Content warning
Detailed accounts of coordinated political assassination, the deliberate targeting and killing of non-combatant civilians (including children, the elderly, and infants) during religious services, the staging of bodies for psychological effect, the use of a captive spouse as a witness to her husband’s killing, and the systematic destruction of an entire faith community by a state paramilitary. The article is written carefully. It is not softened. The sections covering the week after the strike, and the recovered Bureau inventory, go into specifics that may be difficult to read.
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Like every page on this wiki, the article is fiction set within the lore of Landfall. The characters described here are played by real people; players are not the characters. Acts attributed to Seraphine du Roscarte, Sovarre, and the operatives of the strike are not statements about the views, values, or real-life behavior of the players behind the roles.
Overview
The Night of the Veil was the coordinated assassination of the eight figures at the heart of Larrism on a single night, executed by operatives of Sovarre under the personal direction of Seraphine du Roscarte. All six defendants in the active criminal case were killed, alongside two senior Larrist figures whose names appear in no court file but who had served as clergy and political advisors to Huge Larry in the months leading up to the strike. Every body was marked with an “S” cut by the same blade.
The strike was followed within seventy-two hours by the destruction of Larrist chapels, settlements, and homes across the former Idesian and ExoVinian territories. By the end of the second week the lay membership of the faith was effectively dead. The Bureau of Religious Oversight’s later best estimate of the surviving membership was fewer than thirty people. The Bureau’s standing position on what happened in the south during that week has not been published since The Blaze forced it into hiding.
Sovarre never claimed the operation. Sovarre never explained it. The silence was, on the available evidence, part of the design.
The Strike
The eight targets were not concentrated in any one location. They were in six different cities and two further fortified estates across the former Idesian and ExoVinian territories, several of them under personal guard. The operation was simultaneous within an hour. Whoever planned it had pre-positioned operatives in each location, had information about each target’s movements that the targets’ own staffs did not appear to have, and had instructions for what to do with each body that varied by victim and were carried out exactly.
This was the part of the operation that became, in the years after, the part everyone remembered. The brutality of what was done to the victims has been read by some historians as evidence of the strike’s haste. The evidence does not support that reading. Every staging, every position, every cut was deliberate.
Huge Larry
Found alone in his chambers in the bishop’s residence at the central Larrist church in New Ides. The chrome helmet that he had never been seen without had been pried off and set on a side table. His face is not described in any account that survives. The single operator who saw it left no written record before disappearing from Sovarre’s roster within the year. The throat was opened with one cut. The “S” was carved on bare skin between the collarbones, in the patch where the helmet’s chinstrap had rested for years. A loaf of his numbered sacred bread sat untouched on the bed beside him.
Isaac Acentino
Found in his bed in the King’s apartments of the Idesian palace, fully clothed, intoxicated, the door undisturbed from the inside. A drink stood on the nightstand half-finished. The carving was made while he was alive. The servants in the adjacent room, when interviewed afterward, reported hearing nothing. The Bureau’s coroner concluded that the cut had been deliberately slow. Isaac would have understood what was happening for at least the first portion of it. The wine had not been drugged.
Exoticus Exo
Caught at the evening meal in the ExoVinian capital. His wife was at the table. She was not killed. She was made to remain in her chair through the act, and through the carving, and through the time it took for the operator to clean the blade. The Bureau’s recovery team, called in later, found her still in the chair. She did not speak for three weeks. Her later testimony, when she gave it, did not record what was said in the room. The Bureau report observes that she may not have been spoken to at all.
Testimony of Exoticus Exo's widow, recorded by the Bureau three weeks after the strike. She gave the statement in a single sitting and never spoke for the record again.
The first cut opened him at the collarbone. The second was the throat. He was still gasping as best he could through the blood running down his open neck for the third. The man held my husband’s face in one hand and worked with the other and my husband’s eyes did not close. They did not close. The man was patient about it. When my husband stopped moving the man set the blade down on the table beside the bread, took the cloth from his pocket, and wiped his hands. Then he picked the blade back up and turned it over twice in the light to see where the blood had dried, and he used my napkin to clean it because my napkin was closer. He did not look at me. Not when he came in. Not when he started. Not when he was finished. The fork I had laid for my husband was still on the cloth when they carried the body out, and the man stepped over the fork without seeing it.
