Bureau field guide · Article III
Removal is an act of law—and surgery.
Confiscation is the Bureau’s most feared authority. It means separating a person from a power that may already feel like a limb, a memory, or the only thing keeping them alive.
A trait may be confiscated when consent was forged, terms were broken, the origin creature is endangered, or the borrowed power has begun reproducing itself. Senior approval is preferred. Immediate action is permitted when the trait displays hunger.
Seized traits are held in specialized vessels: mirrored jars for faces, lead-lined envelopes for prophecies, bell cages for voices, and red-thread ledgers for luck. Shadows require no container. They require a room willing to stay lit.
Removal leaves an absence shaped exactly like the borrowed thing. Some subjects recover. Some discover the trait had been carrying a pain they could not survive twice. Bureau medics call this withdrawal. Inspectors tend to call it the part that follows them home.
FIELD NOTEField rule 12.1: Never promise the subject they will feel like themselves afterward.