The Oracle's Burden: Creating Complex Female Power
When I returned to The World Below after twenty years, I expected to write about soldiers and battles, about the price of survival in impossible circumstances. I had my protagonist mapped out—a grizzled sergeant, then a technology-enhanced major. Traditional heroes for a military science fiction epic.
But Marro Veldran had other plans.
The Character Who Wouldn't Stay Silent
Sometimes a character emerges from the margins of your manuscript and demands center stage. Marro began as a supporting figure—the Oracle, the Emperor's divine advisor, a role that could have been purely functional. She was meant to deliver prophecies, create political tension, and add mystical flavor to the imperial court.
Yet every time I wrote her scenes, something electric happened. The words flowed differently. Her chapters wrote themselves, often in directions I hadn't planned. While I struggled to give my military protagonists depth beyond their tactical excellence, Marro arrived fully formed—beautiful, terrible, and tragically complex.
Beyond the Chosen One
We've all read stories about reluctant chosen ones who discover their divine purpose and rise to meet it. Marro Veldran inverts this entire narrative. She was "chosen" before she was born, her fate sealed in divine memory before time began. At fifteen, she didn't discover her destiny—she discovered she'd never had a choice at all.
This isn't empowerment. It's existential horror dressed in divine silk.
What fascinates me about Marro is how she responds to this cosmic violation of free will. She doesn't rebel or accept—she performs. She transforms her lack of agency into a different kind of power, becoming so perfectly what the god demands that she transcends the role itself. She makes divinity her weapon even as it remains her cage.
The Performance of Power
Marro understands something fundamental about authority: it's theater. Every gesture she makes is calculated, every word weighted for maximum impact. She has learned that being the Oracle is less about genuine divine connection and more about maintaining the illusion of omniscience.
This makes her simultaneously more and less than human. She wields absolute authority in the empire, commands divine mandate, and speaks truths that reshape reality. Yet she can never be authentic, never be vulnerable, never be the cousin her Emperor desperately needs. She has become, as she reflects, "the Emperor's most elegant jailer."
The Addiction No One Discusses
Here's what I find most compelling about Marro: she's addicted to being special. Beneath her serene exterior and tragic circumstances lies an uncomfortable truth—she loves the power more than she mourns the cost. She drinks divine presence like wine, intoxicated by being irreplaceable.
This addiction makes her complicit in her own tragedy. She could perhaps find ways to be more human, to breach the walls between herself and Eralius (her cousin, the Emperor), but she chooses the isolation that maintains her uniqueness. She has become precisely what she claims to oppose: a manipulator using divine authority for control.
Writing Women with Uncomfortable Power
Too often, powerful women in fiction are either righteously earning their authority or villainously abusing it. Marro exists in the liminal space between. She is victim and victimizer, protector and destroyer, divine instrument and master manipulator. Her power is real but stolen, earned but undeserved, necessary but corrupting.
She's beautiful in a way that repels rather than attracts—"like something calculated rather than inherited." She doesn't inspire love or warmth. She inspires compliance. This isn't the beauty of the ingénue or the seductress. It's the beauty of a blade—functional, precise, dangerous.
The Cost of Transcendence
What drew me deepest into Marro's story was exploring what happens when someone touches the infinite and survives. She hasn't just gained divine sight—she's lost human vision. Her thoughts have become "tributaries to a vast, golden river of memory" that flows in all directions through time.
The most haunting aspect? When finally confronted with the truth of what she's become—shown her real self in a divine mirror—even her horror at the revelation was foreseen. She is not even free to despair authentically. Her grief is just another performance in a play she never auditioned for.
Why Marro Had to Lead
As I wrote deeper into The World Below, I realized why Marro demanded to be the protagonist. In a story about power, identity, and the price of transcendence, she embodies every theme in her very existence. She is the world below—the hidden truth beneath the gorgeous surface, the human soul trapped beneath divine mandate, the authentic self buried under necessary performance.
Sergeant Harlan shows us the honor in service. Major Virelle reveals the cost of enhancement. But Marro Veldran asks the question that haunts the entire novel: What remains human when humanity itself becomes obsolete?
Sometimes the story chooses its own teller. I'm grateful Marro chose to tell hers through me.
J.A. Raithe is currently completing The World Below, a novel about power, transcendence, and the price of being chosen. For updates on the book's progress and more insights into its creation, subscribe below.
