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The Late Marwns’ Social Club met in the gray in-between where soul-flames flickered with unspent purpose. The timing of their meetings was regular, in the sense that they always occurred exactly when the club members most desired to meet, even if that meant breaking with the flow of time entirely. Being spiritually bound to one of the most powerful and secretive lodestones of magical energy in the Nine Worlds had some advantages when it came to scheduling.
For a living mortal to determine the occasion and location of such meetings, they would need to be an expert diviner of obsessive curiosity and focus, not to mention one willing to commit high treason in the course of their search. Alternatively, an invitation from an existing member would do the trick. No such invitation had ever been issued, but one club member was seriously considering it.
In her youth, she had been painstakingly trained in the art of invitations, thank-you notes, and every other written formality considered seemly for a noblewoman; once grown, she had never had the opportunity to write to anyone but herself. She trusted that her intended sentiments would shine through even if her practical experience was minimal, and that the reader would forgive any peculiarities of form or phrase - letter writing etiquette had surely changed with the generations, after all.
She and her fellow club members were all nameless, bodiless, and utterly soaked in ancient and layered magical energies. In the in-between of their meeting place, they took on the trappings of embodiment to varying degrees based on personal preference and strength. The Eldest usually appeared as a faint angular plume of golden smoke, like dust motes caught in a sunbeam. Occasionally the others would perceive brief flashes of a face, young and troubled, wavering in the unsteady light, his mouth dripping with liquid gold. Starwatcher was accustomed to physicality and generally embodied herself fully, though she had a tendency to drop details she considered unimportant when caught up in moments of enthusiasm. Her elegantly slippered feet, the trailing hem of her robe, and the ends of her long braids might all flicker in and out of perceptibility at times, but her expressive hands and large, luminous eyes always remained strongly in evidence. Blade Dancer was visible as a blur of ritualistic movements, their silvered wooden saber glinting as it swept through practice forms in an endless loop, and Vengeance was ever and always a pillar of blue fire in the exact shape of the tower that had measured out the length of each of their lives.
There had been, on a few notable occasions, other attendants of the club, but the central four had come to consider it theirs by virtue of longevity. Their rare cousins who flickered by, pained and confused on their journeys down the ley lines of the Nine Worlds and out of life, seemed to benefit from a moment to connect with other Marwns, but seldom did they stay for long. They chattered and fled, soul flames tamped down to bare embers by lifetimes of tightly bound ritual, out to the broad and peaceful expanse of the beyond. Occasionally the Eldest would look at them pensively, tracking their path out of the in-between, a route leading forever away from the grasp of the Empire’s magic. By his own admission, he was part of the club simply because it had never occurred to him that his soul could leave his tower until he met other Marwns, and then he’d found he liked them enough that he did not want to move on just yet. Perhaps when the Empire fell and the tower crumbled into the sea, he would say in his dust-soft whisper of a voice, then it would be time to go.
Though she was the youngest of all of them, chronologically speaking, Starwatcher felt a sort of maternal protectiveness towards her cousins at times. She had experienced more of life than any of them, and had left it more peacefully as well. Sitting with the rest of the club in the flat gray space that was not a space, she could sometimes feel the sharp angles of their deaths graze her, like stray splinters kicked up from the boards of a fiercely-paced floor.
The Eldest had simply been ill. He choked to death on a piece of his own lungs, small and alone and tasting blood in his mouth for the first and last time in his short life. His placement as the Marwn, he and the others collectively believed, had likely been something of an experiment. A younger sibling or close cousin of the heir, perhaps, hearty enough to survive childhood but already subject to the early manifestations of royal bloodline-pruning, the tenuous health of an increasingly inbred family tree. The most readily available choice for a new weaving of magic, a test of the tensile strength of the bindings of the Empire. None of the club were certain if he had been the very first Marwn, but his faint and dust-blown soul whispered with strands of magic so ancient that he had certainly not been far from the beginning.
He’d left no bones behind. When he died, the unrefined early draft of the Marwn binding had simply pulled him apart. He did not remember what he had looked like when he was alive - the beam of sunlight that fell on his face as he dissipated into a glowing essence, looking out of his tower window at the sky he’d never stood beneath, was more real to him than the body he’d worn so briefly.
Vengeance had been poisoned, a feat that filled her with a strange, dreamy envy as much as it angered her. She was glad she had not had to spend even longer in the tower than her relatively brief measure, but as a soul flame she fantasized wildly about what it would have been like to be on the other side of the mysterious portal through which all her meals had been delivered, to pour a tall, deceptive glass of poppy milk and froth it to enticing perfection, to spill royal blood rather than be spilled. She hoped, she told the others, that her distant assassin had been a commoner and a revolutionary, someone trying to strike out at one of the secret pillars of the Empire. She suspected, she grumbled in her darker moments, blue flames licking up her phantasmal stone walls as she spoke, that it was more likely her eldest sister or a high priest, one of the scant few brought into the official circle of secrets which contained the existence of the Marwn.
