A Family Tree
After hours, In the backroom of Cornerstone of Creation, Ian McNee opened a box from an estate sale of a 'patron' of the occult. It could be said that the obsession necessary to acquire so many objects that were not very magical was what had beggared the man and ultimately caused his death. True magical objects were priceless. Aside from the rare finds that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend, most were handed down from parent to child or grandchild, teacher to student, or stolen only to disappear into myth to be the subject of speculation.



Ian had little hope that anything inside was worth much to true students of the occult, but there was knowledge to be had from examining what others found important enough to collect. There were the usual assortment of odd knickknacks and stones, and several books. The books were the true prize in any case. One was bound in a badly scratched leather cover, worn at the edges from decades of use.

He picked it up and felt a tingle of residual energy from the leather. Opening it, he read a few pages and realized it was documenting assumed witch families over the last few hundred years. If accurate, the book was a real find for him. It was set aside for his personal library.

Over tea a few hours later, he turned the pages carefully with gloved hands and noted the family names he recognized, the names he didn't but probably should. The astounding thing was that the book itself had been updated as recently as fifteen years ago, if the dates painstakingly entered were correct. There were even sketches of different witches with names, birth and death dates. Some were without dates of death, possibly still alive under other names. Some names had been marked out, leaving only blobs of ink. He noticed that the hidden names had all been entered into the book within the last thirty years. Had someone or something tried to hide a record of the latest generation of magic users?

He paged through a family tree to see the matriarch's name, Agatha Harkness. The Harkness line was not unknown to him. At the very end of it, in an entry dated eighteen years before, was a single notation of a little girl. No birth date, or date of death. Like the others, the actual name was obliterated with a thick ink smear, He could just made out what seemed to be a capital M.

Scrawled below that in a different hand was 'Dr. Stephen Strange.'