Hidden Dossier



The Hidden Dossier is the book contained within The Witch Queen Collector's Edition. It is a collection of documents, messages, and other relevant files from Hidden Agents, compiled by Ikora Rey. In addition to the 48 pages within the CE book, there are an additional 30 pages resulting from the ARG involving buyers of the Collector's Edition.

Text in this color indicates handwritten notes made by Ikora Rey.

Letter From Ikora
Guardian,

I hesitate. I am touched by doubt.

We must speak clearly. But you can't talk precisely without knowing precisely who you're talking to. (Think of everything we said to Osiris—) I feel as if I know you. But have I ever allowed you to know me?

I used to act as fast as I thought, and sometimes much faster. That's youth. Eventually I made too many mistakes to ignore; that's youth too, ignoring your mistakes until they pile up and topple. I dug myself out. I learned to keep myself hidden. Hidden purpose, hidden knowledge. A hidden Ikora, and for the world, a face of perfect composure and intent. Even when we lost the Traveler, I went to Io to hide my confusion.

I am going to try to un-hide myself.

I may frighten or confuse you. I am not an easy person to know.

This is a folio of intelligence reports from my Hidden network. It will illuminate the events leading up to the current apokalypsis. In the original Koine Greek, that word means unveiling, and also revelation.

In the spirit of unveiling I have also included fragments of my own personal writing about the nature of Darkness and Light. They are less the work of Ikora Rey the great Warlock Vanguard than of ikora rey, the unfashioned and uncertain woman.

In the early Books of Sorrow, Savathun scribbles a warning that Oryx's text is full of lies. Mara Sov's hagiography and self-indictment, the Marasenna, warns the reader to remember that it is narrated in the first person, even and especially when it pretends to be objective.

Truth is always edited by the truthteller.

I give you no such warning. This is the unaltered truth of what I know and who I am. May it bring you to the clarity I have sought.

Ikora

((01))
Beginnings offer you no power. It is what you do that is in your power; it is how you end which counts.

((02))
 ACCESS: MOST RESTRICTED DECRYPTION KEY: Z2TET3C4WZTLRL8NV5KS$IKO-006 REP#: 1851-GHOSTS-SUS AGENT(S): CHA-319

SUBJ: INITIAL REPORT ON UNPAIRED GHOST COMMUNITIES 


 * 1. Hey friend!


 * 2. I know I'm not allowed to say that to the Warlock
 * Vanguard or to IKO-006, but given that we're under
 * double-trouble encryption, I'm going to say it anyway.
 * How's your whole mess in the City? Glad I missed all that...


 * 3. I've completed my "Ethnographic Survey of Itinerant
 * Unpaired Ghosts Who Prefer Intra-Ghost Interactions."
 * It'll make a neat paper. As a cover story, it was pretty
 * good! These Ghosts tend to be thoughtful and introverted,
 * so like most introverts, they respond well to people who
 * are interested in their thoughts. And they seemed to find it
 * very self-affirming to dislike me! I guess it's nice to confirm
 * you still prefer yourself to other people.


 * 4. These introverted Ghosts spend a lot of time hovering in
 * circles, philosophizing. The longer they've been away from
 * people (sorry, Human people—Ghosts are people, too),
 * the less they care about hovering at head height or facing
 * each other when they talk. After a few months, they'll just
 * scatter around a space facing every whichway, like they're
 * each posing for a photo. When they're not talking, I get the
 * feeling that they're just... sensing. The same way they can
 * divine the character of a long-dead corpse. Whatever you
 * want to call that faculty, they're using it.


 * 5. Speaking of, are we still doing the sunyata friendship
 * thing? Treating each other as sacred voids? If so, I'm
 * allowed to say anything to you, and you are allowed to say
 * anything to me, and we each trust the other to receive it
 * without hurt. So I'm allowed to say—I'm not sure people
 * out here like you very much, Ikora. They don't know who
 * you are; they don't have a sense of what you stand for.


 * And you know, I do get that. I had to sneak up on you
 * in your private library to surprise you and (I know you
 * INSIST I didn't really surprise you, but still...) even then,

((03))

 * you talked to me about circles. Circles! Do you know
 * what the Traveler's reawakening meant for the geometry
 * of circles? You told me it changed everything about the
 * semiotic role of circles in some paracausal invocation of
 * the Light. And I'm going to tell you the truth, which is,
 * you didn't want to talk to me, so you talked about circles
 * instead. I know people who can talk in circles, but you're
 * the only one who can do it by talking about circles. I really
 * admire your efficiency.


 * 6. These Ghosts without Guardians argue about two things.
 * One is the exact nature of their connection to their
 * undiscovered Guardian. Is each Ghost predestined to find
 * one and exactly one soul to raise as a Guardian? Or does
 * each Ghost have a taste, a set of preferences that many
 * dead people might satisfy? Could a Ghost potentially raise
 * anyone? Does the choice of a partner lie within the Ghost,
 * or is it a mission assigned by the Traveler?


