Unacknowledged authority
The Unwritten
No one has ever confirmed the name
The Effacer authority, whose existence is argued from gaps in the record.
The Unwritten are held to be a standing Effacer authority, and the entire case for them is built out of holes. A council decision with no minute. A career that simply stops. A shipment entered on one side of a ledger and nowhere on the other. Each is explicable on its own, and the argument has never rested on any single one of them. It rests on how many there are.
None of it can be settled, which is both the point and the trouble. An Effacer who succeeds leaves no sign of having acted, and one who fails is indistinguishable from a person with no ability whatever, so this is the only classification in the catalogue producing identical evidence whether or not it is real. Velyr files the role, sets out at length what it would do, and declines in the same entry to say that anybody does it.
What makes the belief durable is that it suits nearly everyone. A government with an awkward gap in its record may attribute the gap. A rival may imply the gap was manufactured. Neither is obliged to prove anything, and the accusation and the excuse turn out to be the same sentence in different mouths.
The Unwritten, should they exist, have never been known to investigate, testify, threaten or ask for anything at all. That is either a discipline of remarkable severity or an accurate description of a body which is not there, and eleven centuries of Velyrian scholarship have not shifted the question an inch either way.
The Twofold — Gloam
Gloam here is refusal carried to its end: what is put beyond recovery cannot be argued with. The Unwritten do not investigate and do not testify.