Page 13 of Enchantment of Silver and Sea
After two hours and a few more trips to the shelves, I had three full pages of other possible occurrences, similar phenomena, and anything else that seemed relevant.
Was that enough to ward off any suspicion if Cato came down to check on me?
I scanned my notes again.
It was.
With a deep breath and a jolt of anticipation, I returned to the index.
I had been turning the memory of Kieran’s silver eyes over and over in my head all day, and my brain had finally offered up a mental image that nearly had my hands trembling. It was a colored drawing of eyes very similar to Kieran’s looking out from beneath a dark hood.
My search began with the terms “hoods” (this word was not in the index) and “darkness” (over thirty books referencing this one), as well as “eyes,” which I figured would make reference to any creatures or beings with exceptional eyes.
I spent over an hour looking through the corresponding books.
No luck.
Some books were instantly familiar when I glanced at their covers. But once my memory was refreshed of the contents inside, I already knew they didn’t contain the drawing.
I rested my elbows on the table in front of me, face in my hands.
I had seen those eyes before. Or at least the closest you could get to recreating them with a set of colored pencils.
Savoring the knowledge that I was truly alone in the basement with no one around to hear me, I threw my head back and let out a growl of frustration.
It was here. Iknewit was here.
I returned to the index yet again, this time reading every term, one line at a time. It was completely inefficient, I knew. Readingthe entire index like this would take hours. But I couldn’t think of another option, and I was not giving up.
I made it all the way to the letter M. I was powering through a sickening twist of my stomach at the word “mutilation,” remembering a few unfortunate books on that topic, when it hit me.
I flipped furiously until I reached the page with the letter U. And there it was.
“Unexplained.”
Technically, everything to do with magic was unexplained in one way or another. But the situations referenced under this label were ones in which we were truly clueless. There were several titles jotted in Cato’s handwriting, but I already knew which one I was looking for. I made a mental note of the name and description, then practically ran to the shelf on the far wall.
When I pulled down the small leather journal, my pulse was thundering so loudly that I could feel it in my ears.
Only eighteen pages contained actual content. The rest was blank. The title scribbled onto the front cover in Cato’s handwriting read “Matthew’s Travel Diary.”
According to Cato’s notes pasted carefully onto the inside cover, Matthew was a man in his thirties who was alive at the start of The Awakening. He was an avid hiker and nature enthusiast, and in those initial months of Post-Awakening chaos before the walls went up, he decided that he wanted to do something useful. He and his team of ten other men and women bravely set out from the city on foot with the goal of traveling around the continent and documenting their findings on magic.
But only a few short days after Matthew’s departure, one of his team members reappeared at the old police station—now Enforcer headquarters—in Cyllene. The man was mute. Eyes glazed. Practically catatonic. He could not speak of what happened to Matthew and the other members of their team.
He was still wearing his backpack, and although it looked as weathered as he did, it provided a few clues. One was on the eighteenth page of Matthew’s travel diary.
The last page with content.
I flipped to page eighteen, and my earlier appreciation of being all alone in the basement dissipated. A chill ran down my spine.
No one knew how this man, who lived for only a few weeks more before dying of unknown causes, came to be in possession of Matthew’s diary. But on that last page, there was a sketch of a figure in what appeared to be a black cloak. The rough sketch didn’t include any details of the body, limbs, or anything that would give a better understanding of the size and shape of this being.
With the exception of the eyes.
The person who made the sketch—assumed to be Matthew—was not a skilled artist. But he had managed to capture the being’s piercing stare. Its irises were colored in a blend of gray and metallic silver.
The sketch was captioned:
