Others

Others inhabit The Dark. To define them is folly - their origins are unknown, their actions contradictory, their goals incomprehensible. The few that reveal themselves to mankind do so out of apathy or worse, a desire to manipulate and control the masses. In turn, Cults have spent untold generations categorizing and researching these beings, which had lead to the creation of many myths and methods of their control.

Those that came before man

Three entries on this wiki open with the same five words. Djinn, Faeries and Spirits all begin those that came before man, written by different hands at different times, and none of them says what the formula means. It is the oldest phrase we have and it was inherited without its explanation. inherited

This is the reconstruction, and it is the closest thing to a motive that anything in The Dark has ever been given.

They were here first, and they were replaced. Whatever the material world was for before man, they had it, and they do not have it now. Man holds the position they held. That alone would produce resentment; what makes it unbearable is the second half. contested

They can only reach the material world through us. Not around us, not instead of us — through. Every manifestation documented on this wiki, without exception, is routed through a human mind, a human body, a human place or a human belief. The Dark entry has said as much for years without drawing the conclusion: they pine for what they cannot experience, and the only aperture into it is the species that took it from them. inherited

So they are bound to the thing that supplanted them, and they cannot get in without it. That is the grievance, and it is worse than hatred, because hatred does not require you to come back. unverified

Two things follow, and a recruit should carry both:

• It explains the bargains. A being that could simply take would not negotiate. Every deal recorded on this wiki — the djinn's wish, the fey bargain, the terms an Elder Cult claims to have struck — exists because consent is load-bearing. They need something from us that cannot be seized, and the entire apparatus of temptation is a workaround for that limitation. contested

• It explains who they go to. If consent is required and cannot be seized, then the cheapest yes available is from someone unable to withhold one. Affliction sets out the consequence: the people who most attract them are the people who can least resist them, and they are the same people for the same reason. contested

• It explains the contempt. The tone reported in nearly every account — the mockery, the theatrical patience, the sense of being condescended to by something that has come to ask you for a favour — is what dependency looks like from inside resentment. They are not visiting. They are petitioning, and they cannot forgive us for it.

Whether any of this is their account or merely one we find satisfying, we cannot say. It is a story that makes them legible, and stories that make the incomprehensible legible are the ones this wiki is supposed to distrust. ⚠ warning

Two kinds

The category Other has been carrying two things that have almost nothing in common, and the wiki only recently noticed. contested

The displaced are the subject of the section above: those that came before man, that lost the material world, and that can reach it only through us. Djinn, Faeries, Spirits, and by most readings daemons and succubi.

The made were never out here to lose anything. They were cast by human minds, recently, often without intent, and the Dark kept them. Phantoms, Ghosts, egregores and Gods — set out as a sequence under Meme Wars and individually in each entry.

The grievance reconstructed above applies only to the first group. A made thing has no memory of a world it held and nothing to resent us for. Whether that makes them safer or worse is argued in Gods, which takes the view that a thing assembled entirely out of us and returned to us with a will attached is the harder problem. unverified

None of them are good

This is the one general claim the wiki is willing to make about Others, and it is made flatly, which is not this wiki's habit. The flatness is the claim. contested

Across every cult, every tome and every account held here, nothing out of The Dark has ever been described as good. There are the hostile, which are most of them. There are the indifferent, which are the rest — and which are mistaken for good every time an indifferent thing declines to hurt someone who expected it to. There is no third kind. inherited

Every generation produces a seeker who has found the exception. Every account of the exception, followed far enough, resolves into an Other that wanted something, or an Other that had not yet noticed them. We have no case that survives being followed. unverified

The consequence is the part recruits get wrong, so it is written here rather than left to be inferred: anything good in a person's life was put there by a person. There is no other source and no other supply. Whatever protection, kindness or beauty exists is manufactured locally, by people, at cost, and it is not replenished from anywhere. unverified