 * 7. They also argue over how one should interact with their
 * chosen Guardian. Should Ghosts accede to whatever
 * their partner demands? Or is a Ghost's relationship
 * with a Guardian a negotiated bond between equals and
 * codependents? Heavy stuff. But I guess it's the same
 * argument people always have about their relationships. Is
 * there such a thing as true love, or just the love we decide
 * we're going to make work?


 * 8. What is this thing we do, Ikora? Are you my one true
 * love, am I yours? We agreed it's not love like most people
 * have love. Nobody's getting married or turning up arm-
 * in-arm at the Crimson Ball. It's a special and radical kind
 * of friendship, right? That's what you said. An endogenous
 * need to strike the lies away from another soul. It's the
 * promise to seek truth in each other without mercy or fear,
 * but always with compassion.

((04))

 * So: speaking mercilessly and fearlessly, but with
 * compassion, where is our friendship now? What does it
 * mean? Does it mean that I check in on you every few years
 * and otherwise just let you do your thing? Is that your
 * nature—to draw away forever while I chase after you and
 * nag to be sure you're all right? Friend, you are not Mara
 * Sov, and I am not one of her cadre. I'm not doing that. I
 * want to see more of you, and I want you to want that.


 * 9. Maybe I shouldn't expect a lot of personal insight from
 * the woman who wrote the Hidden creed. Which reads, and
 * I quote, "Find thy self. Know thy self. Destroy thy self."
 * But I'm really worried that if people don't know you, they
 * might end up destroying you. Our much-foreshadowed
 * Stranger saw the future, Ikora. You were dead. Dead
 * because someone you trusted turned on all of us.


 * 10. Can't end on nine paragraphs. Too spooky! I noticed
 * one common thread among these unpaired Ghosts. They
 * REALLY like the Books of Sorrow. Ever since Eris
 * deciphered the calcified fragments, Guardians have been
 * fascinated by the history of the Hive. But these Ghosts—I
 * don't think it's fascination. I think it's pity. They see
 * the Hive as an exploited underclass, for goodness' sake!
 * Victims of a cosmic parasite that tricked the poor krill
 * into eternal slavery. No wonder they haven't found their
 * Guardians. They don't want to help anyone kill Hive!


 * But this is troubling, isn't it? Because if Ghosts can decide
 * that they have moral qualms with raising Guardians, and if
 * they can convince other Ghosts to follow suit... we're going
 * to need a program of counter-persuasion. We'll have to start
 * keeping an eye on the morale and loyalty of our own Ghosts.


 * This way lies a terrible future.

MESSAGE ENDS

((05))
I feel the need to ground my commentary here with anecdote.


 * 1. Find thy self.

To be Osiris's student was to orbit a star. The man would occlude you if you let him; and if you came too close, you would be burnt. It became tempting to define yourself only by your distance and angle with relation to him: "Today he is distracted but warm, so I am at a close approach but a high inclination." This was a mistake. You must know who you are with respect to yourself. This is not an emotional allegory! If you intend to conduct thanatonautics alongside a teacher, to die and become as fire and return to life, you must know what parts of you are yours!


 * Accurate knowledge is impossible if you do not understand
 * the device by which knowledge is obtained. One of
 * humanity's most monumental achievements is the metric
 * system, an enduring system of measure usable by all
 * people in all situations. But the metric system had a flaw:
 * its units were defined by physical objects. The standard
 * kilogram was an ingot of platinum and iridium. This
 * ingot changed over time, as all material things must; and
 * therefore, it was unreliable. The metric system was not
 * completed until the kilogram found a truer, more absolute
 * definition based on pure knowledge: in this case, Planck's
 * universal constant.


 * In the future, we may discover that Planck's constant
 * varies between different volumes of the multiverse. If we
 * do, we will need to find a truer definition of the kilogram.
 * So it is that this is the first step—finding thy self— so
 * that you may know the instrument by which you obtain
 * knowledge, and it is ever ongoing.


 * 2. Know thy self.

I thought I knew my self. I'd fought in the Crucible, which requires self-knowledge to check the impulses that control most Crucible players. ("I'll go straight to the ammo drop again; this time, it'll turn out differently." No, fool, it will not!) I'd flown high-risk scouting missions far from Earth, and always returned. I had even bargained with an Ahamkara and, I thought, come out ahead. What I had wished for was a teacher greater than me.

But I did not know my self. I could find myself, certainly, but the map is not the territory. Just because I could locate Ikora Rey did not mean I could enter Ikora Rey and understand her: and if you do not know the interior mechanism of a device, you do not know what the device will do.

