Funny story about how Marici got her name…
When I was naming the big five—Selene, Ilios, Aydin, Sadhi, and Marici—I started with everyone else. Out of all of them, she was the one I knew least and had the least connection with; as such, she was the last one standing without a name. I knew who she was: Ilios’s sister and the Queen of Day, but other than that, she was a blank canvas. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want another name starting with S. At the time, I already had Selene, Siri, Sadhi, and Syrius. And so I turned to the author’s best character resource: baby name sites. I typed in “sun-related female baby names” and started reading. When I eventually came across Marici, my thought process was approximately this: Sure. Why not? I don’t have any M names yet.
That was it. No profound research. No deep dive into etymology. In fact, I mostly disliked it, but I couldn’t find something that seemed to fit better. And because I was so much more interested in basically every other character, I called it good and moved on.
Then, as time went on, her name started to grow on me, and I discovered that like many other characters in the Day Court, she had a nickname: Mari. Then I started to do some deep diving into the names of my different characters. I wanted to see if there were aspects of them that I could lean into. Since my story literally begins at creation, many characters will impact how language itself is used later on. What happens in their arcs will lay the groundwork for the origins of many words, phrases, and stories that live on today. For instance, in a much later Chronicle, I have a character who is known as Per of the Sea, which, after hundreds of years, will be shortened to Percy as his story is told and handed down through the generations.
That said, as I have been diving into the deeper meanings behind my characters’ names at every single turn, I have been stopped cold. The fit is not approximate. It is not close. In several cases, it is so exact that I genuinely cannot attribute it to coincidence. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that God had a hand in this — that something was being named before I understood what I was naming.
Marici is one example of this.
In Sanskrit, Marici means ray of light. Literally: particle of light. Sunbeam.
And her brother’s name, Ilios, means sun.
I did not choose these names together with that relationship in mind. I chose Ilios early because it was beautiful and felt right, and I chose Marici later because I needed an M name. And yet there they are — sun and ray of light — a sibling pair whose names encode exactly what they are to each other before I had even begun to understand who they were as characters.
Because Ilios is the sun. He fills a room. His laugh thunders across the sky. He is bold of heart, given to motion, the kind of presence that you don’t miss when he arrives. And Marici? She is the ray. She is what emanates from that source and touches things.
The sun at a distance is overwhelming. The ray is what actually reaches you. It is what warms your skin. It is what does the quiet work of illumination without demanding that you look directly at it. Neither of them diminishes the other. But they are doing different things, and in Chronicle 1, you can see this playing out almost immediately.
I thought that the surprises with her name ended there, but then I talked to a friend of mine about my findings surrounding my characters’ names, and while I normally would have jumped to either Sadhi or Siri as examples of the depth I unexpectedly found, I somehow found myself talking about Marici.
Now, the thing about my friend is that she is a third culture kid who was born in Japan. When I was telling her about Marici, she stopped me and asked if I knew what "Mari" means in Japanese.
I told her I didn’t, and she proceeded to tell me the following details…
There are several readings for “Mari” in Japanese. The first is 真理 — as my friend explained, it means a true line. In this instance, “true” is used in the same way as the phrase “be TRUE to your heart.” It is a line that is deeply true at a soul level. I found this so interesting because Marici (Mari) is, at her core, driven by a pure love for others and for the Voice. Not only that, but she is driven by truth and will later struggle to understand why humanity can cast aside the Voice, as that concept is unfathomable to her. To her, the Voice is true, and everything within her desires to point to Him.
The second reading is 真里 — village heart. It literally refers to the relational center where people return. Not the most powerful figure in the room. Not the loudest. But the one whose presence makes the room feel like somewhere you belong. You can see this in the garden scene in Chapter 5. The plants turn toward her. The creatures come running. Bubba — still slightly damp from his unfortunate bubble incident — clings to her skirts and serenades her with tidings of his affection. The ring of plant creatures forms around her, not because she commanded it but because something in the living world recognized her and came home.
There is more to her name, more details I found that I wasn’t expecting, but I’ll discuss those in a later post when they are applicable. So, keep an eye out for an update when we reach Chronicle 2!
That said, I named her Marici because I needed an M name.
I have come to believe that is not the whole story.
There is too much precision here — the sibling encoding of sun and ray, the true line and village heart, along with others that have yet to come into play— for me to account for it any other way. Something was being named before I understood what I was naming. And the more I sit with that, the more it feels less like a curiosity and more like a quiet reminder that the Maker of the story I’m writing has been paying closer attention than I have.
That probably should not surprise me.
But it does, a little, every time.
If you want to meet Marici in the story itself, she first appears in Chapter 2: The First Song of the Heavens. Her garden scene is in Chapter 5: Day’s First Greeting. And there are more chapters with her to come!