Kevinus Exo
Taken from his home in the night. The “S” was carved on him first, in a position visible to anyone passing, before the killing cut. He was then carried, still alive, to a public square in the ExoVinian capital and laid at the foot of the statue of the previous ExoVinian sovereign in a posture the operators had composed in advance. He died on the stone. No witnesses heard the carriage that brought him.
Louis Lime and Zack Arn
The two junior defendants were found in a single residence, in adjoining rooms. Both had been carved while alive, and the carvings on both were made by the same operator using the same blade. Neither was bound. Neither had reached a weapon. The Bureau’s recovery team noted that the operator had clearly chosen to allow each of them to know that the other was dying in the next room.
The Two Unnamed
Two senior Larrist figures were killed on the night who were not named in any case file. They had served as clergy and political advisors to Huge Larry in the months leading up to the strike. Their identities were not preserved in any official record that survives. Whether the omission was a Bureau choice (in deference to surviving family) or a Sovarre one (so that the strike’s targeting logic could not be reverse-engineered from the names) is not known. They were killed in their homes. The carving was the same. The composition of their bodies was not.
The Bodies
The bodies were not hidden. There was no attempt to obscure the strike. Each was left where it fell, or in Kevinus’s case where Sovarre had placed it, and the morning after found them exactly there. Bureau recovery teams, called in by Imperial intelligence at first light, photographed each scene before any disturbance. The photographs were sealed and have not been released since The Blaze.
The carving was uniform in form and made by the same make of blade. The “S” was clean, single-stroke, and placed on each victim in a different anatomical location. The variation was deliberate, and was read at the time as Sovarre’s way of signing each killing as the work of the same hand without producing two identical bodies.
The position of each body was the second signature. Where Sovarre had time, the bodies were composed; where it did not, they were left as they had fallen. The composition matters because it tells the observer what the strike was for. Kevinus at the feet of the old ExoVinian sovereign. Huge Larry beside his helmet and his bread, in a configuration that read as a renunciation. Isaac on the bed of the king he had styled himself, with the unfinished drink. The arrangements are not the work of a regime concerned with deniability. They are the work of a regime concerned with legibility.
The Week That Followed
The strike was the prelude. Within seventy-two hours of the assassinations, the first explosions occurred in the largest of the Larrist settlements south of New Ides. Within a week, similar explosions had occurred in every Larrist settlement of meaningful size in the former Idesian and ExoVinian territories.
The timing was the cruelty. The devices were not placed randomly. They were placed for detonation during gatherings. A chapel where forty-six adherents had assembled for a memorial service for the assassinated leadership collapsed inward seventeen minutes after the service began. There were no survivors. A separate chapel was destroyed during a baptismal ceremony with children present; the surviving Bureau record lists nine adherents of confirmed adult age and an additional, uncounted number of minors. A third was destroyed during a wedding under the cult’s bonded-sacrament rite. The bride and groom were among the dead, alongside both families.
Isaac Acentino’s Nouveaux Ides vineyard estate, central to the Larrist economy under his rule and the place Amlooi’s diary remembers as the seat of “the winemaker,” was destroyed three nights into the sweep. The wine cellar Amlooi describes spending his evenings in was shattered. The estate had, in the days after Isaac’s death in the strike, taken in staff families and adherents displaced from smaller sites; the Bureau’s count of the dead inside lists fourteen adults of confirmed age and an undisclosed number of children. The shared mansion that Amlooi Alvaldi had been given by the Larrist regime was destroyed on the same night. The metal-clad citizen who had shared the mansion with Amlooi went missing in the rubble and was never recovered.