The weavings of Marwn-magic had been tighter in her time than in that of the Eldest, who had been able to ache and cough and cry in fear and confusion as he grew ill in his lonely and luxuriant room. Vengeance had calmly and stoically eaten every bite of her dinner, as she did at every meal, and then calmly and stoically fell down dead. It was only in her final moments as the flame guttered out in her body and found new fuel in the spirit plane that she had learned to feel true rage, and then she had felt a lifetime’s worth all at once. It was so invigorating that she had never stopped since.
Blade Dancer was the youngest in chronology save for Starwatcher, and had been even more thoroughly bound and protected by magic than their predecessors. In life, their food was untainted, their routines precise, their emotions smoothed out and buffed to a fine polish by deep layers of ritual magic. Still, something in their body had known that there was a deep wrongness to the limited physical and psychic space of the tower, and battered endlessly against it like a bird beating its wings against a beautifully embossed pane of glass. Before their exile, they had trained with foil and saber and épée, and in the tower had been supplied with blunted practice weapons. Thick and thin blades of firm, perfectly grained wood, each painted over with a pointless extravagance of patterning in silver or gold leaf, stood at attention in racks ringing their practice room. Blade Dancer was never still in life for even a moment, as far as they could recall. They rocked back and forth during meals, followed the flowing movements of their daily rituals with alacrity, and then spent every remaining waking hour training, a hand around the hilt of their only true source of joy. In their sleep, they kicked and rolled as though running an endless road, traversing distances truly unimaginable to their waking body.
Their heart gave out in the middle of a sword drill one day, and they dropped solidly downwards onto their practice saber. It was not sharp enough to cut cleanly, but still so sturdy that they felt a few ribs bruise and crack as they fell to the practice room floor for one final time, torso striped with blood and silver leaf. In the meeting-place of souls, their sword was more substantial than their body, which usually only appeared as a fluid and flickering shape of crimson and gilt behind the blade. Blade Dancer’s stated intention was to attend social club meetings until they felt that they had learned how to rest. They expected that this would take a very long time indeed.
When Starwatcher fell, it had been much simpler. As far as she could tell, something inside her had simply decided to stop. She had reached out to adjust her viewing angle on a particularly faint star, then found herself suddenly collapsing downwards and rising upwards simultaneously. When she stood up outside of her body in the in-between, the full breadth of emotion available to her for the first time since becoming the Marwn, the wave of grief that crashed over her was not for her death but for the simple, cruel fact that she was no longer able to touch her telescope.
Starwatcher had learned to find anger in her soul over time, but it did not flare or overwhelm her as it did for Vengeance. On the whole, she considered, she had had a good life. It had been long and peaceful, full of beautiful, glimmering nights, reflective days spent on notes and theories, and the soothing, simple practice of ritual. The one thing she had been denied, the thing that stung her deep, was that she had been deprived of a family. She knew that if she had not been the Marwn, her family life would likely have been tense and distant and complicated. Out of the tower, she would have been bound in by the subtler but still stringent threads of power and propriety that shaped the lives of Astandalan royals. Still, it would have been something. She could have been an aunt, a sister, maybe even a mother. There could have been moments of love, of connection, tucked into the weave of life. She could have found someone dear to her to question or tease or delight, to sit down with over tea and mull over a new astronomical theory.
Starwatcher had never voiced a clear plan for leaving the Late Marwns’ Social Club. If three of her elders still stayed, should she not stay with them as long as they needed her? She had not given herself room to consider it fully, did not know what could bring her enough of a sense of peace, of completeness, to be able to move on.
And then one day, as shocking and vivid as the birth of a star, she felt the magic of the tower ripple in a wholly unfamiliar way at the arrival of living visitors.
Kip was visible to Starwatcher like a moon standing before the sun, a photo negative, a magical eclipse. He appeared full of fire rendered in pale, rippling waves, and around him glowed a ring of gold, caressing his outline but never cutting through the inner flame. The magic of the Empire, of her family, knew him intimately yet had no foothold within him; he was filled with something else, something profoundly un-magical and yet clearly serving him as a well of power.
Fitzroy was far more visible, the potent aura of his magic somehow less dramatic than the simple fact that he was so solidly alive . His face had lines and weather-marks from sun and salt spray and things Starwatcher could scarcely imagine, danger and distance and adventure, the vastness of the worlds beyond the tower. His eyes were gilt, and lively as the flickering joy of Blade Dancer’s steps. In the line of his nose and the set of his jaw she felt a resonance with the faint echoes of form that the Eldest sometimes showed in his sunbeam.
I have to remember him perfectly , she thought, as perfectly as I’ve ever mapped a constellation. I need to show the others what it looks like to grow old.