Chronicles of Aquilae: The Victorian incursion [Book 1]

Chapter Fourteen, Green light

"Honey, can I ask you why you have initiated the same ancestral link almost a hundred times? You're going to blow up the Feather of Thoth if you don't stop."
"It's not me, Mama. When we finished watching Star and Wallace's story, Jenny came out crying and said it wasn't fair things ended that way. She's a chickenheart, she was shipping them the whole time."
"What the eff does that mean?"
"That's the stuff of people who read young adult books, they want two characters to love each other forever. But this is not one of those novels, reality can be very cruel."
"Ugh... creepy."
"Remember the episode of Friends where Chandler sees Ross and Monica's cousin and a Barry White song is playing in the background? She made that same face when she first saw Wallace, and said something so dirty I can't repeat it, I feel bad."
"She's a teenager, tell her to relax or throw a bucket of ice on her."
"I'm already going to ask her to calm down, besides, she wanted to change things many times. Every time she wished Wallace would ask Star not to leave, poof! A schism occurred. It also happened when she wished he refused to receive the drachmas or the arrival at the port was delayed."

The schism in an ancestral link occurred when the person who was reliving illusions with the Feather of Thoth wished to manipulate the facts to change history. Certain things were not supposed to happen, so the link had to stop if it detected any discrepancy in the mind of the person reliving the memories so their mental health would remain intact.

Jenny was right, the story between Asteria of Greece and Wallace Amery could not have ended there. However, finding out the rest was out of Evangeline's hands in the first place, because she had no Artificium belonging to Asteria, Wallace executed a blocking spell on his pocket watch to prevent anyone who found it from finding out what he did after the Aquilae Legenda's return to Athens, and as she had no offspring, there was no information available outside of what was written about her later life.

There was nothing Evangeline had to show for it, but no one asked her if she knew anyone who could help her.

The information accessible to the nurse had to be retrieved through the Minor Artificiums of other ancestors of hers. She learned of the birth in 1871 of Robert Amery, her great-grandfather, son of Wallace and an unknown woman he never married, and she was able to see fragments of the training he received from his father when he was old enough to be initiated as an Aquilae.

The known lineage of Aquilae related to Zahara began with Archibald Amery in 1825, who began his training when he was just fourteen and married in 1845 to Catherine, an Aquilae Bellator with special inclination towards magic and offensive spells. Unfortunately, Callum Watson ended her life while she was trying to protect a child Wallace who did not understand much about the Guild until he was ten years old and trained with Roland and Erika Strauss to be a skilled fighter, learning the use of various types of weapons and a variety of hand-to-hand combat tactics.

When Robert became an Aquilae Veteranus and was invested as a Knight of the British Empire, he married Lily Van der Heijden, a Dutch Guild member with whom he fathered Odette Amery before enlisting in the British Secret Service to train Aquilae Armatus to fight in World War I. As a young child, Odette was sent to France to start training in the Guild, where she specialised in enchanting Minor Artificiums to protect her French confreres. After a few years of intense activity, Odette went separate ways from her partners and met Guillaume Arnaud, a Parisian doctor with whom she travelled to Finland and together they set up a clinic where they treated all kinds of patients and gave refuge to Aquilae who arrived there. Their daughter Nannette was born in 1930 and ran the family business for many years until she was forced to flee to Australia, where she founded Woodheim initially as an Aquilae settlement and gave birth to Evangeline in 1962.