Whatever the truth, these treasure hunts are also part of a long history of fascinations with secrets and hidden things which continue to exert their pull from underneath the earth, legends of conspiracies and betrayals that reach further and deeper than any motivation ascribed to them by historical accuracies, mind-boggling accounts of greed and revenge, stories of pirates, thieves, brigands, and cutthroats that live precisely in the dense mist between history and legend.

For the mirage is a form of desert sorcery that combines all the many experiences of unreality, manipulating imaginary states as if they were the different steps of a ladder: the dream, the nightmare, the hallucination, the fantasy, the vision, and the simulation.

The masters often bring another conceptual identity into their midst: the mercenary. The mercenary is a paid figure, a hired gun always highly skilled in war, her body purchased to do what no other is willing, to kill or die in the same breath, but this also makes her an unbound being, mercurial and disconnected, moving without facial expression or emotional pulse, like a sleepwalker with vacant eyes.

The masters are often tied to the practice of idolatry, the worshipping of carved images or statues. These figures would design and forge idols for their own movements, out of stone or wood or bronze, often in the shapes of fearful creatures, half-human/half-animal or completely unrecognizable.

The master learns to orchestrate oblivion (realms of obscurity, forgetting, disappearance). She plays at nothingness like a music box, knowing when time must perish of itself.

The masters learn to orchestrate miracles involving Movement. These include the ability of flight, the ability of teleportation (jumping in space) or surface-climbing (walking on water or up walls), and the abilities of Invisibility or Disappearance.

The masters have always been connected to the realm of miracle, and the first miracles revolve around Time. These include the ability of Time-Travel, the ability of Premonition (or seeing the future), and the abilities of Necromancy or Resurrection (to raise the dead or to bring oneself back from death).