The destruction proceeded in a particular order across the south. The main road first. Then the smaller villages. Then the outposts. The order was the order in which Larrism had spread. Operators stayed at each site. Survivors who emerged from the rubble were, by Bureau report, ushered back into the rubble. The reports rely on the accounts of two Sovarre operators who defected later in the epoch and whom the Bureau treated as credible. The accounts do not give the survivors’ names. The accounts do not give the operators’ names either.
Smoke remained over the southern duchies for fourteen days. The smell reached neighboring nations and was the first indication outside the former Idesian and ExoVinian territories that what was happening had moved beyond the assassinations.
Nordvik Alvaldi
The Bureau’s later position, never formally published, was that the broader sweep across the south was Sovarre’s work. The position is correct. It is also incomplete.
A specific subset of the destruction was carried out by a figure inside the Imperial cabinet. Nordvik Alvaldi, who held governance during Empress Kara’s mourning period, was during that week undergoing what his household physician later described as the worst psychotic break of his adult life. The content of the break was Seraphine du Roscarte. Through the week he was heard repeatedly speaking of “the quartz lady,” her whispers, and the ideas she was, in his words, giving him. He was not in his right mind. He was also, in those hours, present at several of the southern detonations. He set the charges himself.
The sites Nordvik personally triggered were small in count but unbearable in symbol. Isaac Acentino’s wine cellar at Nouveaux Ides, where Isaac had once kept the vintages his wife Avery had drunk during her exile. The mansion the Larrist regime had given Amlooi Alvaldi, Nordvik’s own brother. The chapel where Amlooi had received the numbered bread “22.” These were sites tied to the people Avery had loved before her death, and to the brother Nordvik had spent a lifetime alternately resenting and protecting. The Bureau’s working theory, recorded internally and never released, was that Seraphine had reached into Nordvik in this period the way she had once reached into the part of herself that had loved Avery, and that the sites Nordvik chose were the inversion of that reach. The theory is conjecture. The fact of Nordvik’s presence at the detonations is not.
Amlooi’s Diary is the only contemporaneous witness account. The relevant entry was written after Amlooi returned to the south and found his own mansion destroyed.
From Amlooi's Diary, the entry written after Amlooi's return to the ruined settlements
And above the chaos, the brother of my lord screamed, raving about the quartz lady, her whispers, her truth. Not even our huge god could stop it.
Nordvik did not deny the events when they were put to him afterward. He could not. He had no continuous memory of the week; the account he eventually gave, under household care months later, came in fragments. The fragments matched the Bureau’s reconstruction. He had no memory of the chapel collapsing. He had a single image, returning across the rest of his life, of a doorway whose frame was on fire and a small shoe on the ground at the threshold. He did not know whose shoe it was.
The wider Sovarre operation, the sweep that killed the lay membership in their chapels and settlements across the south, was not stopped by Nordvik’s involvement and was not directed by him. Sovarre would have done its work whether Nordvik had broken or not. The specific sites he triggered are best understood as a parallel hand, working under the same general influence at the same time.
What he did is not the same as what Sovarre did. What the state then did with the record of what he did is the next section.
The Coverup and the Foreshortened Mourning
Nordvik’s role in the destruction was not made public.
The Imperial cabinet, in the days after the explosions ended, made a coordinated decision to suppress the connection between Nordvik and the sites he had personally triggered. The official Imperial line was that all of the southern destruction was Sovarre’s work. The Bureau of Religious Oversight, the only state body in a position to contradict that line, was instructed by the Crown to keep its findings sealed until the regent’s recovery had stabilized. The Bureau complied out of respect to it’s mutually beneficial partnership with the Empire, aided by assurances that Nordvik posed no further danger to civilians. The records have not been opened since The Blaze.
The coverup served Nordvik. It served the Empire, in the sense that public knowledge of a temporary co-sovereign personally setting charges in a state of psychosis during the mourning of his predecessor would have been functionally impossible for the state to absorb. Lilaris was, in that week, still putting itself back together after the Idesian crisis; the legitimacy of the throne could not also be carrying a story like this one.
The cost was carried somewhere else.
