Sworded Affair

Chapter 56: Friends on the Other Side

I'm surprised he can cast something this delicate, Emma mused, as she watched a thousand golden strings rise from the floor, winding around her again and again until they reached and sank into her helmet, one at a time. Wouldn't his bad luck get in the way?

[When he was a young and very foolish apprentice, Marcus visited Ireland and shared a very distasteful joke with one of the aes sídhe in disguise. Not bad enough to warrant death or worse, but he was looking at fifty years of servitude before his aunt called in a big favour back home. Long story short, Overmind bought out his contract, so that instead of fifty years of hard labour in the wilderness, Marcus was indentured for a hundred and fifty years in Scholomance. As part of that, she modified his curse so instead of causing genuine harm, it now only inconveniences him in petty ways. Not great, but still far better than the early grave he was staring at before. Despite the longer duration, his duties in the tower are mostly clerical work, and include built-in blocks of time off so he can still advance his own abilities. More like a military contract, with restricted rights only whilst on duty, compared to the prison sentence it was before.

Marcus has done well for himself in the decades since; his insider knowledge even helped him pass the first two sets of trials despite being fairly weak for a Magus of his age. That said, I doubt Marcus will ever become a Master; he simply doesn't have the temperament for it, in the end.]

Huh. He's had a rough time of it, hasn't he?

[He'll have a far worse time if he keeps poking at the System's mental wards. Tell him he's ten strings away from me sharing his browser history with his mother.]

Emma repeated her ancestor's warning aloud, making Marcus go very pale indeed as his casting sputtered to a halt.

"My deepest apologies, Lady Anathema," Marcus bowed fully at the waist. "Upon my name and my magic, it will not happen again."

[Good.]

Marcus took nearly a minute to compose himself after that, taking deep breaths as his heartbeat audibly settled.

"Moving on, I've enough bindings to get to grips with your open memories. There are a few areas I wish to investigate, beyond that which I've promised not to touch, but the wards for those are far weaker than the System's, so my poking shouldn't be offending anyone too dangerous."

"You can see my memories now?" Emma frowned; she hadn't felt a thing throughout the entire process.

"Of course I can, I am good at what I do," Marcus smiled brightly. "Let's begin then. Emma Knight, born to Noah Knight and Elizabeth Knight, formerly named Faust, at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.

Noah is a distant descendant of Lady Anathema, albeit of a line that had not displayed any use of the System since his great-grandfather perished in the Second World War. A peaceful upbringing awoke in him a love of fairy tales and a desire to see the world; after enlisting and completing two terms in the Army, he went on to join the Security Service, using his hard-earned experience with foreign languages for the benefit of the nation. Solid, loyal, reliable and unremarkable; still routinely monitored by the Empire but largely left to his own devices."

"Sounds like dad alright," Emma nodded, not surprised by any of what she was hearing.

"Elizabeth Knight by the laws of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Faust by the reckoning of the Empire. Her family consisted of minor practitioners, who were erased after attempting to take on the name of Faust, offending in the process a descendant of the original and a skilled Demonologist. Elizabeth forged her contract during the one-sided slaughter, attaining Master level proficiency in mental magic and erasing the minds of her assailants. This impressed Paradox enough to draw her intervention; as far as everyone can remember, Elizabeth has always been the sole surviving descendant of the Faust family, with none able to recall the names or faces of those who supposedly came before her despite them being well-documented in writing.”

[The Faust family was nearing its end anyway. The fact their last generation had to resort to summoning demons, behaving like warlocks only shows the extent to which they fell from glory.]

“Mom never mentioned any of this to me,” Emma pointed out, not particularly judgemental but wanting to make that clear for her examiner.

“Of course not, that's all old news anyway," Marcus shrugged. "Anyway, Elizabeth joined the Empire's internal affairs division after acclimating to magical society. Her power helped crack several longstanding conspiracies, seeing her promoted all the way to head of department in a mere twenty years, an unprecedented rise in a magical society that was both long-lived and generally entrenched in their ways. It was during one of the department's recruitment drives, disguised as a corporate event for mortal eyes that she met Noah-"

"I have no interest in listening to the details of my parents 'getting to know' each other."

Emma's tone didn't change in the slightest, but something in her warning made Marcus flinch all the same as he hastily cleared his throat.

"Right, sorry, moving on then. After you were born, the Knight family relocated to the countryside, feeling it was a better environment to raise children than the bustle of city life. You had an uneventful time in primary school, attending an all-girls school between the age of five and eleven; and it's towards the end of this period that the first blocked memory resides. I'll attempt to unlock it for you now; a word of warning though, whilst it shouldn't be painful, reviewing memories this way can be a bit disorienting the first few times."

"I'll deal with it," Emma replied firmly, now very curious as to what was so important, as to warrant memory modification on her preteen self.

"Alright, here we go," Marcus confirmed, pinching two fingers together and picking a single string, one seemingly selected at random that he gave just a faint little tug.

A wave of drowsiness swept through Emma, who was already fast asleep by the time her helmet collapsed against the headpiece of her armchair.