Gillamoor, England
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It saddens me to tell you all that my mother, who you all might know as Selena Drake Farrington Trichenberg, died on October 4, 1872 when she was only 44 years old. I would have preferred it if she had died at home surrounded by her children and grandchildren, but we all can’t die peacefully like we should.
Not as long as people like Paxton Rothchester exist to trouble the unhappy world.
Here's how that story happened:
Mother and Uncle Phoebus had gone with the king to Gillamoor, where they plotted to stop Paxton and his loyal disciples once and for all. By then, Paxton was engaging in terror attacks in nonmagical London, which had killed close to 1,000 people, mainly the impoverished people living in London's famous East End. Ryland and Piers also engaged in what they called "saving the babies", which meant they kidnapped scores of children living in poverty and killed their parents as punishment for raising their children in such horrible conditions that were unsafe for children. They also brainwashed the children they captured into thinking that their parents had never loved them, that they were nothing more than a waste of space. They also kidnapped many disabled and deformed children just to spite the Scotland Yard, who were investigating the kidnappings and murders.
Of course, there was a time when I could have wept upon hearing about the cruel things that my brothers had done to the innocent nonmagical people living in London; but in truth, they had ceased to be my brothers long before I learned that they had captured and tormented our mother in the monastery where they lived. Learning about that act had boiled my blood, even more than the so-called walk of "shame" that she had been forced to endure.
But that's not all.
The firebombing of the The Silver Pillars was seen as the worst terror attack in the city's history. I won't go into too much detail about the church's history, but all I knew was that the church was supposed to be a very special place to the Silver Drakes and the Stormfield clans.
But for some cruel reason that I’ll never be able to understand, someone had firebombed the church where my mother, uncle, and the king were, along with many other innocent people. Paxton was there, along with Ryland, Piers, and a large group of followers. It had been a confrontation that was years in the making, yet someone who was so sick and tired of the insane religious leaders and the terrorist attacks against the nonmagical humans decided that Paxton and his followers had to go. And not only that, they had wanted to save Selena from her twisted desire to save her brother and sons from their well-deserved fate.
Yet, I was in Gillamoor with my wife Frances and our youngest children Jennifer and Lancel when the bombing happened; nothing in the world could have prepared me for the inevitable grief that I would have to experience, and I would have no choice but I had to tell Thorn and Acacia that their mother was dead. I can't imagine how they would react to the news about their mother's death. I'm not happy about telling my other half-siblings that Selena is gone. I don't even know how to begin explaining to my littlest sister Johannah that her mother was never coming back. I also hesitated about telling Sir David about what had happened to his wife.
But I had no choice in the matter, not when it came to the rumors that Sir Bernard and Lady Michaela Kroger were responsible for the firebombing at the church.
As a reminder, I had met Bernard and Michaela when mother first came to the Russian imperial court; they were as pleasant as a cow eating a snake. Mother never liked them because they were cruel to their own children and they were unkind towards others. (Did you not hear that Bernard sold his oldest daughter Anna as a slave and shoved his only son Karl into an asylum? He also had his second daughter abused by a family friend because she was fat and ugly.)
So when the news of mother's death broke out, many people were quick to blame the Krogers for the tragedy. The Turner family were the loudest protestors, as three of their sons Lem, Delmer, and Joseph had been with my mother and they were also killed in the bombing. Erwin, the last surviving Turner son, took his sisters and went to Canada. My other siblings went with them, as did their cousins Ashley, Kelly, and Olive.
But the story about why my mother died didn't go away, as Bernard Kroger was blamed for the whole thing. Of course, the people who wrote the story messed everything up with a fictional rivalry and sorcery and other things that I knew were not true. One news reporter dared to say that Bernard wanted mother dead so David could marry his sister. Yet, Leopold could never forgive his uncle (false rumors or no) and they ended up being estranged for the rest of their lives.
I'm sure that no matter what history says, the truth would come out. Someone had to have committed the act of firebombing the church, as the church was the most central part of Eirebul. (The criminal was a poor Englishman named Benjamin Schneider, who was so sick and tired of all the madness that he had seen coming from magical London that he felt the need to destroy the church; he was beheaded for that crime in 1876.)
As for the ending of this story, let me just say that Prince Laesslo Luciferian (King Ihon's oldest son) took the throne shortly after his father's death; he had everyone who was a follower or disciple of Paxton executed on Friday the 13th in June of 1873. Paxton's only child Ayandar and his mother Aranna moved to Italy in 1869; no one had heard from them since. Luna, mother's sister and her only surviving sibling, moved to Canada, where she married a sorcerer named Darius Ravencraft. Yet she died the following year when their only child Nassath was born in 1878.
Yet as I close this story, I must say that the lies about my mother being a sorceress was what tainted her legacy and almost destroyed her family. The story about her being disgraced is also being told, but with falsetto. But you alone know the truth, and you must tell the world that truth before it is too late.
Well, as the story about Selena comes to an end, I must say that she was dishonored and her family name was cursed, but not because Bernard Kroger was the cause of that disgrace. (He had a hand in the cruel way that Selena was treated, but not what we think we know.) Far from it, actually. In fact, her half-brother Paxton had been the cause of the curse that fell upon the Drake family, starting with his birth (and killing his mother), the infamous thunderstorm (which killed his grandmother), and his eventual anti-magical revolution (which killed his sister Selena, brother Phoebus, and nephews Ryland and Piers).
As Rowan said, "Maybe it would have been better for us all had he died and my daughter lived, but that's not for us to decide." But what we do know is that even if we are kind to other people who are different from us, those people will still find a way to destroy us regardless of how much kindness we show them.
And that's a sad thing indeed.
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