By the time Seraphina began looking for answers, she had stopped searching for answers.
She was searching for people who had asked the same questions.
That was different.
Answers could be fabricated.
A person could misunderstand something.
A book could be wrong.
But if enough unrelated people had recorded the same strange thing, across different places and different periods of history, then perhaps the coincidence itself was worth investigating.
She started with the internet.
It was almost useless.
Almost.
There were forums dedicated to supernatural phenomena.
Private archives.
Amateur historians.
Religious groups.
Conspiracy communities.
Archaeology enthusiasts.
People who claimed to have seen ghosts, spirits, monsters, gods, and things that had no name.
Most of it was nonsense.
Some of it was obviously fabricated.
Some people were simply looking for attention.
Seraphina created a folder.
Then another.
Then another.
She began separating everything into categories.
Confirmed.
Probably false.
Unverified.
Interesting.
And one category she initially disliked admitting existed:
I don’t know.
She found reports from South Asia describing ancient rituals that were supposed to allow a person to “borrow the nature of something beyond humanity.”
She found old East Asian records describing people who possessed abilities that could not be explained by technology.
She found stories from Southeast Asia about objects that could cause people to dream the same dream.
She found accounts of strange archaeological sites where several people had experienced identical hallucinations.
The details were different.
The explanations were different.
The languages were different.
But sometimes—
the symbols weren’t.
Seraphina stared at one particular image on her screen.
It was a photograph of a damaged stone tablet.
The original discovery had happened decades ago.
The tablet had supposedly been found beneath an ancient settlement.
The researcher who photographed it had written only one sentence beneath the image:
“The symbol appears repeatedly in unrelated locations.”
Seraphina enlarged it.
Then enlarged it again.
She opened another photograph.
Different country.
Different archaeological site.
Different century.
The symbol was not identical.
But the structure was similar.
She leaned back.
“Coincidence.”
She said the word aloud.
It sounded convincing.
For approximately three seconds.
Then she opened another file.
And another.
She began keeping notes.
Not conclusions.
Questions.
Why does this symbol appear in different cultures?
Why are similar rituals associated with illness?
Why do some records describe people gaining abilities after interacting with certain objects?
Why do so many accounts end with disappearance or madness?
She stopped at the last question.
That one appeared too often.
Eventually she created a rule for herself.
Don’t believe it.
Don’t reject it.
Investigate it.
She wrote it at the top of every new research document.
It helped.
Because the deeper she went, the stranger the material became.
And she was beginning to realize something uncomfortable.
She wasn’t looking at one mystery.
She might be looking at hundreds of mysteries that had been mistaken for separate things.