“There are great lines that go way back in the motherland and throughout Europe. Men started charting these lines over six hundred years ago.
Scholars and others of like minds have been monitoring, studying, dissecting these families. Culling out the weakest from among the strong.
Over time they were just a few of those lineages that grew stronger over the passage of time, while others languished and even more faded or squandered their gifts.
Some exploited their gift to their own detriment. Still others had been wiped out by the inquisition and other fallacies like it.
Throughout it all, there were two families that always seemed to rise to the top, whose strengths were always enhanced instead of depleted with each generation.
There was a great legend, one that many had thought to be folly, of these two lines converging. Of two members, one from each of these two groups wedding each other, somewhere in the future, which is now, our time, yours and mine.”
I saw her poised to ask another question of me, but my finger across her lips kept her silent.
“It was believed that if such a thing should happen, that the offspring of that duo would be almost indestructible. For sure the child would be extremely powerful.
As a child I knew nothing of this legend. Had I known, I would’ve understood the strange hold you have had on me, since you were in your mother’s womb.
It was later determined that it was because of that coming connection that my family and I had been led here, to the Americas, to you.
It was only after you’d been taken and I had been brought to the brink of madness that it had all come out...”
Her sharp indrawn breath at my words had me kissing her brow gently and wrapping her more securely in my arms.
“As I was saying, they had no choice then but to tell me the whole of it, young though I was, for fear that if they didn’t, I would surely lose my hold on reality.
There was still a bit of confusion in the beginning, when they first started telling me of my family’s history, because one of those lines was thought to have ended.
Men had spent hours, days, years, trying to decipher and recalibrate the legend. In the end they only set off a horrific sequence of events that no one could’ve foreseen.
The greed, envy and depravity that stemmed from that one mistake, will have repercussions for generations to come, but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
I took a deep breath to push back the anger. It bothered me still that our lives had been manipulated, that she, more than anyone, had suffered as much as she had.
“It was your grandmother that they believed the legend had ended with, your father’s mother.”
“My dad’s, he was adopted wasn’t he? But I don’t think he ever knew what happened to his original family, at least I’ve never heard him speak of them.”
“I don’t think that he knows, but let me finish.” I kissed her hair and inhaled her scent; already it was getting stronger, before long it was going to be almost impossible not to mount her. I cleared my throat and prepared to go on.
“Throughout time, some had chosen to live beneath the radar, while others had enjoyed their wealth and the benefits of their talents lavishly.
No longer needing to hide, but instead lauded by some in high society, these families flourished and amassed great wealth over time.
While even others sought to keep themselves hidden away from the world, and so lived as most men do.
The Vikov family had been such as this. They had not lived in squalor, but neither did they own great wealth. Their women preferred to be midwives and healers over the centuries, though a few have been great warriors of note.
Ekaterina Vikov, that would be your grandmother, had been the last of her line in Russia. A very secretive person, she was hardly ever seen.
It was thought that the weight of her heritage was too much for the young girl and she had sought to escape it. That’s what was believed throughout the society as it is called anyway.
They are the men and women who have kept the annals for generations. The watchers and keepers of this particular truth, whose fathers and grandfathers before them, had done the same.
All in all, there were five remaining families of the thirteen or so that had been known of since about the fourteenth century.
Of those five, two were supposed to fulfill the legend. Ekaterina had known of her heritage of course, it would’ve been passed on to her at her mother’s knee.
In her line it was known that the gift skipped a generation and was most always found in a girl child.
When she had been murdered, it was rumored throughout the society that it had been another one of the five families that had done the deed. No one of lesser power would’ve been able to get that close.