Renelle entered the Firestone Library of the University. The moment she stepped inside, she quickly felt the temperature shift to a warmer one.
The scent of the library made Renelle breathe deeply and exhale softly.
"What memories..."
Renelle murmured as her eyes scanned the entire library.
Normally, the university library is closed to the general public, but Renelle holds a staff badge, as Gregory House, being a doctor at the university-hospital, has full access to roam the campus.
And it is not as if anyone would actually come and stop a small girl of about eleven years of age.
House has been here before and knows very well where the books are, especially the medical books, and understands the general layout of the library.
Renelle guided herself by those memories and walked calmly; her small, white, delicate hands stretched out on either side of the aisles between shelves filled with books, while Renelle felt every book against the skin of her palms.
As Renelle walked through the aisles, feeling the covers of the books against her hands and inhaling the scent of the pages filled with various knowledge, Renelle remembered her time as a student in her previous life.
Despite the era in which Renelle was born, in her past life she loved visiting the few libraries that remained in the world. Advanced technology changed the way humans moved and socialized.
The high demand for energy also struck the lower classes of society. It is curious that in the age when information was more abundant and freer, people had neither the time nor the energy to acquire it, and had to spend most of their time earning money just to survive.
But Renelle, despite being an orphan in her previous life and having to work from a young age, always made time to visit libraries to learn.
Someone had told her long ago that knowledge is power, and whenever she had a moment, she dedicated it to reading books.
That taste never disappeared, not even when her soul changed bodies. In this life, Gregory shared the same passion, and his house contains many books, some of great value and antiquity.
As Renelle walked through the aisles, remembering the past of two lives, she soon felt a ghostly tug on her right hand.
Renelle stopped and looked at the book whose spine her right fingers had barely touched.
"New Jersey Folklore." Renelle murmured as she pulled the book from the shelf. She saw a book originally published in 1938; according to the back cover, this is a reedition.
Renelle opened the book and could see pages with handwritten marginalia signed by someone named "L. Valtiel"—an early clue linking the Jersey Devil to a -Bearer of Sacred Suffering-.
Suddenly, the black book within Renelle's mind vibrated like a cell phone receiving a message, and a breeze blew through the book in Renelle's hands.
The pages flipped in the gust of wind until they stopped on a page showing a drawing of an esoteric symbol.
"Is this not Metatron's symbol? Hmm… it resembles it, but it is not..." Renelle's fingers traced the symbol on the page as she whispered.
The symbol is composed of what appear to be ancient runes and geometric shapes, especially circles and triangles.
"illustration identical to the 'Halo of the Sun' in a seventeenth-century codex titled De Umbrarum Ordine, attributed to a group called 'The Children of Silence'—a sect that vanished after burning down their monastery near Trenton in 1721." Renelle read the text beneath the symbol.
The symbol consists of an outer ring enclosing the entire design, followed by a second, inner ring. Between the two rings, ancient letters are inscribed.
Outside the outer circle, there are marks at the four cardinal points, and within the ring, at each position, there are figures: the northern one takes the form of an eye, the western resembles a scale, the eastern appears to be a kind of tool, and the southern shows the silhouette of a humanoid figure holding a trident.
Inside the inner ring, there seem to be more symbols, as if marking the minutes or seconds of a clock, and at the center lies a sort of cauldron surrounded by three triangle-shaped rings and three inverted triangle-shaped symbols.
{ ' Go to Centre Ville ' } Suddenly, Renelle heard a whisper.
Renelle turned her head to one side and, at the end of the aisle, saw a blonde woman in her thirties sitting at a table, reading books.
Beside the woman, seated in another chair, a little girl—or perhaps two—about eight years old, seemed to be drawing on the table.
But the other girl, apparently sensing Renelle's gaze, turned her head backward. And then she vanished.
Upon the disappearance of that shadow—a girl who seemed to be the twin of the other—the little girl drawing at the table startled and screamed.
Since they were in a library, the scream was heard by everyone present.
The girl's mother tried to calm the crying child, who kept murmuring repeatedly: -Go to Centre Ville-.
This struck Renelle as very strange. Especially because she felt a powerful energy emanating from that shadowy girl, and a special vital energy within the child now weeping in her mother's arms.
Before Renelle's eyes—as she began approaching the mother and daughter—she could see how the mother's thread of colors vibrated with vitality, yet grew gray at a distant point.
But the strangest thing was the little girl's thread of colors, which appeared split in two: two threads diverging from one, bearing the same hues but in opposition.
"Look ~ I have a lollipop. Do you want it?" Renelle reached the girl and pulled out one of the many candies she now carries in her trench coat.
The best way to restore vitality is through sugar. And Renelle has tucked several sweets into her clothes.
Renelle's soft voice seemed to soothe the girl. The little girl has fair skin, though now it appears somewhat pale; her hair is black as night, as are her large, beautiful eyes, now filled with tears.
"Thank you," the blonde-haired mother thanked Renelle from the bottom of her heart.
The little girl, without saying a word, simply took the lollipop from Renelle's hand and brought it to her mouth. Renelle could detect signs of some form of -autism-. But given what had just occurred before her eyes, she began to suspect something deeper.
In just these few seconds, Renelle had already examined not only the little daughter and the exhausted mother with deep dark circles under her eyes, but also the drawings the little girl had made and the books the mother had open.
In the girl's drawings was the very same symbol Renelle had just seen in the book she held in her arms. Moreover, the books the mother was studying all discussed unexplained phenomena throughout history. More specifically, they spoke of a town in the northeastern part of the country that has been burning since 1986 due to a coal mine fire located directly beneath this small town called Centre Ville, Maine.