Désir Éternel

It was so long ago that I have truly lost count of the years. But I recall each event so vividly as if it were yesterday. I met a man who was with the theater company playing in a ramshackle hall in Selnar, my home city on the Cosian western shore. The rent was overpriced and the particular sector much run down and in ill-repair. And yet the man held a certain charisma that captured my heart and held it fast. I wanted to be with him night and day. I wanted to know him, and know every facet of his life and his work. In short, I wanted him more than I have wanted anything in my entire life.

In the theater company's final days of performing some new play that had sold out the house for every night the production ran, I bade Marius to let me join his fledgling company. I was star struck. I wanted to be an actress and bask in that limelight upon the stage. And it was on the final night after the last curtain call, that I became his lover.

When we arrived in Jad, we were quickly joined as Companions before a masgitrate. I had forsaken my father's name, my father's Home Stone, and my father's caste to become one with Marius, who was little more than a pauper with the grandest of dreams. His dreams became my dreams. And I loved him with all my heart.

Bijou

I am Bijou. I am of the caste of Scribes and Cosian by birth. My father's Home Stone is in Selnar.

My family is very traditional and of high caste, from a very long and prestigious ancestry of Scribes. My father has served twice on the High Council, and has drafted numerous arbitration treaties between Cos and her trade allies along the Vosk.

Just prior to reaching my age of majority, I was tutored in all of the traditional slave dances as well as the fine art of seduction, as is every free adolescent girl of well-to-do households. And it was at my debutante that my father announced my prearranged betrothal to one of his own colleagues, whom had asked for my hand more than a decade before the joining was to take place. Being young and still virgin, my dowry was set very high. It was paid in full over a series of yearly installments just months before the joining ceremony was to take place.

I am Bijou. And that is how my life was to have been neatly arranged. By now, I should have been caught up in the whirlwind of arranging all the ceremonial joinings of my own children.