The difference between the Eye and the Spider was a willingness to interfere: the Spider did so subtly, the Eye not at all. The Spider said, It’s just a nudge, and the Eye said, Let things play out as they will. This was the argument they’d been having since time immemorial, but it was almost always amicable -- the sort of discussion one had over tea and biscuits, with a sheet for wagers in between ( though things were normally stacked in the Spider’s favor, given its tendency to tug pieces into place as it saw fit ). Open, howling conflicts were for... Something Else. Certainly that was why, despite the low-level dread that hung over the woods in the south of the western region, with its webs and owls and the feeling that something was watching you, actual physical harm coming to travelers was out of the ordinary. That didn’t mean, however, that the mental damage wasn’t significant. Those that wandered through the wood often found themselves wishing that they had just stayed home. Many turned back. The few that pressed onwards did it because of the reward at the end: the ivory tower, the Temple of Beholding, with its floors and floors of books and scrolls and manuscripts, centuries of carefully-preserved information in shelves and chests just waiting to be dug into.
When someone made it to the halfway point in the forest, Elias began Observing them, but only out of the corner of his Eye. When they came within twenty miles of the tower, they earned his full attention. So he’d watched this young man approach for days, eventually abandoning his other tasks to simply scry, gazing out through the icons he’d carved into nearly every tree trunk so very long ago. He was ready and waiting when the traveler entered; but he gave himself the appearance of being otherwise occupied, only turning around when the sound of footsteps reached his ears. “Oh, hello. Can I, ah, help you?”
