Kulkukan Tavern and Inn; Marion's Room
7 Winter 514 AV
17th Bell
7 Winter 514 AV
17th Bell
"Verisimilitude."
Marion couldn't recall how or when the word had rolled into her mind, but it had been there for a good few bells now. She'd lost count of how many times she'd muttered it, feeling the syllables bounce off her tongue. But she had decided it was a rather beautiful word, and its presence was not a frustration. It had been some time since it had crossed her mind before now; that was one of many effects her time in Sunberth had had. There had been little use for beautiful words in the city of anarchy, where the denizens often seemed content to communicate through grunts and rarely employed words longer than three syllables, if that. The more she had adapted to the culture, the more her vocabulary had suffered. Even her naturally Alvadan accent had grown tinged with rougher tones.
So it was with some combination of relief and joy that Marion uttered the word. She had liked Sunberth well enough, and its inherent freedom appealed to her in ways she could not yet describe. Yet it was with an odd sense of... gladness that she had left. She had lost focus there, caught up in the excitement of her job even though her ultimate purpose had been rendered somewhat obsolete. The entire population always seemed to be teeming with a constant, underlying fear. It had been perfect at first, but eventually it had worn her down. She'd felt useless. What was the purpose of tormenting those already so easily disturbed? There was no challenge to it.
That had been her purpose for coming to Riverfall: the challenge. There was peace here. Order. Though there was a strange tension on the air, a sense that all was not quite right. But, oddly, she felt no desire to investigate that feeling. In fact, she hadn't felt like doing much of anything these past couple of days, instead finding herself preferring the silence of her own little room here. It was entirely unnatural for her, and Marin entertained the idea that perhaps she was ill.
Either way, the word dripped from her lips now, and she watched in the mirror (which sat propped before her) as they twisted around the syllables. Mirrors were another things Sunberth had tended to lack. They were too breakable. The one she was using now was small but well-maintained, and she had leaned it against the pillow on the bed. Marion herself sat cross-legged atop the crimson sheets, loose black pants bunching and nothing to cover the upper half of her body but the top piece of her undergarments. Her hair hung loose about bare shoulders.
Pale eyes peered back in her reflection and narrowed.
"Verisimilitude."
It had started as a whisper in her mind those few bells ago. An echo, as if she had said it first in some other place in space and time and the sound was only just now making its way back to her. At first, it was just a fun combination of sounds. Marion hadn't recognized it as a word until she'd quietly mouthed it, feeling the familiarity of it on her tongue. A few more chimes, and she realized that it'd been part of the vocabulary she'd learned in her childhood. She hadn't had much use for it back then though, and would have assumed she had little use for it now as well, until she had drawn the connection between it and herself that had caused her to believe it wasn't by simple coincidence that her subconscious had conjured it now.
If she wasn't mistaken, the word represented the concept of appearing real -- a concept that fascinated her as a morpher. And she found it incredibly interesting that she would happen to pull such a beautiful, twisting, relevant word to the forefront of her mind.
