The Weight of Legacy

The issue with the lighting had gotten somewhat better in time. Perhaps it was like how people could get used to smells, perhaps not, but wherever the green light came from, it wasn’t bothering Malwine as much as it once did. Nowadays, it was only about as noticeable as the difference between a ‘warm’ light and a white light would have been in her first life.

At last, she could properly appreciate the joy of lounging in a candlelit area.

Actually interacting with Bernie had helped. Not just listening to her lessons and interacting with her through questions, no, it had been actually interacting with Bernie as a child might that had practically flipped a switch. For all this new world's system had reminded Malwine of games, she hadn’t truly wondered whether the existence of the system might have been affecting how she viewed the people around her.

At her core, Malwine had always understood that they were real people—obviously—not just shallow presences like the NPCs of a game might be. They were people with their own thoughts and lives—their own problems, no doubt.

Her mindset would never be perfect—as a person, she knew she would always think of their relevant details and their relation to her whenever she interacted with her family. But maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have to treat them as she would have long-dead ancestors.

Malwine might have still been a bit more hung-up on her past life’s origins than she’d been willing to acknowledge.

Some things grew clearer when she dwelled upon them—some, the opposite. But she knew the widow hadn’t gotten along with her adoptive family, and only got to know any of her blood-relatives near the end of their lives.

Family was all but an idealized concept to the widow, and given how she’d clearly had children in that life, that really said a lot.

Malwine sat on a solid slab of stone amid the chilling grass, her hands pressed against her mouth, clad in thick gloves. Her very first gloves! For this life, sure, but the sentiment still mattered to her.

Winter clothes in this world hadn’t particularly surprised her. Beyond the lack of the brighter colors and shiny surfaces that had been more common on her Earth’s more recent trends, they were similar enough.

Furs and tightly-packed fabrics, with enough superfluousness that she could easily pull on the neck of her coat to warm her chin and so on. She could have used a scarf, but maybe they just didn’t have a toddler-sized option laying around.

Not to mention that, at that point, Malwine was just being picky.

They’d first been outside to the supposed playground about a week before, if Malwine had been counting the days right. A simple slide and a couple of swings were more than enough to entertain children of their age, even if they looked haphazardly put together to such an extent that Malwine wouldn’t have been surprised if Kristian made them himself.

Because if that was the case, it showed, given how Paul had scratched himself on a nail almost immediately, and so, the children were no longer allowed to use the playground.

Nevermind that neither Adelheid nor Malwine had gotten a chance to before that.

Paul was the second of the ones Malwine had started to dub ‘the bonus children’, meaning Bernie’s other kids that she’d somehow never noticed before. She’d been spending most of her time in a single room, sure, but her skillset was clearly lacking if she went over a year without successfully learning of every single family member that lived there.

It was, admittedly, starting to get a bit weird to find out that every kid in the estate was somehow related to her. Did no one else live in this town? Or did they just get no visitors? The size of the place certainly made it bizarre for there to be none other than the family using it.

Unknown (Rīsan?) + Unknown (Rīsanin?) - - - - Someone with {Ore}?₁ + Beryl Skrībanin₂

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Kristian Rīsan + Katrina Skrībanin †

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Beryl Rīsanin

₁Isn't dead???

₂Might have died around The Fields of 5750

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Children born to Kristian Rīsan + Katrina Skrībanin (—The Cold of 5786)

1. Beryl

2. Thekla

3. Anselm (The Fog of 5769—)

4. Kristoffer

5. Alaric

Children born to Kristian Rīsan + Bernadette ‡ (The Forgetting of 5769—)

1. Matilda (The Snow of 5792—)

2. Paul

3. Adelheid (The Forgetting of 5798—)

Of course, The Snow was soon to come—within the next few days, in fact.

A party had been planned for Matilda’s 9th year, which allowed Malwine to not only conveniently extrapolate her birthmonth and year without needing to ask, but also gave her reason to anticipate something.

She still had no idea who would be invited to such a party—people were rude and didn’t explain everything to the perfectly capable three-year-old!—but her hopes were high. High enough that she wondered whether she should tone them down a little.

Ideas—anything from hypothetical godparents to convenient neighbors—all burned through her mind, of things she would have used as potential sources or leads in her past life. If the registration of someone’s death indicated little was known of them, but the informant was labeled as their neighbor, you could, in turn, start snooping into the details of who lived in the area at the time and go from there.

