Immortal Consequences
Immortal Consequences
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I. V. Marie on Immortal Consequences
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A text message and two years of griefThe concept arrived in May 2022 as a single line she texted a friend while walking around her apartment: ‘Magical Academy in the Afterlife.’ What the synthesis makes clear is that the idea landed in the middle of a particular kind of pain. Her father had died roughly two years earlier, and purgatory gave her a fictional space to stand inside a subject she could not otherwise approach head-on.
I’ve experienced really intense loss from a very young age. My dad passed away about two years before I started writing this book, so it was very much on my mind, and using the concept of an afterlife in purgatory was also a way to process my own grief. I wanted to take this thing that had the potential to make me very sad and turn it into something that ultimately brought me joy and could bring others joy—by having this outlet where characters are exploring and processing their own grief.
Grief was one engine; a lifelong, almost involuntary fixation on death was another. Growing up, she could not explain the preoccupation, but it shaped what kinds of stories felt necessary to her. Setting a school in purgatory let her combine the thing that frightened her with the things she loved most.
I grew up getting lost in fantasy worlds, and I knew I wanted to create that same experience for other readers. I wanted readers to have that all-consuming, sweeping feeling that YA fantasy books have always given me. Also, having endured a really intense personal family loss, I knew I wanted to explore the concept of grief in the book, and setting the school in the afterlife seemed like the perfect way to do that.
How she wrote it
Retail shifts, Boston winters, and six voices that refused to be oneThe physical texture of Blackwood Academy, the book’s afterlife school in purgatory, came from a specific sensory memory. She grew up in Miami, and the contrast between that warmth and her first New England winter never left her. The setting she built is less an invention than a distillation of exactly what she felt on those cold campus walks.
I can vividly remember my first like Boston winter, and coming from Miami, it was a bit jarring. But I remember walking through like the ivy drenched campuses at night and it was really cold and isolating, but also like kind of ethereal and beautiful. And I just wanted to convey that in a setting, and when Magical Academy in the Afterlife popped up, I was like, that’s perfect. [paraphrased from audio]
She built the book without a full outline, trusting the characters to reveal the story’s shape as she went. The method sounds loose, but it carried its own discipline: she knew the beginning, the midpoint, and the ending before she typed a word, and let the space between those fixed points stay open.
I’m very much a discovery writer, so I’ll just free write the first like 20K, um, to just really immerse myself in the world and the characters, and then from there I will create like a very loose general outline. Um, of like the major plot points and the beats, but it’s always subject to change. [paraphrased from audio]
The six-POV structure was not a plan she arrived at before drafting; it emerged from the characters themselves. Once she recognized that no single voice was more central than the others, she had to build an internal test for every scene: did switching to this character actually move the story, or was she simply moving?
When I started writing, and these characters started coming to me, I realized that there wasn’t really a main character. They all felt just as important... so the more I wrote, the more I realized that they just all six of them have to have their voices heard. [paraphrased from audio]
That discovery shaped how she evaluated every POV transition in revision: each switch had to justify itself by advancing either the plot or a character’s inner life, or it came out.
The first draft was written under conditions that left almost no room for writing. She was working retail and attending school simultaneously, with no full days off. That she finished the manuscript at all was a matter of treating every spare hour as non-negotiable.
When I first started writing the initial draft for Immortal Consequences, I was still working in retail and had recently gone back to school. I essentially did not have a single day off. But I was determined to finish the book, so I dedicated every possible minute to writing it. I had to really prioritize this project, and I sacrificed quite a bit of my free time, but it was incredibly worth it.
The personal thread
What the afterlife could hold that grief alone could notShe has described the book’s origins in terms of transformation: taking the fact of her father’s death and converting it into something she could work with, even enjoy. But the trials her characters endure at Blackwood Academy, the school’s central competition whose stakes determine whether a soul gains eternal power or risks a final unknown, were also designed to do what grief does: force a reckoning with personal weakness that cannot be avoided.
The other trials were more tailored to the world specifically––like battling illusions, confronting replicas of themselves, traversing the dangerous liminal passageway known as the Ether––all of those were born from the magic system itself. I wanted to make sure that the trials not only forced the characters to confront their magical abilities, but their own personal strengths and weaknesses as well.
Writing the book did not resolve her grief so much as give it somewhere to go. She is open about the distinction: she processed something while writing, and her hope is that readers who have experienced their own losses might find the same release in reading.
I definitely found myself processing my own grief when writing Immortal Consequences, and I hope it can be a way for readers to do that as well.
What she wants us to sit with
The question an eternity forces you to answerFantasy, for her, is not an escape from difficult subjects but a container that makes them approachable, especially for younger readers. She sees the genre’s distance from realism as a feature, not a softening: it lets her put obsession, grief, and the ethics of power on the page in ways that land without being crushing.
I love fantasy because I feel like you can express things that are so important in the real world, but that maybe can become more palatable, especially for younger readers, to process. And obviously, there’s romance and tension and trials, but there are also themes of obsession and power and grief, and what it means to not only grieve the ones you love but grieve the person that you used to be.
She designed Blackwood Academy, the purgatory school at the book’s center, to reproduce the specific cognitive state that the thought of death produces: the feeling that the rules could change at any moment, that nothing is fully legible. Readers arriving at the school for the first time are meant to feel what the characters feel, not to be oriented.
We think of death being this concept of the unknown, and ultimately we don’t have all the concrete answers. I wanted readers to have that same feeling upon entering Blackwood, of it being a bit of an enigma—not fully understanding the rules, and having that feeling that at any point something could flip, and all their ideas of how the world works can suddenly change. Because that’s the feeling you get at the thought of death and the afterlife.
The competition at the heart of the plot offers characters a choice between eternal power and an uncertain peace, and she wants readers to hold that choice after they close the book. The question is not rhetorical; it is the one the story refuses to answer on the reader’s behalf.
There’s something interesting in [the idea] of what would you do if you had been handed an eternity? And also, what would it take for you to give up that eternity? Because a lot of the characters are confronted with that choice. If they win the competition, they can either have all of this power and stay in purgatory forever and be handed this eternity, or they can risk putting their soul to rest on the Other Side, and risk that unknown: giving up that eternity perhaps for eternal peace.