“To protect, in secrecy”

“To protect, in secrecy” is the Checquy’s mandate and the principle that gives its secrecy a purpose. In the face of a renewed Grafter threat, Myfanwy Thomas invokes it as the reason the two organizations cannot simply fight in public: protection means preserving the hidden world as well as defending it.

Meaning and Function

The phrase links the Checquy’s protective role to concealment. Myfanwy argues that even if the Checquy could win a war against the Grafters, an international battle would be difficult to hide, and England would not be the same afterward. The mandate therefore places limits on what victory can mean: defeating an enemy by exposing the supernatural world could also destroy the conditions the Checquy exists to safeguard.

Historical Stakes

The Isle of Wight invasion gives the principle a bloody history. In 1677, Grafter creations emerged from the ocean and supernatural war began on British soil. The Checquy sent Pawns under the Rooks’ command; fighting lasted three weeks, hundreds of civilians died, and the invaders were brought down at the cost of dozens of Checquy soldiers. The conflict ended only when Rook John Perry joined his mind to the Grafter general’s and shot himself, killing them both.

Afterward, the Checquy negotiated with Belgium rather than pursue a wider invasion. The treaty required the dissolution of the Grafters, and the Checquy oversaw the destruction of their people, experiments, facilities, and altered entities. This settlement concealed the Checquy’s own weakened state as well as ending the immediate threat. The history makes secrecy more than a slogan: it is bound to the containment of violence and to the organization’s effort to keep the supernatural conflict from becoming a public war.

Secrecy, Threat, and Alliance

Centuries later, Graaf Ernst von Suchtlen explains that the new Grafter strategy was not an invasion. The earlier attempt had been disastrous, and the modern world made the conquest of a country impossible to conceal. The Grafters instead sought leverage over the Checquy, whose control of a secret world made the two organizations’ continued concealment a shared vulnerability.

Myfanwy recognizes that fighting would violate the Checquy’s mandate, but also sees that the Grafter presence has itself been hidden from both the Checquy and von Suchtlen’s own partner. She concludes that he has come to negotiate an alliance rather than demand surrender. The phrase thus marks a pivot from an inherited conflict toward a proposed union: secrecy remains the common constraint, but it may also create a reason for former enemies to cooperate.

Changing the Meaning of the Mandate

Von Suchtlen recalls that the Checquy had razed Grafter homes, killed his friends, and burned his corpse; at first, the survivors sought only to hide and inflict pain in return. Over time, he came to regard the Checquy as a flawed but effective governing body with noble aims. He says his infiltration and establishment of collaborators were intended to persuade the Checquy that joining the organizations served its interests, not simply to harm it.

That history complicates Myfanwy’s appeal to secrecy. The mandate is a defense against a destructive public war, but secrecy has also enabled infiltration, concealment, and coercive pressure. Von Suchtlen describes his approach as demonstrating mutual advantage while making clear that the Grafters have no intention of dying if the Checquy refuses their continued existence. The phrase’s significance lies in this tension: protection requires secrecy, yet a secret order can be threatened from within, and preserving it may demand a new relationship with the very people it once tried to destroy.