A handful of texts survive that hint at the strangeness without naming it directly. One such is a children's primer, brittle and half-burned, recovered from the ruins of a provincial library. Its script, unlike ordinary alphabets, moved in an unfamiliar rhythm. The letters leaned toward their successors as though drawn forward, suggesting that meaning was not fixed but always deferred. When scholars attempted to copy the primer, their transcriptions faltered. The words seemed to resist capture, shifting slightly each time they were rewritten.
Although most declared it nonsense, several noted a peculiar effect: the more one read, the less certain one became of where the text ended and the reader's own thoughts began. Marginal notes in one copy, written centuries apart, seemed to echo one another in voice if not in hand, as though the primer had drawn responses from different readers into a single, continuous commentary.
Another artifact, a broken set of clay tablets, spoke only in fragments. Short lines such as:
"What returns is not what was.""Every departure leaves a mark behind.""A name repeated loses its owner."
No explanation accompanied these aphorisms. They offered no system, no doctrine, only hints of recurrence. Still, scattered through archives across centuries, the same fragments resurface, copied in different hands, as though compelled to persist.
One archivist observed that the tablets seemed to multiply. When catalogued and locked away, new copies appeared in unrelated collections, often in unfamiliar handwriting that bore no signature. The fragments, it seemed, carried themselves forward independent of their custodians.
Such pieces resist analysis. Their presence unsettles not for what they say, but for what they refuse to say. They leave the reader not enlightened but entangled, caught in an endless chain of repetition. Like echoes in a corridor with no walls, they give the impression of infinite return without revealing the source.