Somebody

I've Never Seen Him Before In My Life

"I chased him across three streets. Never lost sight of him once. Still could not tell you his face if you put a knife to my throat."
— City Watch Report, Saint Sebastian

There was a stretch of years, after magic returned but before anyone truly understood it again, when the most dangerous thing in the world was not power, but assumption. People believed they were rediscovering what had been lost. In truth, they were rebuilding it from fragments, guesswork, and half remembered principles pulled from the bones of older civilizations. The results were uneven. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes deeply unsettling. The spell does not attempt to hide the caster in any traditional sense. It does not bend light, obscure sound, or interfere with physical perception. When it is used, the target sees the caster exactly as they are, with perfect clarity in the moment. There is no illusion to pierce, no distortion to question, and no magical signature that suggests concealment. By every immediate measure, nothing is wrong. The problem begins the moment the mind tries to hold onto what it has just seen. Details refuse to remain stable. The shape of the caster’s face cannot be fixed in memory. Features slide between possibilities that never quite resolve into certainty. If the target attempts to recall what they saw, they find themselves describing contradictions without realizing it. Hair that was dark becomes uncertain. Height shifts slightly with each retelling. Distinctive features dissolve into vague impressions that cannot be trusted. The memory is not erased. It is degraded in a way that feels natural, as though it was never fully formed to begin with. What makes the spell effective is what it does not touch. The target remembers the interaction clearly. They recall the conversation, the actions taken, and the consequences that followed. They know someone was there. They understand that person mattered. What they cannot do is anchor those events to a reliable physical identity. The result is a kind of cognitive dissonance that most people do not recognize immediately. They feel certain about what happened, but uncertain about who made it happen, and that gap is where the spell does its work. This effect reflects a broader shift in magical thinking that took hold during the later years of reconstruction. Early efforts focused on restoring the grand expressions of arcane power that defined the world before the Shattering. Over time, however, practitioners began to understand that control over perception and memory could be just as valuable as control over the physical world. Archaeomancers, in particular, played a role in this transition, as their work with unstable relics and fragmented enchantments forced them to confront how magic behaved when its original context was lost. There is an unsettling implication in spells like Somebody. It demonstrates that identity, at least in the eyes of others, is more fragile than most people are comfortable admitting. A person can be seen, heard, and understood, and still fail to leave behind a coherent image of themselves. The spell does not make you invisible. It makes you unresolvable. That distinction matters, because it means the world continues to react to you while simultaneously failing to retain you. In practice, this makes Somebody a tool of quiet influence rather than overt deception. It is useful in negotiations where recognition would be a liability, in investigations where presence must be acknowledged but not traced, and in any situation where being remembered clearly would create problems later. It does not prevent suspicion, and it does not erase accountability. A determined mind can still recognize patterns, connect events, and conclude that the same individual was involved more than once. What they cannot do is prove it through description alone. That limitation is important, because it keeps the spell grounded in the imperfect reality it was born from. Like many creations of the Second Alchemical Renaissance, it is not a flawless restoration of lost knowledge. It is a functional solution shaped by incomplete understanding, built to solve a specific problem without fully grasping the broader consequences. There is a quiet, lingering discomfort associated with its use, even among those who rely on it regularly. People are accustomed to being remembered, even if only in passing. Faces are one of the ways the world confirms that a person was present, that they occupied space, that they existed in a moment that others can recall. Somebody interferes with that expectation in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to feel. It leaves behind the kind of absence that does not draw attention to itself immediately. Instead, it settles in slowly, in the gaps between memory and certainty, where a person realizes they know exactly what happened and cannot say who was responsible. That realization rarely comes all at once. It builds over time, each failed attempt to recall adding weight to a question that has no satisfying answer. And once that question takes hold, it tends to linger longer than the spell ever does.