Chapter 302: Genealogy
Once the Merchant was gone, life returned to its calmer, productive state.
Dominic spent his days working on enhancing the Sorcerer’s Spellbook and making magitech orbs for the lamps. The ladies of the veiled maid corps were incredibly adept at making the clear quartz crystals that he needed, and the only part that Dominic was making himself was the light orb.
The factory was going up smoothly, and it would be ready in plenty of time for the next caravan. The actual shell of the building had only taken one afternoon, but the workbenches and training were taking longer.
They were close to getting the training completed for the initial products, though.
The Techno Wizards had all but shut down their shops so that they could train the new workers, though there was a qualified magitech engineer in the last batch of arrivals.
They were skilled, but the two in town had forty years more experience than the freshly promoted journeyman.
It all worked out in the end, and Dominic was told that the new arrivals were getting highly efficient at their tasks. However, he hadn’t been out to see much of the training, as he was spending all his time in the library, working on his own training.
There was so much old knowledge about magical weapons and magitech hidden in here, even when the books weren’t directly about it.
For example, the tome that he was reading now was actually a history book about the region. Dominic had chosen it hoping to learn more about the villages that he hadn’t seen as a child. But what he found was a detailed list of local heraldry, equipment types and formal rituals for when local nobles met each other in different circumstances.
It was like the etiquette book that he had been forced to memorize twice now, both as a child and as a Royal Sorcerer. But it was more personal so that the reader knew the background of the exact people it referred to. It even had pencil drawn pictures of important people.
This would have been updated every generation, and Dominic saw handwritten notes on many pages, where the person in charge of a territory had been changed mid-generation.
He also learned a few interesting new facts about the Earldom. For example, the Earldom itself belonged to the Wavemates Royal Family, and it was officially considered a vacation home.
So, the territory hadn’t officially been part of the Earldom, but part of the Empress Dowager’s Dowry, which had been passed to the Royal Concubine and her child.
Though, that didn’t make any sense to Dominic, as she didn’t have any children that he knew of.
Then he flipped the page, and found the notation.
{Earl Wistfield, brother to Concubine Tatiana. Succeeded by Daughter -----------}
The name had been inked out, but to the sensitive sight of a dragonkin, the two different inks were not identical.
However, it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing. He as quite sure that was his mother’s first name there, but from all other records, she should have been the Earl’s younger sister.
Upon doing mental math, Dominic realized that was highly improbable.
For one, the woman he knew as his grandmother would have been eighty years old when his mother was born. Even if she were dragonkin, that was well past normal childbearing years, and she was already widowed by then.
So, if the generations were moved around by one, and his mother was the Concubine’s daughter, hidden in the family for her safety, then he was the grandson of the Dragon King.
Dominic carefully flipped the pages and calculated the years.
No, none of that added up at all.
The Concubine hadn’t been recorded as arriving until his mother was already in her teens. Unless the daughter had been hidden with the family for some time before that, it didn’t make sense.
Alexis came in to find Dominic surrounded in a pile of notes, with three different lineage and genealogy books open.
"What did you find?" She asked.
"Bad math. There is a note here about the Concubine having a daughter. But she didn’t have one that was publicly acknowledged.
Then, when I looked into that, I realized that everything else about the family is wrong. Most of these birthdates are either clearly false or impossible. For example, my mother should have had me when she was sixteen, which sounds right, as it was just after she married.
But, according to the records, her perfectly human mother, who married into the family, was over eighty when she was born.
And from there, it only gets more and more nonsensical.
So, I’ve spent the entire day trying to sort out my own family tree.
I mean, I have one right here, but now that I know it’s just the public version, and nothing on it is true except the names, I need more information." Dominic explained.
Alexis laughed as Dominic huffed in frustration.
"Well, that’s normal for any Royal Family, isn’t it?" She asked.
"That’s just it. Other than the Concubine, we were so far down the Wavemates Family lineage that even the Earl was only considered to be a distant branch of an ancient royal lineage.
We still carried the name, as it was directly down through oldest sons of a Dragon Emperor three generations earlier.
But before the invasion, that put him about fifteen hundredth in line for the throne." Dominic grumbled.
"What else did you find?"
Dominic shrugged. "Someone in the family is likely to be the Concubine’s daughter, and it might have been someone in my mother’s generation. There is also the possibility that the Concubine came here pregnant with a son, who would have been a strong contender for the throne, but there is no record of the birth.
Also, my father’s name isn’t recorded anywhere in the family tree.
My name is here, see? But my father is simply listed as deceased, as if my mother gave birth as a recent widow. It would say unknown if I was born a bastard, but my father lived with us."
Alexis frowned. "The Wavemates Royal Family had secrets, that’s for certain. But you’ve already found more details and inconsistencies than anyone else. Even my father thinks that the concubine had no children."