Not Your Grandmother's Oracle: Reimagining Divine Power

When I tell people about Marro Veldran, the Oracle of The World Below, I can see the image bloom behind their eyes: flowing robes, crumbling temples, incense and riddles. A staff. A sanctum of dust and prophecy scrolls.

Let’s shatter that image.

Marro Veldran wears tailored coat dresses in deep navy, lines so sharp they could cut glass. Midnight hair pinned with military precision. She doesn’t shuffle through ruins; she strides through gleaming imperial halls where every surface reflects her calculated stillness and every click of closed-toe pumps lands like a decision.

The Future of the Divine

The World Below is not quasi-medieval. This is Cetia-243, imperial capital, where high-born fashion is a protocol as strict as any dress uniform. Think less “ancient Greece,” more “future Buckingham.” Knee-length coat dresses in saturated color. Structured fascinators for formals. Pearls. Everything impeccable.

The Emperor does wear robes—technological marvels that shift color with his emotional state, an exclusivity no one else can command. This isn’t tradition for nostalgia. It’s power expressed as proprietary technology.

And Marro? She dresses as what she is: a high-born woman who happens to channel the divine. Her sanctity needs no costume. It radiates from her unnatural poise, her too-clean symmetry, the way her gaze lands like a scanner measuring truth.

Protocol as Power

High-born life is a cage made of etiquette. You cannot wear bright hues carelessly. You do not appear without the right accessory. A protocol slip isn’t awkward; it’s catastrophic. Meanwhile, the non-high-born enjoy expressive freedom—smart fabrics, programmable color, integrated tech.

Marro’s complexity lives in this tension. She must satisfy the optics of rank while performing the work of an Oracle. Every outfit is both uniform and ritual. She doesn’t need mystic robes to read as otherworldly—precision is her vestment. And for the record: she moves with Arath-Bar’s favor; favor grants sanction, not shielding. A close blade still finds blood.

The Terror of the Familiar

We’re comfortable when the divine looks ancient. The robes keep it far away. But an Oracle who could step into any corporate tower—who delivers cosmic truth in a coat dress and modest heels—is genuinely unsettling.

Marro’s beauty isn’t soft or romantic. It’s geometric, engineered—“as though every cell obeys an aesthetic imperative.” She doesn’t invite the cozy awe of a storybook seer. She compels compliance. She looks like authority incarnate, the kind of person who could end a career—or a city—with a single, perfectly manicured gesture.

Breaking the Genre Mold

When I returned to The World Below after twenty years, I didn’t want another fantasy with familiar trappings. I wanted to ask: what does divine authority look like in a civilization of advanced tech and rigid etiquette? What happens when mysticism wears military precision? When prophecy walks in corporate power?

Marro Veldran is that answer. She isn’t your grandmother’s oracle wrapped in smoke and chants. She’s something more dangerous: a divinity that looks like it belongs in our world. She could stand behind you in an elevator, and the air would change.

The New Divine Aesthetic

This choice ripples through everything. The imperial court gathers not in torch-lit throne rooms, but in spaces that feel like Buckingham crossed with a Fortune-500 headquarters. Soldiers don’t clank in plate; they move in exosuits that make them something beyond human. Even visions and cosmic horrors arrive with the clipped clarity of a briefing.

The dusty corridors and flowing robes belong to another story. Here, divine power wears tailored navy, walks on polished floors that mirror its composure, and speaks with the measured cadence of someone who has never raised her voice to be obeyed.

Marro Veldran doesn’t look like an oracle. She looks like the future of control. That’s exactly what makes her terrifying.

What are your assumptions about power, divinity, and authority?
The World Below challenges all of them—dressed in perfectly tailored navy.