England is the site of the Checquy’s foundational confrontation with the Grafters and the country whose protection defines the organization’s mandate. The 1677 invasion brought monstrous Grafter creations onto British soil; the Checquy’s victory came at a terrible cost, and its apparent settlement left behind both a terrifying institutional memory and a danger that the organization would eventually have to face again.

The 1677 Invasion

In 1677, the Grafters chose the Isle of Wight as a contained preliminary target for testing their creations. The attack became the beginning of supernatural war on British soil: the Checquy deployed its Pawns under the direct command of its Rooks, and fighting continued for three weeks. Hundreds of civilians died. The Checquy gradually wore down the invaders, but each Grafter creation cost dozens of Checquy soldiers to bring down.

One battle brought together twelve troops described as the last anthropophagi in the British Isles. They killed seventeen monsters, but the fighting leveled an entire village and left surrounding fields toxic. Pawn Hamish McNeil, who had leprosy, released a virulent, abnormal disease among Grafter troops; their bodies then fell apart under their own shuddering exertions. The episode made the land itself part of the battle’s consequences: victory did not undo the destruction or contamination left behind.

The last surviving invader was a massive Grafter general apparently impervious to every attack the Checquy could muster. Rook John Perry, the only surviving Rook, linked his mind to the general’s and shot himself in the head, killing them both. The invasion ended through an act that joined the Checquy commander’s death to the enemy’s destruction, rather than through an uncomplicated military triumph.

Treaty and Apparent Extinction

After the fighting, Charles II reportedly wanted to invade Belgium, believing the Checquy had demonstrated its superiority. The organization’s Lords and Ladies argued against it: its forces had been decimated, and its most capable generals were dead. Charles accepted their reasoning, and negotiations with the Belgian ruler followed. The Checquy concealed how precarious its position had become, while the prospect of its supposed strength helped secure terms in its favor.

The treaty required the Belgian ruler to dissolve the Grafters. Their funding was withdrawn, experiments ended, and estates and property confiscated. The Checquy supervised the dismantling in detail: leaders were executed before numerous witnesses and their remains obliterated; scientists were discreetly killed, their bodies fed to pigs, and the pigs then killed and burned. Facilities and barracks were burned, estates redistributed to the church, and altered entities—including humans—put to death. That process took months, in part because the creatures were so tenacious. Servants and bureaucrats involved were pressed to forget their former work and take new occupations.

The Checquy believed the eradication complete. Its records described no unexplained disappearances beyond those it had engineered, and no member left unaccounted for. Some regretted the loss of the Grafters’ revolutionary knowledge, but the prevailing view was that their destruction was preferable. The incident became proof, in the institution’s own account, of the Checquy’s importance and capacity. That reassuring official conclusion would later prove incomplete.

A Threat Kept in Memory

The Grafters did not surface during the Second World War, and decades passed without hostile action. The Checquy continued to suspect that its old enemies might still exist, but other responsibilities drew its attention elsewhere. Court members also judged that the memory of the invasion remained too terrifying among ordinary Checquy members for evidence of Grafter survival to be widely shared. At the Estate, students instead circulated stories about them to frighten one another.

That silence did not make the danger seem slight. The Grafters remained one of the most frightening enemies the Checquy had faced, and their return in force was understood to threaten disaster. When Myfanwy examined old, blurry sketches and descriptions of their creations, she encountered the invasion as both institutional history and grotesque physical evidence: the illustrations showed glittering carapaces and jagged barbs, while the records described scaled, fanged horse-like animals as large as Humvees. The gap between the Checquy’s confident account of victory and the surviving images gave the past a continuing power to unsettle the present.

The Threat Returns

Centuries after the invasion, Myfanwy learned that a Grafter leader was in England. After a fax carrying a threat was traced to a source in London, she told Eckhart that the organization needed to strike there and asked him to oversee the strike team while she was stuck in Reading. The discovery connected the long-dormant historical enemy to an immediate operation on English soil.

The danger proved larger than a renewed invasion. Graaf Ernst von Suchtlen explained that the Grafters had not been interested in conquering England after the disastrous first effort. The 1677 invasion, he said, had been a feint: a visible threat meant to distract while the Grafters placed a more consequential danger against the Checquy. In a modern world where conquering a country could not be concealed, he argued, the secret supernatural order itself was the more plausible target. A secret takeover could remain concealed because the Checquy, like the Grafters, could not allow its existence to become public knowledge.

Von Suchtlen confirmed that some senior Grafters favored taking control of the Checquy by force, and Myfanwy recognized that even a victorious war would leave England changed and make secrecy difficult to maintain. She argued that the organization’s duty was to protect in secret, and that von Suchtlen had entered England secretly—not only from the Checquy but from his own partner. She inferred that he had come not to surrender, but to negotiate an alliance between the organizations. His account reframed the old invasion: England had been the site of a catastrophic clash, but the enduring contest concerned the survival and control of the hidden world.

England and the Checquy’s Mandate

The country’s significance in the narrative lies in the contrast between visible devastation and concealed conflict. The 1677 war killed civilians, destroyed a village, and poisoned fields, yet the Checquy’s subsequent treaty and eradication campaign were designed to prevent wider knowledge of what had happened. Centuries later, the same commitment to secrecy constrained how the Checquy could respond to the returning Grafter threat: an open international war might defeat an enemy but expose the world the organization existed to protect.

England is therefore more than the territory defended in the first battle. It is the setting in which the Checquy’s history of sacrifice, its confidence in the Grafters’ destruction, and its vulnerability to a secret takeover converge. The early victory established the organization’s power at immense cost; the later threat showed that military victory and administrative erasure could not guarantee that an enemy had truly disappeared.