The years following the disc's discovery were marked by confusion in the records. What should have been careful histories are riddled with contradictions: dates repeated, names appearing twice, events described in one hand only to reappear in another as though newly told. One annalist recorded the death of a nobleman in spring, only for another, writing in the same city, to describe his public speech in autumn.
Those who lived through these years wrote privately of disturbances: lamps flickering though no wind stirred them, conversations replaying as if rehearsed, entire corridors walked twice without meaning to. A child was said to ask the same question three nights in succession, with each answer forgotten as though the exchange had never occurred.
A few accounts speak of encounters more unsettling still: people meeting friends they knew, only to discover those friends had already been buried. One widow swore her husband returned home at dusk, spoke to her tenderly, then vanished at dawn. The grave she had visited the week before remained untouched, the soil firm, the stone unbroken.
One unsigned letter, recovered from a pile of confiscated correspondence, confesses:
"The days fold upon themselves. What I write this morning I find already written last week. A friend greets me twice in one day, once as if he has not seen me in years. I no longer know whether I am living forward or returning backward."
Authorities dismissed these complaints as poor record keeping, superstition, or illness. Physicians declared them symptoms of fever. Priests warned against blasphemy. Yet the accounts persisted too widely, too consistently, to be dismissed. What was once rumor became pattern, and what was once pattern began to feel like law.