Private lists of the missing began to circulate, carried in whispers and sealed packets. Unlike official registers, these notes compared cases across decades. Their compilers traced unsettling lines: faces recurring in different towns under different names, handwriting resurfacing in manuscripts centuries apart, voices described identically in eyewitness accounts separated by generations.
A student gone missing in one age seemed to return in another, unchanged. A physician declared dead in 1721 appeared in sketches of a lecture hall in 1845. A general slain in battle was later painted into a mural depicting a festival, his features unmistakable though the artist had never seen him. None of the connections were ever acknowledged in public, but those who studied them grew convinced that disappearance did not mean erasure.
Some began to suspect an unseen hand. Not fate, not chance, but something that gathered people deliberately, plucking them from one moment and placing them in another. The compilers speculated in cautious marginal notes: Was there a pattern in who was taken? Did their recurrence serve some design? If so, what purpose did it fulfill?
What purpose it served was never written — or, if written, those pages have not survived. Those who pursued the lists longest tended to vanish themselves, their notes ending mid-sentence or struck through with ink as though erased in haste. One particularly careful ledger breaks off in the midst of a word, the pen having cut a jagged line across the page as if the hand holding it had been wrenched away.
The more such lists grew, the more dangerous they became. It was whispered that to recognize the pattern was to risk joining it.