The Ligeia Club

*'The Law goes back all the way to Stone: the Keys cannot be held or owned. This had, I believe, the unexpected consequence that those outside the law may hold and own them. But even they cannot keep them.'*
 *'The Locksmith's Dream: Incursus'*

**The Ligeia Club** is a club or sorority of Alukites, who each hold a Key, and who call each other ‘sisters’. There have always been seven Ligeians, though the Club has not always been called the Ligeia Club, and the members have not always been the same. It is very rare for all seven to meet in convocation, but it does happen. We know of at least one member - the one who held the Flaying Key when the Moth rose - who is no longer part of the club (because she was consumed by Marinette).
Individual Ligeians are described as ‘something like a person who does something like eat people’, ‘criminals and fugitives’,  and are ‘cursed eternally because they devoured their children fresh from the womb.’ Physically they vary in their appearance, but when attacking the Exile, Echidna, Klêidouchos, Marinette and Sulochana are all described as ‘flapping nightmare[s] of teeth and webbed skin’. This description is not applied to Morgen, Medusa or Rowena, due to the Exile not meeting with them in the same way as the others. However, it is likely that this description applies to all seven Ligeians and to alukites more broadly, allowing for oddities/additions like Medusa’s destructive gaze.

Several members have specific sacrificial animals. Sometimes these sacrifices are necessary for their Key to occur, other times it seems like the Ligeians merely consider them ‘fitting’. Enigma also associates each Ligeian with an animal when describing their Key, this often lines up with their respective sacrificial animal found elsewhere, but not always.

Current members of the Ligeia Club are:

* Sulochana Amavasya;
* Echidna (Mrs E., Mother of Monsters);
* Marinette (Our Lady of Wires);
* Klêidouchos (Frau Schlüssel);
* Medusa;
* Morgen (Mme Matutine, Sea born);
* Rowena; (Wolf-wife)

## Other Notes

* In Vienna - likely during the Second Worm War - a ‘charitable organization’ called the New Ligeians was observed by Nico Van Driel to be funding the burial of the poor. The ‘New Ligeians’ were in fact the Ligeia Club, or at least some of its members. It seems likely that the Ligeians were simply eating the bodies they claimed to be burying.
* The Ligeia Club once chartered the entire ship ‘Hebe Stanton’ for the use of seven cabins, likely for one of their rare convocations.
* The reckoners have learned to avoid Ligeians, who are ‘older and hungrier than any of [their] mobs.’ Even Duffoure, a major reckoner lord, is wary of Ligeians, and can be wounded by them.
* ‘Ligeia Remembers’ is an important phrase connected to the Ligeians, but its significance is not fully known.

## Sources

1. ↑ On the Smoky Satisfaction..., *'There have always been seven...'*
2. ↑ An Audience With Mme Matutine?
3. ↑ Seek out a Ligeian
4. ↑ Ligeian Irritation
5. ↑ The Soucouyants' Hungers
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Viennese Conundra, Read 'The Viennese Conundra'
7. ↑ Phase X – Solution
8. ↑ The 'Hebe Stanton'
9. ↑ Ligeian Presence, Ligeian Interference, Something Greater
10. ↑ 'LIGEIA REMEMBERS'
11. ↑ A Good Reason