Police were called after numerous witnesses noticed that someone had left the lights on inside the mausoleum, an act of unparalleled stupidity given that the monument has been in a state of perpetual darkness ever since Bartrium was interred long before the Vermillion Dawn. That the graverobbers didn’t think to bring a torch or dose themselves with See-In-The-Dark sauce is just another indictment of the current standard of organised crime (you’d never have seen such an amateurish display in the days of Maverick Swindle I).

Unfortunately, from there the fatuity devolved into outright maleficience, as the perpetrators made their escape through an unregulated and dangerously unstable closed-loop portal array. The pursuing officers later turned up on the Blisterbone Sand Lake on Anakar… or at least, an assortment of their body parts did. The fate of the thieves remains unknown.

This is the latest in a long string of thefts involving items of religious and historic significance. Just last month, the former actor Prescott Westermount was arrested after a raid on his home uncovered a vast collection of stolen Meridian treasures.

Both incidents are believed to be related to a deep-rooted criminal enterprise, though exactly which enterprise that might be remains to be confirmed (and lead detective DCI Dalton is hardly likely to share to his working hypotheses with me since blaming me for cocking things up for him on Dhalia… though in hindsight I can see why he might be annoyed).