The Oracle's Economy of Gestures: When Every Touch Becomes Legend
There is a servant in the Imperial Palace who has told the same story for thirty years: “I once helped the Oracle from her transport. She placed her hand on mine for just a moment—skin like cool silk, fingers light as breath. She looked at me, truly looked, and said, ‘Thank you.’ My family keeps the glove I wore that day in a glass case.”
Marro knows this story. She knows all the stories. She knew, even as she allowed that touch, that she was minting an heirloom that would outlive the servant’s grandchildren. This is the mathematics of her existence: every gesture priced not for the present, but for its permanence.
The Empire holds two truths at once. The Oracle is their protector, the voice of Arath-Bar, keeping the cosmos in balance. She is also a beautiful terror who could unmake them with a word. They love her the way one loves a sunset—at a distance, with awe more than warmth. When Marro walks the palace corridors, courtiers flatten against stone. Not from fear of punishment, but from the terrible risk of accidental significance. What if she notices them? What if she doesn’t? Either outcome could bend a life. She is a living monument. Monuments don’t get to be human.
Every morning, she wakes knowing she must perform divinity from the moment her eyes open. The way she rises—should anyone glimpse it—must suggest otherworldly grace. The way she takes her tea must read as communion, not caffeine. Even exhaustion must look transcendent. She understands that when she allows an attendant to adjust her collar, she is not receiving help; she is granting a blessing. That attendant will remember the texture of the fabric, the angle of her neck, the scent of her proximity. They will tell this story for decades: “The Oracle trusted me once. For a breath, I was necessary to divinity.”
These small permissions are her currency, rationed with care: a direct look for a nervous guard and his confidence doubles; a pause before entering the High Council and ministers read prophecy in her timing; the choice to walk rather than glide and a glimpse of humanity becomes priceless; a smile—perhaps twice a year—and an entire sector shifts its weather.
When she accepts a cup of water from a page, she can already see the ripples. The page keeps the cup; their family’s status rises; rivals take note. Stories attach to the object—how she held it, sipped from it, and returned it. Someone will claim the water itself changed by her touch. Kindness, priced correctly, is a strategy. But strategy accrues interest and side effects. Once, two families claimed the same “Oracle cup.” A petty grievance became riot fuel. Marro adjudicated, returned the cup to the kitchens, and wrote a policy: palace objects are not relics. Awe cooled into governance. It had to.
What haunts her most is that she remembers when touch was simple. At fifteen, before the anointing, she could help someone up without creating a sacrament. She could accept help without bestowing grace. Skin was just skin. Now her body is sacred real estate. Those who touch her speak of more-than-real flesh, heatless burning, the god’s attention humming beneath the surface. None of it is true. All of it is true—because belief is what divinity is made of. There is a clause she never shares but always honors: she moves with Arath-Bar’s favor; favor is permission, not protection. A close blade still finds blood. She keeps distance not for grandeur alone, but for survival—and chooses, at times, to cross it anyway.
The cruelest part of the performance is that it works. The populace doesn’t merely respect or fear her; they marvel. On a hundred worlds, children draw her with stars for eyes. Poets claim her steps leave invisible gold. Scholars across the spiral debate whether she experiences time as mortals do. She has become, in their minds, something other than human. On some nights, she forgets they’re wrong.
This is the cage she inhabits—made not of bars but beliefs, not of chains but choices. Every gesture that maintains her status deepens her isolation. Every ovation moves the audience farther away. She is beloved by billions spread across hundreds of planets, and known by almost no one who would simply sit with her. On the day the servant helped her from the transport, Marro saw the tremor in their hands, the tears gathering, the exact moment when the mundane tipped into the sacred. She could have refused the touch, preserved immaculate distance. Instead, she allowed it, knowing she was creating a legend that would define a family’s story for generations. That is her compassion. That is her cruelty. She gives people the miracles they crave, knowing the miracles are theater. She is an actress who can never leave the stage, playing a goddess for an audience that has forgotten it is watching a play.
In the Empire’s strange economy, Marro is both currency and mint. Her gestures create value. Her attention assigns worth. Her choices make and unmake fortunes of significance from system to system. She manages that economy like a disciplined merchant: too many blessings and the sacred inflates into noise; too few and the system starves. She walks the razor’s edge between distance and presence, truth and performance, mercy and myth. Each day, she calculates the exchange rate between what she gives and what it costs.
Sometimes the cost is public: a crack along the inside of her ring after a benediction, a tremor stealing precision from her fingers, silk darkening where a knife kissed the skin beneath. More often, the cost is private. The servant with the glass-cased glove does not know that when Marro touched their hand, she was remembering her cousin Eralius—how they used to sprint the palace gardens, palms clasped, laughing at nothing, touching without consequence. They do not know that in granting them a legend, she was mourning her own mythology.
In creating Marro Veldran, we explore what happens when someone becomes too important to be human, too beloved to be known, too perfect to be real. She is the Oracle—forever performing divinity for an audience that needs her to be more than she is, even as it costs her everything she was.
