“I’m sorry if I offended you, speaking about druids like that,” said Alfric. “I do think you have a gift, but… I could have phrased it better.”
Isra shrugged. “I don’t know if you’re right.”
“I don’t either,” said Alfric. “But if you need help or want me to find a druid for you to speak to, I’ll do what I can. Part of being members of a party together means you support each other.”
Isra felt a bit of warmth at hearing those words. From Alfric, she felt like she could trust them. “And you?” she asked. “Do you need support?”
“I need for us to do more dungeons,” said Alfric. “Anything that helps make that happen, I’ll consider support.”
“Deal,” said Isra, nodding. She packed her water away and went to the gate, continuing on home.
Chapter 14 — Cracked Tiles
Five was an annoying number, in Hannah’s opinion. There was very little symmetry to be had from it. Five could have rotational symmetry, but the same could be said of any number, since a circle could be defined by infinitely many points. Five also allowed a flanking approach, with one of the five in the center and two sides of two each, but this didn’t have manifold symmetry, not in the way that four could, not unless you put the fifth point in the center. But that was just pretending that five was actually four, and Hannah didn’t hold with that.
For people, trying to do that was trying to pretend that the fifth person wasn’t there, and if you were looking at symmetries, that wouldn’t do. Five was, no matter how she looked at it, a bad number. Still, five was the most you could have in a party, and five was what they did have, so it was up to Hannah to divine what might be done with what she had. It was, for a cleric of Garos, a form of meditation and prayer that might bring her closer to her god.
The first step was arranging the party in a pentagon, which Hannah did in her mind, though perhaps if she had time later, she would make little symbols for each of them. A pentagon had rotational symmetry, but it also had flanking symmetry when a line was drawn intersecting one of the points. The obvious point to go through was Alfric, for two reasons. The first was that he was the leader of their group, something Hannah didn’t dispute even if she did think of herself as his deputy. The point around which the flanking should happen needed to be the most important of the points. The second reason was that he was male: both ‘halves’ of the pentagon would then contain half a male and two females, preserving gender symmetry and overall reflection.
This left the question of where each of the girls should go. There were three configurations, and Hannah ran through all of them in her mind, trying to find which one was best. Unfortunately, there were too many methods of division, and they kept giving different answers. Mizuki and Hannah were both clearly more outgoing, while Verity and Isra were less so. Verity and Hannah had more experience with the wider world and had come from larger cities, in a fashion, while Mizuki and Isra were (approximately) natives of Pucklechurch. There were two who used magic and one who was a cleric, with a fourth who had only a bow, which was no good at all. They couldn’t be easily divided by the darkness of their skin, or their hair, or their different sense of fashion. For the most part, Hannah didn’t know them well enough to make good judgments about their personalities or how they saw the world.
Eventually, because she didn’t want her morning prayer to be a waste, Hannah decided that it should be her and Verity on one side with Mizuki and Isra on the other, but she wasn’t sure about which spots each of them should take, and the whole thing felt like an exercise in frustration, because none of it sang to her sense of symmetry. Garos would look at the arrangement and not be pleased. She would pray again, perhaps picking a different person to be the center, and as she talked to them, she would try to tease out the ways in which they reflected each other. Unfortunately, she had yet to find a firm grasp.
Hannah therefore started the morning feeling a bit out of sorts. It happened from time to time, and while her ability to call on Garos was unaffected, she didn’t feel quite right with the world. The last time it had been when she focused too much on the wrong parts of her own body. While she was perfectly symmetricalized, there were limits to symmetricalization. The lungs could be symmetrical with each other, which required moving the heart to the center, but the heart was an awkward, asymmetric shape, and the guts snaked and twisted back and forth in a person’s belly, with various organs sitting in awkward spots without respect to symmetry. If she put herself in the wrong mindset, all she could focus on was the hideous imperfection. Worse than those failures of bilateral symmetry were the other symmetry failures of the body, the way that the legs and arms seemed to almost mirror each other, the way the hands and feet were clearly made from a similar map but far too different from each other. In the seminary, there had been classes on human anatomy, and Hannah had always cringed at seeing all these issues, something that she felt alone in because no one else seemed to mind. One day in the seminary, while looking through books in the library, she’d found a thick tome that went on about theoretical changes to the body that would bring it to greater levels of symmetry, which she had loved, mostly because it made her feel seen. But of course the first verse of the first section was, ‘Man is not of Garos alone’, a refrain that each of the six holy books had in common, a plea to unity that hadn’t always been heard.
As she walked from the Pucklechurch temple to Mizuki’s house, she tried to turn her thoughts away from imperfections, but there were times when that was difficult. On seeing Mizuki’s house though, Hannah’s mind lightened, because it was a house of immense and deliberate symmetry.
Each of the three levels was a square, and of all the basic geometric shapes, the square was Hannah’s favorite. There was four-point rotational symmetry and four lines of bisecting symmetry. All of the windows of the house were identical on every side, and the doors were centered in the middle of the square. There weren’t, unfortunately, doors on each of the sides, but on the two sides that didn’t have doors, there were large windows that hung within a frame that was identical to the doorframes. The rooms, at least on the first level, almost perfectly divided the main floor into four smaller perfect squares, with the exception of the foyer that surrounded the front door and the symmetrical area that enclosed the back door. There were two sets of stairs going up to the next floor, on opposite sides of the house, going different directions to preserve rotational symmetry, and there were likewise two sets of stairs leading to the basement. There were choices made in the house that were clearly impractical, and to Hannah it was obvious that there had been some religious worship of Garos in its construction. It was something that she would broach with Mizuki at some point, but the fact that Mizuki hadn’t mentioned it to a cleric of Garos seemed to be an indication that Mizuki didn’t know. The general state of the house and the garden behind it, and the fact that it belonged to her grandfather… well, Hannah was anticipating that they wouldn’t have much to discuss.
She came to the house with a loaf of berry bread, this one with cut-up bits of strawberries, which had already passed their seasonal peak. The excess harvest was being made into jams and preserves that would supply them through the winter, and some of them would be frozen in large chillers, though Hannah had always felt that frozen berries were a pale imitation of fresh. There were other berries coming into bloom that were good for baking, and there would be sellers sweeping into Pucklechurch through the summer and into the autumn, trying to get the most they could for their harvests, whether foraged or cultivated. They were a bit far south for farkleberries and had the wrong type of soil, but Hannah had taken a liking to the sour berries, and was going to do her best to find some, especially if she was going to be baking for more than just herself, Lemmel, and those to whom they gave healing and advice. Baking was just fine with a bit of flour, salt, sugar, yeast, and water, but she always liked it better with fruits and spices.