Kara had filed the case in her own name against her father. She had drafted the language. She had watched the trial collapse, and watched Sovarre kill every defendant including Isaac before the case could resume. Her father’s body had been returned to her in the kingdom’s intelligence custody, with the carved “S” still on it. The mourning period that should have given her time to process all of this was, by the standard Imperial protocols of the period, a matter of months.
The cabinet shortened it to weeks.
The official rationale was that the Empire required active dual sovereignty to manage the Idesian transition and the absorption of New Ides under the Idesian Accord. The actual rationale, recorded in private cabinet correspondence later released after the fall of the Republic, was that the longer Kara’s mourning ran, the longer Nordvik remained the public face of the regency, and the closer the public came to noticing his erratic behavior and absences during the week of the explosions. Ending the mourning early meant Kara back in public, Nordvik in secret retirement to private chambers, and the chronological proximity of the regent’s presence to the southern detonations dissolved by ordinary news cycles.
Kara returned to public life on schedule. She presided over the Idesian Accord. By every public account from the period, she was composed.
The private record from the same months tells a different story, and is treated in full in What Kara Carried. The practice she had carried since adolescence, dormant for the previous several years, returned in this period at a sharper intensity and a higher frequency than at any prior point in her adult life. The candle entry from her Diary, dated to the night of her father’s funeral, is the single most-cited line in the record of her self-injury. The entries the Diary contains across the months that followed are not single lines. They are pages. The relapse did not begin to ease until well into her marriage to Riven two years later.
Whether Kara knew, during the foreshortened mourning, that the cabinet was protecting Nordvik with the time that should have been hers, is not recorded. Whether she learned later, when the private cabinet correspondence was released, is not recorded either. The Diary entries from that period do not mention Nordvik. They mention Isaac. They mention Avery. They mention the inside of her own right forearm.
What Was Recovered
The Bureau of Religious Oversight produced an inventory of items pulled from the rubble of each destroyed structure. The inventories were sealed before publication and have not been opened since.
What is known of their contents comes from a single Bureau intern who later wrote about her work and whose memoir was suppressed by the Bureau but circulated quietly in the late epoch. From that memoir:
- Small shoes. The intern records that the smaller sizes were the more common find.
- Painted baptismal markers, including markers still wet with the ink the cult had used for unfilled name fields.
- A half-finished embroidery, a wooden horse, a wooden toy in the shape of the godhead’s chrome helmet.
- A loaf of the numbered sacred bread, recorded as bearing the inscribed number 84. The cult had issued the bread in sequence as adherents were baptized. The highest number on a known surviving body at the time of the strike was 22. The 84 had been baked for a baptism that would have taken place the following week.
- A diary in a child’s hand, partially burned. The intern read what remained, but vehemently refused to transcribe it.
From the suppressed Bureau intern memoir, undated entry, on a single item from one of the chapel inventories
The diary belonged to a girl of seven or eight. The cover was cloth and the cloth had been waxed black by the smoke. On the first page she had drawn her family in a row, her mother’s hair in green because she had used the wrong pencil and not corrected it. The dog stood beside her, and she was holding the dog’s leash. The pages after were lists. One of the lists was for the puppy her father had promised her for her next birthday. There were seven names on it. Two were crossed out, and five were still in the running. She had drawn a small star next to the one she liked most.
I went home that night and I sat on my kitchen floor for forty minutes and could not get up. I lay down next to my husband without telling him what I had read. I have not told anyone. I am writing it now because if I do not say it once, into something, the girl will go on having starred “Bella,” her favorite name without anyone in the world but me ever knowing.
The inventories were returned to surviving relatives where surviving relatives could be identified. Most could not. The Bureau’s standing position is that the items remain in storage.
Survivors
A small number of Larrist members were not at home or at chapel on the night of the strike, or in the week that followed. Some had been traveling. Some had broken with the faith days or weeks before. Some by accidents of geography were elsewhere. Their estimated count has never been published.
The former Larrist settlements were watched for months. Anyone who returned to one was found in the morning with the “S” already carved. The Bureau attempted to identify the lay membership through its monitoring records and to extend offers of protection, but most of the lay membership had never been individually identified to the Bureau because the cult had not maintained registries. The Bureau’s effort produced a small number of confirmed survivors and a much larger number of unaccounted-for adherents whose disposition is not known.
