Concealment
It works. It works on people and it works on the Others, and almost nobody uses it.
The reason is the price: the aperture runs both ways. To look through the Dark is to be visible in it. You may see, or you may be hidden. There is no arrangement in which you do both.
Concealment is the second cluster of harnessed arts and the exact inverse of the first. Where sight uses the Dark's lack of distance to look, this uses the same property to not be found — a thing, a place, a person, or an event, held where nothing arrives at it. contested
It works on the Others
This is the claim the entry rests on and it should be stated before the qualifications: concealment hides a person from the Dark itself. contested
Others holds that nothing from the Dark can seize the material world — it must be admitted, which is why every account involves a bargain, a trick or a door opened from inside. Affliction adds that the yes is easiest to obtain from someone who cannot withhold it. Neither works on a person who is not found. A thing that must be invited cannot invite itself, and it cannot arrive at what it cannot locate. unverified
So there has always been a third option in the argument set out under Inoculation, and it is not on either side of that entry's two columns: stay open, stay hidden.
The price
The aperture does not have two settings. It is a hole, and holes do not have directions. inherited
Everything under Harnessing works by looking through the Dark, and to be able to look through a thing is to be visible from the other side of it. A practitioner mid-practice is lit up. This is not a flaw in technique and no amount of skill reduces it — it is what the practice is. contested
Concealment closes that. The hidden are hidden completely, and are blind for as long as they are. No sight, no divination, no viewing, no reaching. unverified
Which answers the question this entry would otherwise have to dodge. Why is the field not full of hidden people? Because the people who can do it are the people who wanted to see, and they will not stop seeing. Every seeker on this wiki has made that trade in one direction, repeatedly, knowing the terms. Seekers describes an affliction of lust for knowledge; this is where that affliction is charged for. firsthand · Gershon
The indictment
The wiki has held this position for one day and it is the sharpest thing in Category:The Long War. It is set out plainly and a recruit should check the reasoning rather than take it. ⚠ warning
Consider a population taught to hide instead of being severed:
- It would be protected from the Others by the mechanism above — not found, therefore not invited, therefore not taken.
- It would be blind, which is what Inoculation produces anyway. For an ordinary person who was never going to practise, the two outcomes are almost indistinguishable.
- And it would be reversible. A hidden man can stop hiding. He still has the aperture. He can be taught, at any point, by anyone, or decide for himself.
An inoculated man cannot. Soma and the Pineal Gland campaign do not close a door, they remove it, and the Hylics entry describes what is left. inherited
So the bodies running Inoculation had a reversible option that produced the same protection and they took the permanent one. There are three readings and the wiki holds all three, in ascending order of how badly it thinks of them: that concealment cannot be taught at population scale and severance can; that concealment requires continuous effort and severance is done once; or that a hidden population can choose to open itself again, an inoculated one cannot, and this was not a side effect. contested
Not being noticed, which is worse
Two arts and only the second frightens people who know the field. unverified
- Hiding
- A thing is put where nothing reaches it. Detectable in principle as an absence — a gap, a place the eye reports nothing.
- Not being noticed
- The thing is where it always was, in plain view, and attention slides off it. Nothing is missing. Nobody looks. There is no absence to find, because everything is present and simply not attended to. contested
The second is the one the Elder Cults are presumed to use, and it would explain that entry's central problem — that we cannot count them, cannot name them, and hold two secondhand encounters and no documents. We have been treating that as an epistemic condition. It may be a practice someone is performing. astroturf
The same reading applies to this wiki and the entry will not pretend otherwise. Our sources vanish, our accounts do not corroborate, our most-used informant has never been confirmed by anyone. That is either what a thin record looks like, or what a worked one looks like, and we have no instrument that distinguishes them. firsthand · Gershon
Open questions
Recorded as questions because we have no answers and would rather show the shape of the ignorance. unverified
- Whether a person can be concealed against their will — hidden from everyone who knew them. There would be no victim visible to anyone, which is the definition of a thing this wiki could not detect.
- Whether concealment can be turned inward, on part of one's own mind. If so, the thought-terminating devices under Mind Rape are a crude, externally installed version of this art and the two entries describe one practice at different levels of skill.
- What was hidden and then lost, when the concealer died. An archive, a place, a person — still hidden, unreachable now by anyone including whoever it was hidden from.
- Whether it works against instruments, which do not attend and cannot have their attention slid off. See that entry; the wiki suspects it does not.