Belgium

Belgium is the setting of the Grafters’ origins and the state whose rulers alternately sponsored, concealed, and dismantled their work. Its story links a fifteenth-century alliance between wealthy patrons and experimental scientists to the invasion of the Isle of Wight in 1677, the Checquy’s retaliatory settlement, and the Grafters’ eventual return as a clandestine power seeking a different relationship with their former enemy.

Historical setting and the Grafters’ beginnings

The Grafters, formally called the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen, arose among alchemists in the territories that would eventually become Belgium. In the fifteenth century, wealthy nobles joined the brotherhood as investors. Their money helped the scientists develop processes that worked: rather than achieving the investors’ presumed aim of turning base materials into gold, the experiments produced techniques for transforming and improving bodies. A later account describes mice, hounds, and horses being cut apart and reassembled, and the prospect of replacing a damaged leg was enough to persuade one noble to finance the research.

The sponsors’ interest was not simply scientific. The new methods gave the brotherhood power with which it might seize political influence, but Belgium’s rulers made an accommodation rather than fighting a war. The wealthy backers met the ruler of the time, and the Grafters became officially affiliated with the government. They received funds and permission to pursue their studies, while the political landscape around them repeatedly changed. Because later rulers apparently did not know about the project, the organization was able to continue without becoming an instrument of successive regimes.

A growing international threat

For centuries, the Grafters concentrated on refining their work and paid little attention to political affairs. The Checquy knew something of their existence but initially regarded them as an obscure scientific concern. That assessment shifted in the early seventeenth century, when a Checquy operative’s report described the efficiency of the Grafters’ weapons and prompted renewed attention. Under Alabaster Lady Margaret Jones, seven operatives were sent to Belgium to gather intelligence from the estates where the brotherhood worked.

The information they brought back showed that the threat was no longer confined to laboratories. The Grafters had an augmented regiment mounted on enormous, specially altered creatures. Their own government’s leader, impressed by the military possibilities, encouraged them to develop their strength without informing the King of Spain, to whom he owed allegiance. Belgium therefore became the base from which a government-backed military ambition could be pursued discreetly, even as the appearance of the Grafters’ creations made public deployment politically risky.

In 1677, the Grafters’ forces crossed the water and brought supernatural warfare to British soil in the invasion of the Isle of Wight. The Checquy’s response ended the incursion, but the battle left both sides weakened. After the surviving Grafter general was killed along with Rook John Perry, the English ruler Charles II favored invading Belgium. The Checquy leadership argued against it: their own troops had been decimated, and their most capable commanders were dead. Negotiations followed instead, while the Checquy concealed how precarious its position had become.

Dissolution and apparent disappearance

The settlement required the Belgian ruler to dissolve the Grafters. Funding was withdrawn, experiments were stopped, estates and possessions were confiscated, and the Checquy oversaw the dismantling of the organization. Its leaders were publicly executed in front of witnesses, while scientists and their work were eliminated through other means. The facilities were burned, and altered beings were put to death. The thoroughness of the operation was meant to leave no doubt that the brotherhood had ceased to exist.

For the Checquy, the destruction appeared complete. Its records indicated that the leaders had been executed and their remains destroyed; the project’s other participants and resources had also been accounted for. The apparent end of the Grafters became a settled historical conclusion, and their extraordinary methods were remembered as a lost chapter rather than an ongoing danger. Belgium’s role in the settlement thus concealed an important distinction: the organization had been dismantled in public and deprived of much of its strength, but the surviving Grafters had not all been eliminated.

Survival and the later Belgian account

Centuries later, Graaf Ernst von Suchtlen identifies himself with the Belgian Grafter history and describes the destruction as a catastrophe from which a remnant survived. He says that he and his cousin had taken new bodies before the Checquy’s counterstrike. They watched their own apparent deaths being presented before the kings of the two countries, then left the court and escaped. The account overturns the official conclusion that the executions had ended the brotherhood: its founders’ ability to survive in altered bodies had made the public display of their deaths a deception.

The survivors had lost estates, personnel, and important research. They relied on hidden funds and fallback positions, and it took decades to rebuild their technical capacity. Their later work operated on a smaller scale and with greater secrecy, but the Grafters continued to develop their power. The Belgian’s account also distinguishes the original invasion from the later strategy. He says that the Grafters were no longer seeking to conquer a country: modern conditions made conquest impossible to conceal, while their own existence, like that of the Checquy, depended on secrecy.

The remembered destruction nevertheless shaped the survivors’ relationship with the Checquy. Graaf Ernst describes an initial desire to conceal the Grafters’ survival and inflict pain on the organization that had destroyed their homes and killed their associates. Over time, he says, his own resentment diminished. He came to regard the Checquy as a flawed but potentially suitable governing force and sought rapprochement, while continuing to establish collaborators inside it because its members remained wary of the Grafters. Belgium’s history therefore matters not just as a national backdrop but as the source of a long, concealed conflict: a settlement that appeared to end the threat instead left a surviving organization able to return, infiltrate its adversary, and propose cooperation from a position of hidden strength.