In the archives of forgotten schools and ruined courts, a peculiar pattern haunted the records. Students, physicians, kings, and poets appeared in portraits and documents across centuries, unchanged. The same eyes, the same hands folded in near-identical poses. Names shifted, dates altered, even the supposed lineage altered with each telling, but the faces endured. It was as though history itself had a limited cast of characters, endlessly redressed for each age.
Wars ended only to reappear, treaties promised peace only to sow the next conflict, and dynasties that claimed to end in fire rose again as though nothing had concluded. To read these annals in sequence was to sense a strange duplication, the ink echoing itself in subtle distortions. No event felt wholly new — only a variation of what had been, rehearsed in another hand.
Chroniclers who noticed this pattern struggled to explain it. Some dismissed it as clerical error, the muddled work of inattentive scribes. Others muttered of deliberate forgery, a conspiracy to rewrite the past. But the recurrence was too consistent, the likenesses too precise. Scholars who lingered too long upon the similarities began to confess to unease. One historian wrote in frustration:
"I cannot prove it, yet I cannot deny it. These pages have been written before, and I their unwilling copyist."
Alongside these complaints are the disappearances. Names struck from registers without cause. Letters unfinished, their final lines trailing into silence. Journeys begun but never completed, their travelers swallowed between departure and arrival. The vanished left no remains, no graves, no witnesses. Only the unsettling suspicion that they were not lost at all, but placed elsewhere.
Even more troubling were the gaps themselves. Margins where whole columns had been scratched away, shelves of archives where boxes had been pulled and never returned. In the silence that followed, whispers multiplied. No one dared to claim knowledge of what claimed them, for the records trail into absence too sudden to be natural. As if to speak further was to risk joining the missing.
And so, the pattern endured — unacknowledged, unsettling, like an echo that refuses to fade.