Pain. Pain and heartbreak are all Marian has known the past few months.
She feels like a fallen woman. It has become absolutely impossible for her to remember how many times she has been hit, pushed and called names, or for whatever bullshit reason it was provided to her.
The Marchen girl had always known fortitude, and she knew how to maintain her pride and posture under duress, but she has been so thoroughly drained that she could only lay down and take beating after beating in silence, without any hope of rescue. Her body and mind became used to the harshness by now.
Is it not curious how her life was so promising not too long ago and now it is in ruins? Shattered and broken with no way of saving it?
Marian had a future, a happy future, ahead of her. She had a match, the prospects of keeping her freedom and serving her city, and then, as if it was all build in unstable sand, it came crashing down in the first storm. All it took was one misconception, one wrong move by an insane man to ruin her life completely.
Just a piece of misplaced gossip, just some Elven maid that rolled her tongue when she should not have, and it was enough to destroy everything that she hoped to have achieved in her life.
It all turned upside down so quickly that the Viscount's daughter barely had a chance to defend herself publicly before it blew up, and that was merely about the judgement of the masses. She held in greater esteem the opinion of a single man, and he has not allowed her to utter a word before taking drastic action.
Sebastian has always had a flare for the dramatic, he always acted too much with his heart and sense of right and wrong than with his intellect and reason. His mind was quickly set on her summary condemnation and nothing she could have said would change that.
In any regard, it does seem like a tall order to have her fiancé listen to her with a cool mind in such a situation. Nobody, not even the most reasonable of men, would have cared about what Marian had to say about the whole situation. The entire city had turned against her, the nobility throughout the Free Marches chanted her demise with a distasteful sense of hypocrisy. She has been labelled as a whore, cheater, witch and much more she cannot hope to remember at this point.
Well, it is not as if it mattered anymore. Her mind became numb to the insults and hits thrown her way.
Sebastian Vael, her fiancé, the man with a past, the firm believer in the boundless forgiveness of the Maker, the one person who should have trusted her, even if only circumstantially, did not deign himself to.
Perhaps he wanted to be free of her. It is not as if he had proposed to her because he wanted to. He had been given a choice: marriage or Chantry, and he picked the former. The oldest daughter of Viscount Leandra, the ugly duckling with unrefined manners and an inconvenient streak of independent thinking, came with the most advantages.
Yes, she is a mage, and yes, she kept unsavoury company, but Sebastian was the third son of a philoprogenitive family. There was little chance of the crown ever landing on his head, and even if it came to, there had numerous cousins to be appointed instead. The commercial and military advantages were too numerous to overlook.
Faced with the humiliation, the suspicion and the effort to keep a situation he did not care to be in, Sebastian refused to listen to his fiancée. He broke off the engagement with her, alerting his parents that he would rather be imprisoned at the Chantry until the Maker came to step on this earth than go through with this marriage.
Marian begged the man to listen to her. She pleaded with him but he scoffed at her and paid no mind.
Over the season he spent in Kirkwall, over the time they spent together, she had come to care deeply for her intended, and she had hoped that he would feel the same, but it was to no avail. Hurtful words flew out of his mouth, like daggers being shot against her spirit. She cried in front of him, begged him not to consider the terrible accusations being levelled against her, but it was to no avail.
The noble daughter remembers how Sebastian had just looked her up and down with a sneer on his face. He pushed her away, back hitting the shelf in the Chantry audience chamber, where he had been staying for the duration of his visit, in the interests of propriety, making her wince in pain as he walked away. Eyes welling up with more tears as pain bloomed inside of her.
Malcolm had been disappointed, Leandra had been slighted, but Carver had been absolutely enraged. He blamed his sister, of course, as he is prone to do, as he perceives that this whole affair had humiliated the family and, by extension, hurt his social prospects.
Her family had braced itself for having their eldest daughter be left an old maid, but Marian knew better. She knew who would be coming, and come he did, in what certainly felt as a salvation to them. It had all been planned, after all: Bran, Lord Cavin had ruined her life all because of his little obsession with her.
He had wanted she ever since she was young, as he had always been close to her family, ever since he came to Kirkwall from less-than-stellar origins in Ansburg and higher education in Antiva. Since he climbed to the position of seneschal, he had always told her in that slithering manner of his, whenever they happened to meet, how she would be his when she grew up, even when she had not had debuted yet, making her loathe at every corner she would see him in.
It got worse as the Amell daughter grew up and matured into a beautiful and talented woman, as he evolved from some garden variety of a creep to a downright disturbing rapist. He would often make sexual comments about her that she would ignore. Not that ignoring ever did anything of help for her, as it only served to make him madder and not make him stop. She would have murdered him, as she did other men, but she feared repercussion to her mother and her often fraught position at the helm of the city.
In that regard, her engagement had been a source of security as well: Bran knew he had little chance to become her husband, as he was not of noble birth and she cared very little for him. The presence of the son of a Prince as Marian's intended made this possibility even more remote, but, alas, he insisted. The seneschal would accost her unexpectedly, especially when she was accompanied by her fiancé and pulls her away to 'talk' to her.
On the beginning, it passed off as city affairs, but soon this explanation grew thinner and thinner. All those instances made Sebastian suspicious and angry, and it set the stage for the scandal to come.
That day, that fateful day, had Marian in a state of reflection after a particularly nasty quandary between the already unsteady couple. Sebastian's anger burst out the night before because Lord Cavin had touched her face while making one of his disgustingly lewd suggestions. She had not moved away quickly enough for Lord Vael's liking, which caused the aforementioned discussion of theirs.
The prince's son had also decided to keep his distance during the day, in hopes to calm his own rage. She seized the opportunity to get some work done and swift through the jobs on the advertising board and lending a hand to the city guard in various affairs.
As night fell and the mage returns to the Keep, tired and battered, Bran waits for her with a trap. He cornered her and forced himself onto her at just the perfect time that someone could bear witness of it. She had still been a strong woman then and managed to push him away before he went any further than a kiss, but the deed was done.
A maid had seen her lady frazzled and, supposedly, in the woes of passion with the Lord Seneschal, and it did not take much to have her spread the story amongst the help, the merchants and, eventually, the nobles. She would tell anyone that asked that their hair was a mess and their clothes were halfway off, in such a dramatic moment of forbidden love that it would not be out of place in the theatre.
With that, her fate was sealed.