For some reason, she had been getting a bad feeling ever since she saw black stains on her diary. At first, she chalked it up to being paranoid, and assumed that the stains must have been due to her worsening health as a result of practicing a branch of magic that was as much draining as it was time consuming. Were it not for her power over time, she would not be able to simultaneously hone her natural gift of Fate so that it was not in any way inferior to her acquired gift of necromancy.
However, when she woke up in the basement of the Vischer mansion, she knew that her decision to ignore the black stains on her diary was a mistake. A big mistake that she would pay dearly for.
Evanora thought she knew what suffering was. But her father exposed her to an entirely new level of suffering. He showed her suffering in its truest sense, the one that is afflicts you from within, and not without.
She refused to help him at first. Starving and whipping her made no difference to one who used time magic regularly, to the point where the pain caused by the backlash was barely negligible. Frustration and anger are a terrible combination. Add a twisted mind to the mix, and you have a sadistic psychopath.
Anthony Vischer became more creative in torturing her. His safe contained whips of different sizes, surgical instruments for various procedures and various vials containing poison in different concentrations. All of these were used to get Evanora to bend, but he was unsuccessful.
Father and daughter held firmly to their beliefs and refused to compromise. As far as they were concerned, there was no middle ground. There was only success or failure. And neither of them faltered. While Anthony Vischer became even more ruthless and brutal, Evanora remained reticent. The sounds of lashes could be heard if one stood near the basement, but there were no accompanying screams; Evanora did not give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream.
It is said that when two elephants fight, it is the surrounding grasses that bear the brunt of the conflict. There might be no winner, but there were already losers.
Several maids disappeared mysteriously. Anthony Vischer could not carve out any of her organs, for fear that it would affect her ability to use her gift. At that time, the erroneous belief of magic being hinged upon specific parts of the body still held sway.
Since he couldn’t do that to her, he resorted to materialising his sadistic fantasies upon other people, starting with the maids.
Evanora watched, with a heavy heart, as the man who was once her father gleefully sliced the helpless females to pieces, depending on his disposition and temperament at that point in time. We’re it not for Klara Vischer’s warning, she would’ve agreed to do his bidding in order to spare their lives, but the wisp of consciousness was able to convince her to make the necessary sacrifices for the greater good. Better to lose ten and save a million than the other way around.
When he realized that this tactic did not work, he decided to test her filial ties. After drugging his elder daughter, Henrietta, he brought her to the basement where Evanora was locked up.
Evanora vividly recalls the fear in her sister’s eyes as her father brought down the mallet upon her small head. She thought that Anthony Vischer was only bluffing, but when he swing the mallet repeatedly, ignoring the tears on his favourite daughter’s cheeks and her silent pleas, she realised that all hope was lost. She had failed. At that point, Evanora also realized that she never really hated her sister. She may have some misgivings towards her, but at the end of the day, she was family. And you do not abandon family, no matter what.
Gritting her teeth in anger, she used her gift and went back in time, saving her sister from a gruesome fate. She knew she would regret it later, but the look of relief on her sister’s face was worth it.
Prior to that day, Evanora never used the power of fate. She restricted herself to small, miniscule alterations of time, nothing major. She did not want to be responsible for a domino effect, so she only manipulated time if she was extremely sure that nothing would go wrong. But for the first time in her life, she turned back time without regard for its consequences. All she could think of was saving her sister.
That was the first of many experiments Anthony Vischer conducted to bring back his wife. He figured that necromancy would only make her a puppet, and since there was something better than having a puppet for a wife, why not go for it?
Numbing her receptors made no difference, the physical, mental, emotional and psychological strain she suffered was still the same. Shutting off her receptors only made the sensation of pain go away; it didn’t reduce the backlash from continuous misuse of Fate magic.
For a century and a half, Evanora wasted away, trying to turn back time in order to rewrite a fate that had already been set in stone, in order to save the life of her only sister.
Henrietta Vischer later went on to marry Nicklaus Vane, and had a family. Irrespective of the passage of time, she never forgot about her sister and how she saved her life. By partnering with several other prominent witches and wizards, she exposed her father’s evil deeds and spearheaded the first war among witches and wizards. Several lives were lost, but justice prevailed in the end.
The Vischer branch of the Vischer-Andalusian bloodline was not entirely wiped out for the sake of posterity; only a few members of the main family remained. However, their influence was greatly reduced. All they had left was their family name, and several reminders of their glorious past.