Fuchsia Bellgrove-Marlowe

Lady Fuchsia Bellgrove-Marlowe was Lord Alistair Marlowe's mother and Hadrian's paternal grandmother. She died at nearly seven hundred years old — an extraordinary lifespan even by palatine standards — with her mind faded toward the end. Alistair was the child of her old age, decanted from the same birthing vats as Hadrian himself. Hadrian's first encounter with death was her funeral while he was still a boy: Prior Eusebia led the procession down echoing steps to the family necropolis beneath Devil's Rest, attended by the smell of myrrh and incense tapers and chanters, and the family carried canopic jars — Hadrian carried her eyes in cerulean fluid, his mother Liliana carried her heart, and his uncle Lucian carried her brain.

She received the full formal burial rites of palatine custom: her vital organs were removed and preserved, her flesh was burned to carbon, her ashes were sent toward the Homeworld, and a votive lantern was released into the skies. Hadrian contrasts this ceremony with Cat's death in a storm drain and the complete absence of any such dignity, highlighting the vast distance between palatine and plebeian mortality.