Amlooi Alvaldi, whose diary became the most complete first-person record of the faith’s interior life, was traveling at the time of the strike. He was not at his mansion when it was destroyed. He survived the night and the week both. He was killed later, by Seraphine personally, in circumstances the framing of his diary scaffolds but (for obvious reasons) does not continue to narrate.
By the Bureau’s best later estimate, the lay survivors numbered fewer than thirty. Organized Larrism did not survive in any form.
State-Level Aftermath
Empress Kara A. Ehrveil withdrew from public life in the immediate aftermath of the strike. Her father, Isaac Acentino, had been one of the eight killed. The personal cost did not appear in any official statement from the Crown. Governance shifted to Nordvik Alvaldi through the mourning period. The trial was never reconvened. With every defendant dead, the case had no defendants.
New Ides passed to Riven Skorne, who moved within days to distance the duchy from Larrist ideology. The Idesian Accord formalized the reabsorption of New Ides into The Second Lilaris Empire in the months that followed. No comparable reconciliation occurred with the ExoVinian Empire, whose own leadership had been gutted. The territory fragmented and was reorganized under different banners as the epoch continued.
The strike’s effect on the broader political record was immediate and lasting. The “S” was confirmed as Sovarre’s signature. Sovarre’s position on the strike was never published. No Sovarre figure ever claimed any part of the operation. Seraphine du Roscarte’s personal involvement in the planning was treated as known but never charged. The Imperial position, in private, was that prosecution would have produced a trial Sovarre had the standing to disrupt.
The Question of What This Was
The Night of the Veil and the week that followed have been treated in three competing frames in the surviving literature.
The first, favored by the Imperial record and by the lay public in the immediate aftermath, treats the strike as a regrettable but contained act of political violence whose effect was to remove a destabilizing extremist movement from the field. This frame is the most generous to Sovarre. It is also the only one that treats the deaths of the lay membership as a separate question from the strike itself.
The second, favored by survivor accounts and by the Bureau in private memoranda, treats the strike and the week that followed as an integrated operation whose target was not the defendants alone but the faith itself. On this reading, the lay killings were not collateral. They were the point. The strike removed the leadership and the week removed the substrate on which a future leadership could grow. The carved “S” on the bodies of children was not collateral marking and instead was symbolism that there would not be another generation of Larrists. It was claim of action.
The third, advanced quietly by some legal scholars of the late epoch, holds that the strike and the week are inseparable in principle but not in moral category. Any honest reckoning has to hold both the political case for the assassinations of the defendants, who, but for the strike, would have been convicted in the trial that had already begun, and the moral case against everything that happened after, including the chapels, the children, and the survivors who were herded back into burning buildings, as facts of the same week that do not reduce to a single verdict.
The three frames have not converged in the record, and they remain unlikely to.
Trivia
- The “S” carved into each body became, in the late epoch, the recognized signature of Sovarre and of the Blood Court’s resurgence. Imperial intelligence treats any new appearance of the mark on a body as a confirmed Sovarre attribution.
- The phrase “Night of the Veil” is not a Sovarre term. It was coined by Imperial reporting in the morning broadcasts that followed the strike, and refers to the chrome helmet whose removal was the strike’s first inversion of the cult’s iconography.
- The Bureau intern’s memoir is referenced in late-epoch survivor literature without being named. Whether it is a single document or a compiled corpus is contested.
Cross-references
- The People v. Huge Larry (the trial the strike interrupted)
- Case Filing - The People v. Huge Larry (the consolidated criminal filing against the defendants)
- Larrism (the movement and its doctrine)
- Huge Larry (the godhead)
- Sovarre (the perpetrating regime)
- Seraphine du Roscarte (the director of the operation)
- Amlooi’s Diary (the first-person initiate account that records the week)
- The Great Teachings of Larry (recovered from a chapel ruin in the week after the strike)