—And suddenly his third eye snapped completely open on its own accord, and he saw all the magic in the town, threads and knots and strings of arcane force spiraling into the dark wooden doors, sucked into the seam between them as if there were some insatiable abyss beyond. The third eye glanced around without his head turning: the library stood alone in an empty plain, a confluence of ley lines converging on the building and intersecting somewhere inside…

Simon felt a sharp pain in his thumb. He yanked his hand back. There was a tiny bead of blood at the center of the ball of his thumb. He put it in his mouth, sucked the drops away and looked. There were two tiny pricks in the center of the whorls that quickly welled up with new blood; there was nothing on the door handle at all. Simon tried reopening his third eye again, but the moment was gone, and he could barely see any magic at all.

Was he going to do this?

He loosed a long breath, put his hand back on the handle, and pushed the door open.