"What's so special about the hundredth generation? Isn't it just a fate of lifelong loneliness?" I grumbled, already deeply immersed in the story spun by my mother—real or fabricated, I couldn't tell. "That ancestor of ours, the third, knew about the curse. Couldn't she have strangled her daughter at birth and spared us the ninety-nine generations of misery? She was profoundly skilled in magic; she must have been well aware of the curse, right? With all her abilities, why didn't she find a way to break it?"