“Sapientia et Magia” – wisdom and magic – reads the Griffiths family motto, carved into a crest above a home that stopped being anyone’s idea of wise or magical long before the Agents ever forced their way in through a boarded window. By the time they found it, acting on a map traded for Agent Hawke’s own exhumed tooth, the house had gone to gang squatters, rot, and worse.

FILE NOTES

A walking corpse in a woman’s dress and an offset wig met them just inside – the first sign the building held more than looters. The gang holding the ground floor didn’t last long against three Agents and a second wave of the dead. What they found afterward was worse than either: notes tacked to the corpses themselves, rigged to detonate on reading; recently used rooms littered with charred quills, an empty ink bottle, and a burnt animal carcass; and, upstairs, a scrap of parchment behind the headboard bearing a detailed anatomical diagram in High Jouvaine script – a girl’s face, scored through.

A partly burnt playbill among the debris was the thread that actually led somewhere: a limited run of a show called An Absence of Light, at the Regent Theatre.

STATUS: Filed under Locations. Abandoned, condemned, evidence catalogued. Griffiths has not returned to it since.