Shade shifted slightly so he would not block the owl hanging upside down outside the window alongside the icicles, while the Old Forester did not forget to explain:
"I didn't mean to steal anything. I was hungry and exhausted then. After running into the castle's tower, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I left in a hurry and didn't notice that I had wrapped this up in my clothes when I rolled up my coat."
The silk was of excellent quality, though when unfolded, it was only about the size of two palms. It would probably make just the right blanket for Little Mia.
Miss Reinhart was drawn to the great serpent pattern on the silk. Thinking of the speculation concerning "Destiny," she began to suspect that the castle the Old Forester had encountered twenty years ago might have been related to the local Giant Snake Worship.
Shade, meanwhile, frowned at the ring of patterns around the silk. Most people would subconsciously overlook those decorative patterns, and even if they noticed them, they would not think much of them.
But to the Outlander, who possessed Text Comprehension, those patterns were clearly writing. Each of the silk's four edges bore a sentence, and Shade translated them clockwise from the top—
Serpent's Shedding reveals the Secret of Fate,
Blood dripped here is the first step onto the stage;
The lead role remains vacant,
For the shining one, there exists only a single solution.
There was no need to verify anything. Shade knew this was a Poem Chapter Fragment.
Moreover, it was the rare kind of Poem Chapter Fragment that presented four lines at once.
Before obtaining the two pieces of Serpent's Shedding, Shade might not have understood the meaning of those four lines. But now, everything was perfectly clear—
Only by