Marrek favors practicality over ceremony: a weathered face scored with faint sunlines, a close-cropped beard threaded with gray, and hands thickened at the knuckles from both prayer beads and rope. He moves with the steady economy of someone who has spent long hours tending beds and bell towers — deliberate, unhurried, but always prepared to spring into action. His vestments are a patched cassock dyed a soft, mossy green rather than the bright white his order prescribes, the hem repaired with mismatched fabric from the families he served. Unexpectedly, he wears a child's ribbon — faded blue, knotted around his left wrist — that never seems to come undone and occasionally draws his fingers away from a task as if to check it mid-prayer.