When the professor reached out for the third time to run his fingers over the paper, trying to touch the engraved grooves through the limits of the medium, Green finally couldn't hold back and stopped him.
"Don't let its decent condition fool you. It's at least a hundred years old. You'd better be careful."
"Oh, sorry. I just never thought I'd see this here." Kraft withdrew his hand and wiped the sweat that had seeped out onto his palm against his hem, then gently lifted the paper and turned it over.
Realizing these things were imitations didn't reassure him. Instead, it stirred up an inexplicable disgust, like seeing a narrative that couldn't tell what mattered most, or a face with crooked features awkwardly pieced together.
The way the image seemed to melt made it even more unsettling. He'd never thought to associate melting with solid stone carvings, and had no way to guess what this imagery was meant to convey—or whether it was an imitation of another, still-unknown form.
"Have you seen anything like this?"
"Not quite. It's not the same as what I know. It belongs to the same style, but it must be an imitation."
The copyist had left very little written down. There wasn't much content on either side, and the text even omitted when and where the item had been found. A few crooked lines of hastily scrawled letters were compared against several forms apparently mentioned earlier, but still offered no sound way to trace its origins. The only explanation was that the work had been made on the author's own whim, without much thought.
"Two symbolic patterns have been mixed together." Anyone who had seen them in their entirety would have found them much easier to distinguish. Their distinctive features were hard to erase, even