Chapter 16: Chronicles of Master Eldrin Voss – Court Wizard IX: The Great Lineage Inquiry

Year 62, Month 7

The Continental Academy of Genealogy announced the project in the spring.
“The Full Mapping of the Plaza Lineage: A Comprehensive Family Tree of the Cages of Mercia.”

A team of twelve scholars arrived. Historians. Heralds. Blood-mages. Statisticians. They carried scrolls, crystal orbs, and portable writing desks. They set up tents around the square. Interviewed the Square Spawn guides. Pored over my declassified logs. Cast tracing spells on the runes still glowing faintly on the older women’s bellies. Counted. Cross-referenced. Argued in hushed tones over ale in the nearby taverns.

By Month 9 the first preliminary charts were unveiled in the Academy Hall.
Open to nobles and scholars only.
I was present. Staff in hand. Hand moving. As always.

The room fell silent when the large parchment was unrolled.
Then came the gasps.
Then the quiet retching.
Then the first scholar—a young man from the eastern academies—fainted.

The tree was not a tree.
It was a knot.
A dense, purple sphere of intersecting lines.
Fathers bred daughters.
Those daughters bred with their own sons.
Those sons bred with their sisters, aunts, cousins.
Great-granddaughters bred with great-grandfathers.
The same names looped back on themselves in dizzying spirals.
Some individuals appeared in five different places—as parent, sibling, child, grandchild, and great-grandparent all at once.

One scholar—a pale, bespectacled man—pointed at a single node.
“This woman ... she is her own great-aunt. And her son is also her half-brother. And her grandson is her first cousin twice removed ... by blood.”

Another traced a line with a trembling finger.
“The king’s seed is in every branch. Every single one. There is no escape. No dilution. It is ... mathematically impossible. And yet here it is.”

The head of the project, Professor Lirien of the Thalorian Academy, stared at the chart for a full hour without speaking.
When she finally did, her voice was hoarse.
“This is not genealogy.
This is not history.
This is a singularity.
A blood-black-hole.
We cannot publish this.
The world is not ready.”

A junior statistician—Master Caldor of the Low Marches—spoke next. His voice shook.
“The inbreeding coefficient ... it exceeds 0.95 in the third generation. By the fifth it is effectively 1.0.
Every descendant is genetically identical to the original king in all meaningful ways.
There is no genetic variation left.
It is a closed system.
A perfect loop.”

A noblewoman in the back row asked the question everyone had been avoiding.
Her voice cut through the silence.
“What does that mean ... in plain language?”

Professor Lirien turned slowly.
Her face was grey.
She answered without flourish.
“It means that after five generations, every child born in the Plaza is, for all practical purposes, the same person.
The blood does not mix.
It folds.
It repeats.
It becomes one single, unbroken thread.
There is no ‘outside.’
There is no ‘other.’
There is only the king.
Again.
And again.
And again.”

The room stayed quiet for a long minute.
Then someone laughed—short, sharp, hysterical.
It died quickly.
No one joined in.

The charts leaked anyway.
Scribes copied them in secret by candlelight. Nobles passed the copies hand-to-hand in taverns and private chambers. Whispers spread through the court and the city like fever.

The project was quietly shelved.
The scholars left the Plaza pale. Shaken. Some muttering about “blood singularities” and “genetic collapse.”
One never returned to academia. He now works as a clerk in the Plaza gift shop, selling miniature cages with a vacant stare.