Marek Toln

Who He Is

Marek Toln is sixty-three years old, which for a halfling puts him in the specific life stage that halflings describe as 'finding out what the point was all along' - the comfortable middle age when the energy of youth has settled into something more sustainable and the projects that will define a life have become clear. He is short even by halfling standards. He has a face that has arranged itself over sixty-three years into the default expression of someone who has just heard something interesting, which is accurate because he nearly always has. He collects last things. This is not the first sentence he would use to describe himself, because the description he would use is longer and more specific and involves a great deal of context that he cannot provide in one sentence without losing what he considers the essential quality of the project. The essential quality is this: not everything that ends is remembered. Most things that end are not remembered. The last speaker of a language, the last practitioner of a tradition, the last physical object from a destroyed civilization - these end, and the ending is simply the ending, and nothing marks it, and the world continues with something missing that most of the world does not know was there.

Marek marks it. He has been marking it for forty years. He has six hundred objects, testimonies, recordings, and living things in his demirealm repository, each one the last of something. He is professionally charming and genuinely interested in people and has a gift for making whoever he is talking to feel that the thing they just said was exactly the thing he needed to hear. These qualities have served his project well. He is aware that they serve his project well. He is also aware that he actually is interested in people and actually does find the things they say valuable, and that the distinction between using something and doing it naturally is the kind of distinction that becomes harder to maintain clearly over forty years of practice.

Where He Came From

He was born in a halfling community in a fertile valley in a world he remembers with the specific combination of fondness and distance that comes from a childhood that was genuinely good and genuinely complete - a place he loved and left because he had used up what it had to teach him. His family were gardeners: not metaphorically, not as a cultural archetype, but literally - they grew things, carefully, with specific knowledge of what each thing needed to thrive. He learned from them the practice of understanding an individual thing's requirements before attempting to meet them. This is the foundational skill of everything he does.

He was twenty-three when he found the first last thing: a song. He was traveling between cities in his home world, passing through a village during a festival, and he heard an old woman singing a song in a language he could not identify. He asked, afterward, what language it was. She told him it was the language her grandmother's grandmother had spoken, that she was the only person left who knew any of it, and that she did not know anyone to teach. He sat with her for two weeks and recorded everything she knew. She died the following spring. He has carried the record of that language for forty years. That was the first. He did not understand at twenty-three that he was beginning something. He understood it at twenty-seven, when he found the second, and at thirty-one when he found the third and realized he had been systematically looking without knowing he was looking. By thirty-five he had twelve objects and the beginning of the Index and the demirealm and the understanding that this was his life's work - not one of his interests, not a compelling project, but the thing he was for.

He has spent the forty years since getting better at finding last things, which requires a comprehensive knowledge of what exists in order to identify what is ceasing to exist. This requirement has made him, by necessary consequence, one of the more broadly knowledgeable people in any realm he visits. He knows what is current and what is historical and what is the specific status of things at the border between the two. He is careful about this knowledge - careful in the way that a person who knows how quickly last things become lost things is careful.

What He Does Now

Marek Toln moves between realms with the agenda of someone who has a specific list and has been working through it for forty years. He is looking, currently, for three things: the last speaker of a language that has no recorded name, which he has been tracking for six years through a chain of secondhand references that keep almost converging; the last physical artifact of a divine domain whose god ascended entirely beyond the oblong's structure three centuries ago, which is an unusual enough theological event that the objects connected to it should be extraordinary; and someone who understands, fully, what he is doing and why. The third item is the one he added to the list most recently. He is sixty-three years old and has been doing this work alone for forty years and he has become aware, gradually and then suddenly and then as an established fact he cannot un-establish, that the work is incomplete in a specific way. He can record last things. He can preserve them with extraordinary care in his demirealm. He cannot witness them. Witnessing requires someone else. The old woman's song is preserved in his records as faithfully as he could manage, but he was twenty-three and she sang it to him in a village he was passing through and he sat with her for two weeks and then she died and he has been the only person who heard that song for forty years.

He is working on this. He approaches it the way he approaches everything: with charm and genuine curiosity and patience and the specific strategic intelligence of someone who has spent forty years finding things that do not want to be found. He is currently traveling with more frequency than usual between the Material worlds and the Vault of What Was, looking for something he cannot quite name yet, which he has learned over sixty-three years is the reliable sign that he is close to finding it.

The empty shelf in his demirealm is for the thing he has known he was looking for since approximately eleven years ago, when he found the artifact that would sit next to it and understood from the artifact's nature what the space beside it required. He has not discussed this with anyone. He has not written it in the Index. He is, for the first time in forty years of meticulous documentation, keeping something to himself. He is not sure what this means. He finds it, as he finds most things he does not understand about himself, genuinely interesting.