this military was the largest standing force in the world.

Rumor had it that Aereon’s shipyards had doubled their output in recent years. Officially, the fleet expansion was to counter piracy. Unofficially, many suspected preparations for a large-scale military campaign.

South of the Dawn Kingdom lay Ziphron, the only democratic nation.

Its cities were evenly spaced, connected by an intricate web of trade routes that glowed faintly on the map.

Ziphron prided itself on its open governance and thriving commerce, but Logan knew that didn’t mean stability.

The country’s politics were a constant struggle between powerful merchant houses, each with their own private guards and informants.

Trade agreements with the Dawn Kingdom kept relations publicly friendly, but behind the scenes, there were reports of Ziphronian agents sabotaging Dawn supply lines to gain leverage.

And then... the fourth continent.

It sat in the middle, surrounded on three sides by the others. Larger than Ziphron, smaller than Aereon, it was a landmass of untouched wilderness. No cities. No ports. No road markers. The map showed only forests, rivers, and mountain ranges. Not even a faint magical signature glowed there.

The absence of settlement wasn’t unusual for small islands, but for an entire continent? That was unheard of.

Control of it would mean dominance over central trade waters, making it an invaluable strategic position. And yet, no nation claimed it.

Logan zoomed in on the map, the enchantment sharpening the view. The rivers were wide and plentiful, and the soil near them was dark green and fertile.

Forests covered most of the land, with a mountain range cutting diagonally across the southern region. Nothing about it looked uninhabitable.

The official Academy notes listed it only as "Uninhabited Continent" with a survey date almost two hundred years old. No details on why it remained empty.

That alone told Logan something important: if there was no reason recorded, then the reason wasn’t meant to be known.

He studied the positioning again. The Dawn Kingdom to the east. Aereon to the west. Ziphron to the south.

The three most influential powers of the world, each keeping their distance but maintaining an unspoken balance of power. The unnamed continent sat at the center like a neutral zone or a barrier.

His eyes narrowed. Neutral zones only stayed neutral when something dangerous lived there.

He thought of the symbol again - the serpent curling around a sphere with three eyes staring outward. It didn’t connect directly to the continent, not yet.

But the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that both were pieces of the same larger picture.

The continent might have been linked to something ancient, something the three nations had quietly agreed to leave untouched.

That kind of cooperation between rivals was rare, and it usually meant the alternative was worse.

He remembered a story from his academy history classes - one of the few that mentioned all three nations in the same breath.

Two hundred years ago, Aereon and Ziphron had been on the brink of war over trade access to the southern straits. The Dawn Kingdom had intervened, not with troops, but with a treaty.

The terms were odd: neither side would expand into the central waters, and the uninhabited continent would remain unclaimed.

The textbooks framed it as a political compromise that prevented bloodshed. But now, staring at the map, Logan wondered if it had been something else entirely. A warning disguised as diplomacy.

If the symbol was connected to that land...

He stepped back from the table, letting the map dim. His research had given him no direct answers, but it had drawn a shape in his mind - not of the thing itself, but of the shadow it cast.

The symbol.

The empty continent.

The treaty that kept three rival nations in rare agreement.

This wasn’t random. This was deliberate.

And deliberate things had a way of coming back.