Inner Sight was believed to bestow its holders, called seers, the ability to divine certain natural truths, mostly about the near local future, but also about current or past events, and to evaluate - morally and in the gods' opinion - certain actions and events.

The practice was born in the Gleshrian regions, but spread throughout Nord Litchy. Cuprien, the primary documenter of the Inner Sight, discovered the practice and assigned it to the Nordics.

Inner Sight was practiced more or less the same for centuries, until it was relatively quickly wiped out after the ogre offensive into northern Litchy. Uprooted Nord communities did not continue the practice. It notably influenced the Cuprien Doomsbay movement. Meanwhile, the practice's popularity declined under ogre occupation, until it was banned by destructivists in 4 b. OW.

Divination

The seers' most notable activity was predicting the near future, mostly natural events, but also other unpredictable factors. This was a rigorous and active process, involving careful analysis of many sources of information. A seer might observe weather patterns, animal movements and behavior, the lay of the land and the flow of rivers, the situation of the Weave (if they are magically capable), and the opinions of several locals over the course of a few days before making a prediction of the future.

Some seers, those who traveled a lot, were also able to predict political events and conflicts. These were in effect little more than wandering news sources, with some extra political understanding and cunning.

The practice of Inner Sight did include some educated guesswork. The future could never be known for certain, and seers usually made quite vague assertions, but they often made assumptions about what was likely. (Virtually all known trust issues of Nords regarding the Inner Sight is not directed at the practice itself, but at the trustworthiness or ability of specific seers.) Some seers appear to have been little more than fortune-tellers, making vague and likely true statements in the vein of indicating someone will find true love in the next year, using tricks like self-fulfilling prophecies as well.

The Inner Sight was thus simultaneously a careful science based on years of experience and careful analysis of all available information, as well as a social art of soothsaying.

Ceremonial, Magical, and Occult Practices

Inner Sight in its basic form was thoroughly nonmagical, but in later centuries there is some use of actual spells, sometimes in combination with elaborate rituals that have no practical reasoning unless a God directly intervened, which must have been exceedingly rare. Other rituals (though often nonmagical ones) were at least partly founded in reason, for instance cutting up a dead animal to find its cause of death.

The most famous Inner Sight rituals, though, ones which produce grand prophecies about the distant future, seem to be solidly on the soothsaying side, though nonetheless with spectacular artifices. Some seers specialized in these kinds of prophetic rituals, and the few who were successful received great compensations for their efforts. The rituals themselves usually lasted just a few hours, involving candles, lines of salt, and magically luminescent ink in occult shapes. The rituals were also punctuated with minor spells of light and sound, and trances by the seers.

There are indications, though, that at least some of these rituals did manage to reach powers outside the room in which they were performed. One kind of Gleshrian magic-users, known as Four-Eyed seers, who held their rituals on the bare rock of the mountains, seems to have been able to consistently get in touch with Auril. It is likely that others managed to contact devils and other deities. Even if the rituals were successful, though, these beings could have given little valuable information; their participation was likely more in direct proof of their presence by some tangible manifestation, or by giving opinionated answers if validation was sought.