You are not wondering whether. You already have a name.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years I was the person that name would have come to, so I can tell you exactly what changes once you know.
Three things change. Two of them make the work easier and one of them makes it urgent.
What knowing changes
The source is open. Somebody is alive and holding this, which means clearing will buy you weeks rather than ending it.
That is the urgent part. A thing nobody is feeding thins out on its own. A thing with a person behind it does not.
It can be sealed. A route that was used once can be closed against being used again, and that is only possible when there is a known route rather than a vague weight.
It can be sent back. Which is a separate decision and the last section of this page.
The name is information, not material
This catches almost everybody, because every instruction in circulation says to write the name down.
Knowing who it is tells me a great deal. When it started, what the brief probably was, whether it was sent once or is being maintained.
It does not go into the working.
A name held with intent behind it is the first move of the thing that was done to you. Put it on paper and you have not cut a road. You have laid one, from your side, with your handwriting on it.
Tell me the name. Do not write it.
What not to do first
Contact them. In any form, for any reason, including a reasonable one.
Not a message asking what their problem is. Not a mutual friend raising it gently. Not a look across a room that lets them know you know.
Two reasons, and the second one is the one people underestimate.
Contact reopens the channel, and the channel is what is being used.
And it tells them it is working. Somebody who has been wondering whether any of this does anything now has an answer, and in my experience they do not stop after that. They increase.
The mutual friend is the one people think is safe. It is the least safe of all of them, because it arrives as gossip and gossip always completes the circuit.
Say nothing to anybody until it is finished. Not to them, not to friends, and nothing online.
The order, when you know who
Same as any removal for the first three stages, and then one extra that only exists in this situation.
- Clear. Coarse salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off downward before you get out.
- No bath? Coarse salt in a bowl of hot water poured over the shoulders in the shower does the same work.
- Guard. Roasted salt carried in cloth, and cones at the door changed each morning.
- Cut. The route, over three consecutive nights, with no name on the paper.
- Seal. Closing that specific route so the same hand cannot use it again.
The first three are written out stage by stage here: the seven methods and the layer each one reaches.
The fourth is the one that matters when there is a person, and it is the one nobody does alone, because sealing against a particular hand means holding that hand steady in your attention while you work.
You cannot hold somebody steadily while you are frightened of them.
Sending it back is a different decision
People ask for this in a lowered voice, as though it is the shameful part.
What was sent goes back the way it came. That is not revenge and it is not an attack. It is a thing being returned to where it was made, and it was never yours to hold.
You perform nothing. You face nobody. Nothing comes back on you, because you never sent anything.
I remove. I do not send.
The full account of how a return is carried out, and the two situations where I tell people not to, is here: return to sender, and who should not use it.
If you are wrong about who
Then nothing is lost, and this is worth saying plainly, because the fear of accusing the wrong person stops people writing to me for months.
The work is done on the route, not on the person you have in mind. If the route runs somewhere else, that is where it is cut.
Nothing is aimed at an innocent person by mistake, because nothing is aimed at a person at all.
A great many people arrive certain of a name and turn out to be looking in the wrong direction. It changes the reading. It does not change the removal.
One man was certain it was a colleague who had made no secret of disliking him.
It had started six weeks after his father’s estate was settled, and the colleague had nothing to do with any of it.
Loud dislike is rarely the one. The people who say it out loud have usually discharged it by saying it.
If you know who and want it off
Tell me four things.
Who you think it is and what happened between you. When it started. What has been happening since. And whether anything was said to you at the time.
That last one carries more weight than the rest of it put together.
You have been holding a name on your own and had nowhere to put it. Put it here.
