Beneath the stones of a ruined sanctuary, explorers uncovered a disc of polished obsidian. Unlike the sacred relics of its age, it bore no images of gods or rulers, no ornament at all. Around its rim, scratched in sharp script, ran a single repeating sentence:
"Echo, guru — wander into orb; also, mirror onto serpents."
At first glance, it appeared meaningless. The grammar faltered, the words refused to settle. Some called it a chant, others a joke, still others a mistake preserved by accident. Yet those who copied it often recorded unease. The line, once spoken aloud, lingered in memory with unnatural weight, as if the ear carried it long after the tongue had stopped.
Wherever the disc traveled, reports followed of strange recurrences: letters rewritten in identical hands, clocks resetting to the same hour, portraits erased and then reappearing intact. Merchants swore that contracts signed one day were duplicated word for word in the following month. Soldiers recorded drilling the same maneuver twice in succession, though no order had been given.
None of this was provable, and yet too many accounts echoed the same unease. One explorer confessed that he dreamed nightly of corridors of glass in which his reflection multiplied, each copy whispering the inscription in unison. Another wrote of conversations with companions that seemed to repeat verbatim days later, as though rehearsed.
The disc was eventually sealed in an archive beneath layers of stone. Guards were posted, not to protect the relic but to prevent further contact with it. Yet its inscription survived, transcribed in dozens of notebooks, etched on the walls of cells, scratched into the margins of ledgers. The phrase lingers still, not fully understood but not forgotten — a sentence that seems less composed than imposed, lingering like an unasked question.