The Marchioness

Wheels within Wheels, Turning in the Heavens 

The Darkmanse is a world of semiautonomous city-states and the far-flung trade routes and spice roads that connect them. Trade on the continent is a monopoly of the traveler guilds, nomadic clans who traffic in gold and intrigue, and who prize blood and loyalty to family above all else.

One such group calls themselves the Seven Caravans People, seven for the stars in the constellation that their dukes and marquises claim as the mythical birthplace of their bloodline. They are musicians and fortunetellers. Their ancestors were thieves and tinkers.

Their women are seers who burn with the light of the Seven Caravans. Their matriarch is a ninety-eight-year-old witch known, in the nomad tongue, as the Marchioness.

The Seven Caravans People use landed titles yet possess no lands. They are a wandering nation unto themselves. The Marchioness lays claim to no marchlands. In her possession are cartographies of a far different sort, obtained through initiations guided by the previous Marchioness, now dead and interred with all the rest in the ossuaries of the Darkmanse.

Like her predecessors before her, the current Marchioness knows that there are greater spell-makers than her. The world itself is a spell, the working of a cunning magician who, like her, veils his motives behind elaborate mechanics. There are wheels within wheels, turning in the heavens.

But now that the Greening has come, even the maker’s laws appear to be weakening. Some believe the Marchioness is in league with the hidden ones who are rumored to be behind the renewal, but nobody can really say for sure.

Her true motives are her own.