If, say, the hypothetical person who died was some guy named Tom, from an isolated village, and the unfortunate neighbor who had to walk all the way to the city proper to declare that wasn’t well informed about the guy, the information would be incomplete.

But you could just go back. Who lived there, who had a cousin, a brother, a son, named Tom? Who was missing their Tom? Siblings were the best leads, from the widow’s experience, but anything could work if it had enough information tied to it.

Malwine knew, thanks to [Once and Forever], that Kristian didn’t know his own parents. It had been a question she’d been dying to ask, but now had some guesses about, thanks to the trial.

So who’s Rīsan?, Malwine had wondered at times. She wasn’t treating the family name as though it would belong to a person, of course—she was pondering on its source. A habit from her past life, one the widow knew she’d shared with many others. With time, surnames lost their weight.

She’d had—frankly still had—a lot of opinions that fell under that category of name meanings, but this one was easily the one she could justify the most. You could have a whole family line of people, say John Cook, Jane Cook, the stock names, but somewhere along the line, if you could get far back enough, you could start asking yourself—just who was the cook?

And it rarely, if ever, got to that point, at least if your family wasn’t one of incredible means—which most weren’t. Her fragmented memories didn’t help one bit with that thought exercise, but her certainty on it remained.

And so, Rīsan had become a hypothetical individual to her, almost—the representation of what Malwine needed to know of Kristian’s side, and of all she already knew would be a pain in the ass. If he didn’t know the answer himself, that left Malwine with no choice but to seek documentation. There wouldn’t be any convenient diaries or bibles with trees stuck to a page.

Somehow, she had to figure out where that orphanage had been, and perhaps work from there. It didn’t help that she had no way to directly ask for that information—a real toddler should have no knowledge of that, and no way to gain that knowledge. Malwine had concluded she was outside the norm long ago, and secrecy was of utmost importance.

Sure, she would have to be willfully ignorant to pretend the family didn’t at least see her as weird, but anything short of being suspected of being a reincarnated centenarian under the effects of a mythic curse could technically be considered a victory for her.

There was always a risk that the orphanage itself had no idea where the children had come from, but Kristian had a surname. Should they have at least had some idea then? Unless he wasn’t from where the orphanage was, but I’m working on the assumption that travel isn’t particularly fast when stuck in caves under the sea. I’d expect people to not be so eager to move from their familiar areas unless there’s some obligation to.

Malwine did wonder how viable this theory of the orphanage having the information she needed would be when the point that Kristian himself didn’t know, remained. Shouldn’t they have told him of his origins if they knew them? One factor there would be the fact that Hanß was clearly a dick. That wasn’t proof of anything, but if the go-between separating information and Kristian was that utterly punchable face, Malwine would absolutely understand the lack of communication.

Hypotheticals. A lot of hypotheticals. Still, Malwine had an advantage—she was fairly certain her Skills would help confirm any information she got. That was miles above any sort of assurances she could have gotten on her past life. There, you had to assume the person knew what they were talking about, when everything was based off people’s word, and that the scribe also transferred that faithfully into whichever document you were using as source.

Things like language barriers, even just accents, could complicate matters on both steps. Then there was the question of whether or not what you were looking at was the original, or some copy made to preserve the information of decaying parchments, in which case, you had to assume whoever copied it, copied it right…

Malwine was glad she wasn’t as closely watched on their new excursions as Adelheid was—otherwise, she might have to come up with an excuse for how often she stared off into the distance while fantasizing about how she’d solve the brick wall that was Kristian’s ancestry.

She didn’t want to think of just his parents—they would be a start, but in a world where she could use magical Skills to surpass the normal limitations of family research, she wasn’t going to settle for anything less than as far as her power could take her.

Prehistory, even.

In the same manner that the system informed her that Kristian didn’t know of his parents, it had implied that Katrina did. OBeryl had to be known to her. Whether her father was known to her might have been up in the air—Katrina did have OBeryl’s surname, after all—but the fact that the system had excluded him out of some perceived ineligibility rather than just calling him unknown left the possibility open.

Malwine supposed it might have depended on what the system took into consideration first, but she tried to stop that train of thought as soon as it started. There would be little to be gained from it.

She’d often both taken pride in and deeply regretted how she might go a little overboard on considering alternate possibilities when it came to a select few things, and even now, all she could do was sigh.

Still, almost every single thing she considered was so far away. Everything from Katrina’s possible resurrection to tracking down her great-grandfather or shaking that orphanage down for every last record.

If Katrina’s dad were alive, though, why would she have been in an orphanage?

