317 - Astral Cloaking

Ritual: Astral Cloaking

Cost: 3 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Switch to a vegan or peskitarian diet if you're not on one already, no meat except fish. Once you have the stench of dead things out of your system bathe yourself in a tub of water as hot as you can bear and oil extracted from verbena. Once purified give up part of yourself permanently: destroy a career you've spent years building, suffer irrevocable injury, renounce a belief in a way you can't go back on, it must be dramatic enough for you to feel the loss.

On the culmination of your sacrifice, twist your right hand into a prescribed gesture. It's uncomfortable but you have to maintain it as long as you want the effect to continue. Some people hold themselves in position with string, tape and glue.

Effect: Demons can't track you, they might get a glimpse of you for a moment every so often but then you become a grainy, foggy blur that slides out of their mind's eye. They can't surveil you and certainly have no hope of possessing you. It has no effect on other entities.

Animals also have difficulty around you, either behaving aggressively or shying away. It's the surest way to tell whether it's working.

If you ever regain the sacrificed part of yourself the effect is reversed, you stand out like a beacon. Interest and possession attempts are likely to increase. This gets worse if you do it several times, not all versions warn against it with some instead telling the caster to "temporarily relieve themselves" of their sacrifice.