by HR Moore
*****
Alexander had spent the last couple of days buried in the Archives. He had waded through all the birth and death records for the ten generations of Descendants before Christiana, but couldn’t find anything suspicious about her blood ties; it looked like she was authentic. So he turned his attention to Christiana’s heirs. The problem was though, that although everyone else had to register babies with the relevant Council, Mind with Mind, Body with Body, Spirit with Spirit, the Descendants were able to simply enter the births of their heirs into the records themselves. There were two entries in Christiana’s line. First, Peter, on 21st May 1310, and then Gwyneth, on 20th March 1337. Again, it looked fine. The only mildly strange thing he could find was that, for some reason, they had waited for three days after Gwyn’s birth to enter her into the records. Other than that, there was nothing. No other children of Christiana had been entered, nor did it look like something had been entered and then scrubbed out. Alexander had drawn a blank.
He had also looked at the newspaper archive, hoping that something strange would show up in an article somewhere. There was an article about some woman dying from childbirth a few days after Gwyneth was born; not a regular occurrence, but not unheard of, an article about a strange shipment of chocolate from the Wild Lands that had had to be burnt; again, not regular, but no obvious connection, and an article about the bloodline and whether it was still intact, but you would expect that given Gwyneth’s unconventional line. Mind you, given the level of control that the Descendants had over the newspapers, it came as no real surprise that there was nothing to be found.
As he was putting back the book that held the articles from March 1337, he absent-mindedly moved further down the row of records. He found himself by the book for March 1340, the month his father, Marcus’ grandfather, Tobias, and a woman called Clarissa, had all died in a fire in the Temple of the Body in Empire. Nobody knew why the woman and Alexander’s father, Anthony, had been there late into the night, but everyone assumed that Tobias had been in his chamber and that he’d come out to try and help when he’d realised there was a fire above. The whole thing was deeply suspicious, and every time Alexander had tried to bring it up with Philip, he’d looked pained and swiftly changed the subject. Alexander’s mother, Celia, had died shortly afterwards, which everyone had attributed to a broken heart. His grandparents, Philip and Amelie, had brought him up, but he knew there was something Philip hadn’t told him, and he desperately wanted to find out what that was. He had tried, of course, to find answers, but he couldn’t think where to look other than in the Archives and family libraries. Information was so tightly controlled by the ruling Descendants that there was nowhere else he could look. He had tried to identify other people to ask, who would have been around at the time, or who might be able to put him onto a new lead. The problem was, there was no one obvious, and he didn’t want to run the risk of getting some poor, unsuspecting person into trouble by probing where he shouldn’t.
Alexander gave up for the day; there was nothing more for him here.