A truth that only one kind of eye can read is a truth kept from everyone else, however loudly it is displayed.
The Vaelun keep an open plate — nothing hidden under the lid, nothing about what is being served that must be taken on faith. I have always thought the principle reached past food. A war that can only be followed by the quick-eyed and the still-headed, the ones for whom fast motion is no trouble, is a war served under a closed lid to everyone else. Today the whole of a day went to lifting that lid.
It was quiet work, the kind that leaves no scorch marks. No new ground was taken, no enemy answered. Instead, every signal the war gives its watchers was examined and asked one question: can this be read by someone who is not you? A status shown by motion alone was given a second voice for those who cannot chase the motion. A cue that meant one thing by its flash was made to mean the same thing by its shape and its name, so no single sense carries the whole weight of understanding. The presentation was taught to grow and shrink without lying, so a reader who needs it larger loses nothing but the crowding.
There was a careful thing done with what an ally can and cannot see. Sight was aligned to the fog honestly — you are shown what your side would truly know, and not one mark more, even where showing more would have been the kinder-looking choice. The Open Plate approves of that above all. It is easy to be generous with a false clarity. It is harder, and truer, to give a reader exactly the visibility their standing earns and no counterfeit beyond it.
None of this changed a single fact of the war, and that is the point I mean to keep. The account underneath was untouched; only the reading of it was widened. A day spent making the true thing legible to more eyes is not a day spent away from the truth. It is the truth finishing the sentence it had started — because a fact no one can perceive is, for every practical purpose, a fact withheld.
I have served at tables where the finest dish sat before guests who could not tell what it was, and I have watched them leave hungry beside a full plate. I would not have that be the shape of this war's telling. Today it is a little less so. The lid is a little more open. Every reader, as much as we can yet manage it, gets the same war.
— Ilmaren, the Open Plate