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It is said that you reap what you sow. The seeds of the misdeeds of years past bear fruit that is blood red and bitter, mealy and poisonous.
It is said that the Candlewood Institute was founded on a whim. Growing out of the vein-like halls of Candlewood Manor.
It is said that towards the end of the 16th century, a man arrived in the ill-habitable collection of islands and towns that had only recently been established under the name of Magnus. The man was charming, blue-eyed, and wealthy, snapping up a tree-choked island devoid of any other human life. On that island he built a manor home, a great good place, which stood upright and firm in the face of the vast and grey expanse of water which surrounded it.
There was a reason, it's supposed, that no other habitation had been built upon this land.
It is said his wife, whose name no longer exists in any findable historic accounts, was from beyond the sea, and bore him two daughters, Elinor and Magdalen, before succumbing to a strange sweating sickness. Each daughter grew into figures of surpassing beauty. When the pair of them were barely into womanhood, their father told them, as he wasted away in his death bed, that neither were to marry.
In those times, a woman without a tie to a husband had little chance, little future. There were no male heirs, and the pair would surely lose everything if they were not careful.
Elinor is lost to the sands of time, but Magdalen married a distant cousin and had a daughter. That daughter's granddaughter, a woman named Muriel Caldwell, would marry a man by the name of Mr. Everett. By the time the family became Everett’s however, Candlewood Manor had burned, in one way or another, some three times. In the decade after this marriage, the family home was completely rebuilt, with the stones of the original manor used for the foundation. A Phoenix, it was said, rising from the quite literal ashes.
Muriel Caldwell, now Muriel Everett would live nearly a century, vastly outliving her husband who died in middle age. She was one of the most powerful women in Magnus, above, in the eyes of high society, even Mrs. Arleth Lockwood, who was known as the ‘Grand Dame of Magnus’ in her day. Muriel had only sons, and from then on, nary a daughter was born to the Everetts, and if one was, she died young.
In the intervening century after the death of Muriel Everett, but before the stately home became a research institute, the Manor home on Whitt's Isle, tucked away at the quiet end of the Canwick Archepeligo, was turned into a summer home, nestled in the Beechly Nature Reserve, which was founded by Muriel's Grandson in the mid-1800s. After a schism between two Everett brothers - twins in fact, they ran in the family - in approximately 1813, The Everett family resided, in a grand residence in Hours Square in the Old Town district of Magnus Island proper.
The only notable exception to this rule, this pattern of survival being a promise only to male heirs, was Dr. Helen McKraken Everett, born in the early 1880s, who went on to found the Candlewood Institute in 1911, using the old manor home as its headquarters. Her younger brother was noted philanthropist Oris Everett, father of Nathaniel Everett. Helen's ward, a boy named Elias, who would later be granted her surname, would likewise become a doctor and continue the legacy of the Candlewood Institute after Helen's death at the great age of 80.
It is said, and it is known, that in 1962, 11 extraordinary children were found. The first of them, a little girl of nearly 8, whose birth name is lost to history, as so many things are. Hereafter, she will be known as Jane Everett. The ersatz daughter of the so-called 'Good Doctor' Elias Everett.
Of the 42 total oddities found by the Candlewood Institute, members of the Cuckoo Project, very few of them still walk the earth. For a long time, before the Institute’s dying years, it was only the 11 children found after Jane who were allowed to leave the grounds. Many sojourned in the dark, deep in the bowels of the Institute. Many are buried in the cemetery beyond. It was a place for the dead and the dying. It was most certainly not a place for children. Yet, that's what so many of them were when they first set foot upon its grounds.
Ostensibly, Elias had founded the Cuckoo Project on the foundation of deferential genetics. Elias was a curious man, with curious thoughts, born to the generation of the Problem. Magnus then, and yes, perhaps, always, was rife with street children. Throngs of them, subsisting in decay and alleyways. At that time though, many of them could too be found at the wharf on the eastern shore of Blackwell Island, in Carventi. It was some politician, the history books are sure, though not of whom, that coined the phrase 'Wharf Rats' to describe these children.
It is said that Elias was truly the son of Oris Everett, by way of a lady of the night. It is said, too, that he bore more resemblance to Oris than the man's rightful son Nathaniel. His life’s story was oft told in the fanciful cadence of the tales of King Arthur. He was a wharf rat by birth and a ruler by right.
It is said that Elias Everett died before he was even born. It is said that had he died, choking on his own afterbirth, the blood would evaporate from the palms of so many erstwhile souls. It is said that he was a man so sure of his own mortality that he would fight Lady Death herself when the time came.
It is said that you reap what you sow. So carry a hatchet, kill your past before it kills you.