Izax once said: "The history recorded by short-lived races cannot be trusted. Their lives are brief, and they are easily trapped by their own emotions, so their records always develop fatal deviations after several generations." As it turned out, he was absolutely right.
If they had not happened to find a portrait of a witch that had been preserved in an alternate dimension and thus could not be tampered with, and if Vivian's unreliable memory had not finally become somewhat useful, no one would have guessed that the witch in the Andre family's three-hundred-year-old legend was actually this poverty-stricken Bloodkin. The truth back then was actually quite simple: a poor Bloodkin happened to meet two humans. After tricking them into losing everything, she felt deeply remorseful. So, after destroying a vengeful spirit, she gave the spoils she had obtained as a gift to those two people. One of their descendants was the present-day Andre family.
As for how those descendants had accumulated their present wealth, how they had built a castle in this ominous land, and how they had been tormented by the vengeful spirit for three hundred years, it would probably be difficult to uncover the truth now. Still, the general course of events could be guessed.
Vivian's seal had definitely gone wrong, and the "gift" she had left for the Andre ancestor back then was absolutely suspicious.
Vivian had found a way to deal with the vengeful spirit in her own memories, and she finally remembered why it had been bound to this world.
"This hall... wasn't originally like this." Vivian pointed around them. "Andre's descendants rebuilt it over the course of a hundred years. They enlarged the original cavern and reinforced the place with massive stones. But I can still sense some traces lingering in the hall...