The Evernight Church is happy to send people to the scene!

...well. "Happy to." Obliged to by treaty and also it's their sacred duty, yadda yadda etc. You know how it goes. Regardless, there are people being sent to the scene. One of them is

Sleepless Pathway, Sequence 8 Midnight Poet
Evernight Goddess's Nightwatch
James Orland

at their service!

Death Pathway, Sequence 9 Death Watcher
Evernight Goddess's Nightwatch
Frye Webb

After they show their badges, they are let in past the police tape, the front door, and inside.

For a scene of a likely occult ritual, it's surprisingly neat. No obvious visible signs of a ritual being conducted, and there's barely even a mess at all. Just the regular disarray of ordinary living, no candles or strange scents on the air. If it wasn't for the bloodstains on the wall, the small puddle around the wash basin, and the bodies, it would look normal.

Frye's face is naturally set into something like a frown, but it frowns more pointedly the minute they cross the threshold.

"... Their souls are gone," he reports to his colleague, in an undertone. They haven't had time to fully dissipate, not for an ordinary murder, which confirms that this sure is their department.

"—gone? Gone, gone? Not there at all? Huh."

He activates his Spirit Sight to look. He cannot see souls without it, unlike his Death Pathway pal.

Souls? What souls? What a silly thing to think. There was never anything alive here at any point in time. It's just a couple of piles of meat. They just happen to be human shaped.

"There aren't even traces of them being ripped away," murmurs Frye, approaching the bodies with an unease that has nothing to do with their status as corpses. "Not even the faintest shreds of spirit left. It's like they were never even alive."

He disables his Sight. "Well, that's disturbing. And definitely under our purview. And... I am not certain us mere mortals can deal with this on our own without calling for a little bit of reinforcement."

His colleague nods. He quite agrees. This seems above their Sequence and paygrade.

"I'll talk to the witness and draw a sketch of their mysterious third."

So: please go get someone to tell the captain for him, he's running away to go draw pictures, thanks and bye.

Yeah, he can do that. He'll get one of the non-Empyrean police officers looking stoic and trying to hide their spookedness to send a handwritten note to Captain Smith, please and thank you!

And then he activates his Sight again and begins to investigate this location more thoroughly. What oh what the evernightmarish fuck has happened here?

The sun has set, and night's beginning to set in, so the dark will hold no secrets from him.

To his Sight, there is a faint aura of expended power, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, that tastes like sacrifice, centralized at... that desk there, but... that's all there is. It's not really much. Barely even a whisper of power, when anyone would expect this place to be screaming something bad happened here so loudly that even the fully mundane people are spooked away.

To his ordinary (to certain definitions of ordinary) vision, the desk contains, pen, paper, and translation notes of some kind, covering a book. The book announces itself as a linguistic text on the subject of Feysac; specifically, ancient varieties used in the Fourth Epoch. It looks like someone was trying to translate something... but whatever it was, it's not here anymore. Nothing here could be that old.

Would he like to try to read what was written of the translation?

Yes, yes he would. If he knows the translation, maybe he will know the original!

(He is not a history buff. He probably won't. But it can't hurt.)

(Well, it can. But very few things that can hurt you by being read would be this thoroughly invisible to his Sight, and you just can't live like that.)

thou will be gone (dead, possibly?) but thy descendants shall (make ready/be fertile ground for) thy return.

(???? this is not what page 2 said before??? Did the pages stick together? Did something fall out?)

seeking with blind hands, shifting clumsily through endless (mist/fog) but all are connected in the (beyond/eternity/nexus of all creation)

fear the (dark/night - possible link to Evernight Goddess?) as it comes to steal death itself

in a womb of the oppressed shall horrors be conceived, nourished by resentment and suffering

SERVE ANTIGONUS WITH OUR DEATHS.

He takes a step back and begins to reconsider his stance re. whether reading something inert to his Sight can hurt him. This is even creepier than he'd expected, and—

—he looks at the wall behind him, and nods minutely. "Definitely above our paygrade," he murmurs to himself. "Current paygrade," he amends, before returning to the notes.

He may... decide against reading any more, though. Possibly. And might just want to collect it all.

The paper with the ominous words is perfectly amenable to being collected, and neatly stacked for transport. He doesn't even suffer a papercut for his trouble, let alone unknowable horrors that corrupt the mind and soul.

(This time.)

Next what he'd like to do is try to figure out a timeline of events. This would be much easier if they had a Diviner Pathway Empyrean here but they don't, so he will need to do this the boring old-fashioned way, by looking at spiritual vestiges and the literal physical state of this room. Also possibly interviewing the staff.

Well, the spiritual vestiges of the room are very easy. If there are any besides the faint ominous aura of sacrifice, he can't see them. Maybe someone of a higher Sequence, or of the Death Pathway or something similar, could get more out of it, but these secrets aren't kept by the dark.

The staff is similarly easy, if just as unhelpful: there is a housekeeper, and occasionally a cook, but the cook wasn't working today and the housekeeper is the one who found them. If he'd like to talk to her, he's free to, though she's probably still speaking with Frye. A neighbor might have noticed something, though they might take issue with being roused to assist in a police investigation after dark.

The literal physical state of the room... it looks like several people, at least two to potentially four, spent a lot of time here. The plates and teacups are stacked neatly for retrieval by the presumed housekeeper, but there are enough sets present to imply that those who used them had several meals here. There are a couple books related to Feysac or the Fourth Epoch that look like they either were to be read, or checked and then discarded, in a little pile on the coffee table. There's an unopened wine bottle, and two untouched wine glasses.

...two wine glasses. Were they fucking? Also, wasn't there a third person Frye is getting info about? But yeah okay he doesn't think he can get much from this, he's gonna go hover over Frye and see what's up.

Frye does, by this point, have a sketch of the woman in question, and passes it to James silently.

He's a very good artist, at least for portraiture. This is perfectly usable as something to show neighbors and coachmen, to see if they've seen her.

"- might've been a school friend of theirs? He and Naya were from the same class, she often helped him with his homework," the housekeeper is saying.

"She had luncheon with them earlier but then... left?"