Malwine shook her head—that entire situation was strange. The broken system message and subsequent headache that she’d be holding her great-grandfather responsible for felt like a harbinger of things to come, and with how her preexisting problems already had her dealing with a curse and an obit, she did not look forward to that. Even if the information would absolutely be worth it!

It was all distant, nonetheless.

In her mind, she was still some family historian out to unravel the mysteries of as many of her antecedents as possible.

In the present, she was a child. A very small child.

As she all but snuggled within her warm winter clothes, Malwine reminded herself of that, taking in the sights.

Bernie was still admonishing Adelheid for the latest disappearance stunt just barely beyond earshot. Kristian was walking around, as though the home needed any more guards. Perhaps he was guarding the playground so none of the children got any closer, but most of them were old enough to know better than to approach the place that led to one of them being injured.

Paul himself was sitting in a corner, playing with a toy doll. Matilda hovered nearby, her eyes glued to a book about a knight and his hammer. Of course, Malwine had checked it out.

She hadn’t seen Kristoffer in ages, though Alaric had dropped by to bring Bernie food a few times. The former was apparently closing in on 20 of this world’s years, and the latter had turned 15 recently, but Malwine had yet to learn their exact birthmonths.

Maybe she could have passed the questions off as a child’s newfound hyperfixation, but she hadn’t quite had the chance to interact with them all so freely before now.

Kristian had more kids than reasonable, there was no doubt about that. But for Malwine, they represented possibilities.

She wouldn’t deny, that in her past life, she might have just considered them potential sources of information, but again, she had to remind herself that they weren’t people from the past.

They were alive and right next to her.

Malwine had a family that was alive.

It was silly that she had to outright tell herself that—but a part of her had, perhaps, not fully processed it.

Her walking was still clumsy—very much so—but slowly, Malwine made her way through the gazebo-like structure they sat under, moving towards her six-year-old half-uncle. He looked up, doll clutched tightly.

“What’s her name?” Malwine tipped her head before gingerly kneeling, soon shifting to sit next to him and Matilda. “She’s pretty.”

Paul lit up, turning the doll around. “Lili. She is pretty.”

He giggled, and Malwine smiled. She turned to Matilda. “What are you reading?”

Matilda looked up and huffed. “It’s for older kids. I don’t think you’d know it.”

Malwine feigned a gasp, [Remote Reading] helping her confirm the details she’d picked out as she pretended to read the cover. “But I know this one! Sir Heinrich is so awesome!”

“Oh, you do?” Matilda’s eyes might as well have lit up. “What’s your favorite part?”

“Hm,” Malwine scratched her chin as she picked a scene that might be interesting to someone Matilda’s age—the book wasn’t particularly long. “My favorite, I think… It was when he used the mantelpiece! You know. To defeat the evil wizard.”

“What? Wait, that part? It wasn’t a mantelpiece! That was the blessed banner of the moon!”

“He pulled it from the table!”

“It’d been hidden on top of the table, it wasn’t a mantelpiece!”

“People were eating on that table, three pages before!”

“They—” Matilda turned to her book, flipping the pages. It took her quite the long while—long by Malwine’s standards—to find the relevant parts. “Oh, no, they were using the blessed banner of the moon as a mantelpiece.”

Malwine reached over to pat her little half-aunt’s hand, which was about as far as she could reach. “It’s okay. It’s still my favorite part.”

“I want food,” Paul chimed in.

Matilda turned to face Bernie’s direction, before calling out to her. “Mother! When will dinnertime be?”

“Within the hour, dear,” Bernie said without looking.

None of us have a clock, though. Dammit, Bernie!

Malwine had since learned hourglasses existed—which shouldn’t have surprised her—but people weren’t fond of leaving fragile objects in the possession of toddlers.

So mean.

She turned to her half-aunt, making her best impression of a curious child. “Where do you get books?”

“The library,” Matilda said like it was obvious. “Next to the gardens? Haven’t you been?”

No, she had not been—all Malwine knew of were the books she’d stumbled across inside the estate, and she’d quickly run out of useful ones. Aside from that condescending book, everything else she’d managed to get her Skill to pick up on had been fiction. There was always the possibility she might have missed some, and she was ignoring the existence of one, but there certainly hadn’t been, well, a library amount of books in there.

I knew it, that’s just Bernie’s nook.

“Can you take me there?”

Matilda’s response was merely a mischievous grin. “Of course.”

Giggling, Malwine smiled back. Who knew? Maybe she’d find herself wanting to give her newfound other half-aunt a birthday present, even, if things went well.