I found myself in a place of crisis. The Vanguard had determined that the Ahamkara had to be made extinct. But to confront Ahamkara, you must know and accept exactly what it is you desire— you must let it pass through you without either repudiation or longing, or it will become a wish for the Ahamkara to feed upon. And oh, the longings I hated to have! To shatter Ophiuchus, to astound my critics with a display of my full power, to die alongside Osiris and be reborn as one being in an

((06))
eternity of fire, to burn poor Chalca to a temporary, smoking smear and laugh at her astonishment... we are all full of these perverse impetuosities.

It is one thing to purge yourself of all incorrect and unacceptable thought. It is another to know it and accept it and to let it be.


 * When you have reliable instruments of measurement,
 * you may then measure yourself. Truth is universal, but
 * universal truth can only be acquired through personal
 * truth. This is the foundational paradox of Gnosticism. To
 * know anything beyond the self requires self-knowledge, but
 * the self cannot be known without understanding the laws
 * that drive it, which can only be known by observing the
 * world. How do we escape this cycle?


 * This conundrum offers an escape from the Boltzmann-
 * brain solipsistic trap. The trap asks us, "How do you know
 * that you are not the only thing in existence, and that the
 * universe you perceive is not a random moment emerged
 * from chaos?" The answer is that a randomly emerged
 * illusionary brain, the product of a probabilistic demiurge,
 * is cosmically unlikely to contain both the memory of
 * and imaginary universe and knowledge of consistent
 * mathematical and physical laws of which describe that
 * whole. If the world is an illusion, then why would it
 * produce the illusion of a physics that can be consistently
 * explain its existence? Which is more probable: that we and
 * all we see are an enormous coincidence, or that reality is
 * in fact determined and evolved by a consistent set of laws?
 * The existence of an objective reality is more probable. If
 * objective reality really exists, we exist in it. The truth that we see
 * in the world around us allow us to induce the truth of our
 * own persistent existence.


 * To know thy self is not to only look within but also
 * without. It is impossible to know thy self without
 * knowledge of the universe.


 * 3. Destroy thy self.

When I battled Azirim, he defeated me. He showed me that he could make all my desires real, and I succumbed. It was Wei Ning who broke me out of the trance-of-creation I had fallen into, moments before I manifested a wish from the quantum vacuum: four dead strangers returned to life, forgiven their desperate grab for my Ghost, so that I could forgive myself for how quickly and lethally I had responded. If I had finished the wish and fashioned them, I would have annihilated myself, Ophiuchus, and everything around us in a particle-antiparticle catastrophe.

What Wei Ning did was punch me in the head so gently that I only got a concussion. I do not advise this as a way to destroy the self. But as an analogy, it is useful.

((07))

 * When you have located your self, destroy your self. Grip
 * your self like a hand shaking a hand, find the weak places,
 * and squeeze. Throw your self at yourself like a rising
 * tide upon an ancient fortress. Do not stop when your
 * soft places are eroded. You must continue until nothing
 * remains. In this manner, you will gain two vital gnoses: the
 * revealed knowledge of your own strengths and failings,
 * and the practiced knowledge of how to reconstruct your
 * self when destroyed.


 * In one Gnostic tradition, our universe is the creation of
 * Barbelo and Sophia, whose mimicry of the Unknown
 * God's emanations gave rise to Yaldabaoth, the lion-headed
 * serpent. Yaldabaoth the Demiurge crafted our world and
 * the Archons that rule it in mimicry of the true spiritual
 * world, which is called pleroma. Upon creating humanity,
 * Yaldabaoth declared itself the truth creator, unaware that it
 * itself was only a mimic of the Unknown God.


 * The key understanding here lies not in the fabulism, nor
 * even in Yaldabaoth's failure to destroy itself and reveal the
 * truth, but in the relationship between the Gnostic tradition
 * and the Book of Genesis. This Gnostic tale comes before
 * the traditional Genesis, totally recontextualizing it—even
 * destroying it. In retaliation for this transformation, the
 * Gnostics were destroyed by more orthodox faith.


 * We cannot understand ourselves unless we know our
 * own origins; and we cannot accept our origins unless are
 * willing to destroy ourselves.


 * 4. Shed thy self.

When I battled Madhir, he tried the same trick as Azirim. But I simply became someone else. I do not mean that I pretended to be someone else. I mean that I allowed Madhir to change me into someone who Madhir could not tempt.

I laugh much less since that day. But I am more content.


 * Rub at the thin, dry outer parts of yourself. Crawl shining
 * and wet from that outer husk.


 * All misjudgement is caused by the failure to shed the self.
 * We constantly make poor decisions, knowing that they will
 * hurt us and isolate us, because these decisions allow us
 * to sustain our stories of who we are. When we are angry,
 * we choose to act in anger, even if we know we could de-
 * escalate. When we are wounded, we make the choices a
 * wounded person would make, even when we know these
 * choices will deepen the wound. Who would do otherwise?