“Oh, it’s not like that,” said Hannah, her own mouth half full of food. “Garos and Oeyr are opposites in many ways, but I think there’s hardly a cleric of Garos that would want Oeyr dead. Oeyr’s necessary, they all are, it’s just a matter of where we put our focus. I think symmetry and order are beautiful, but in the church there’s somethin’ called the Meditation on Dichotomy, and it starts with the first and biggest of them, the separation of man and woman, largely Oeyr’s domain.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I’d kind of thought… Garos has a reputation for…”
She waved a hand. “I don’t want to be
“Men laying with men and women with women,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s
one of the old sacred rites, not so common anymore, at least
“Did we what?” asked Mizuki. It was still early, and it took her a moment. “Oh, no. No. No no no, it wasn’t…” She paused. “Not that she isn’t pretty, she is, I just… no.”
Hannah was a bit thankful for that, because it was a source of tension the party didn’t need. “And is talkin’ about such things, women with women, somethin’ I should avoid with you? Because if so, that’s fine, I’d just want to know. You’re half Kiromon, and I don’t know what the thinkin’ is there.” No one would bat an eye in Interim, though it was a quite large country.
“I don’t really know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I’ve never been, so all I have are stories. I think… there was something my father said, offhand, when he was drunk once, that it was fine for a man to be with a man, but not a woman with a woman? He was drunk though. Personally, I don’t, um—it’s not relevant to my life.”
Hannah nodded, and she was thankful that Mizuki seemed befuddled. Some people cared and thought that it was the ‘business of Garos’, to be confined within the church in one way or another, but it was a minority opinion throughout Inter, typically held by those more skeptical of religion. She’d met a few in the seminary that had come because their families thought that it was a matter of religion, but it was like tall people becoming clerics of Xuphin, or short ones clerics of Kesbin: a poor reason to become a cleric, and likely to result in a poor cleric if they had no real godly fire in them.
“And you care about the things close to you?” she asked.
“Isn’t that how everyone is?” asked Mizuki.
“Oh, not at all,” said Hannah. “Some people care the most about things far away from them.” She took another bite of the fermented vegetables, then the perfect example occurred to her. “Henlings!” she said around the mouth of food. “Some people obsess over them, collect them, things like that, spend their time and effort lookin’ at them, tryin’ to figure them out. Some of these people never stepped foot inside a dungeon. But it’s the same for everythin’ else, isn’t it, kittens and bobbins and what have you, they bring all this into their lives, make it their focus, but it’s not close to them, necessarily. So of course I wouldn’t be surprised if what you care about was far away from you, some distant thing that didn’t touch you personally, ay?” She returned to quickly eating her food. She had a bad habit of talking too much at mealtimes and lagging behind. Mizuki had very little left on her plate.
“Like you with Garos?” asked Mizuki. “Because he’s something you bring into your life, isn’t he?”
“Well,” said Hannah, swallowing a mouthful of venison. “This is amazin’, by the way.”
“Thanks!” said Mizuki, beaming. “The sobyu, yes or no?”
“Yes, I think,” replied Hannah. The taste wasn’t
“In Kiromo they eat it with every meal,” said Mizuki. “I only do that in the winter, when there’s less that’s fresh.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah, gulping down an egg. She took up a cloth napkin and wiped her mouth, trying to remember decorum, which she’d never been too good at. “Well, as I was sayin’, with Garos, it’s not quite the same, is it? Because the nature of symmetry is all around us, isn’t it, and even if you don’t think much about Garos, you can’t escape him, just like you can’t escape Oeyr. All the more in Pucklechurch, where there’s this grand temple that looms over the town.”
“Is that for me?” asked a voice from the doorway into the kitchen. Verity was looking much worse for the wear, with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair. Her eyes were bleary and she blinked slowly, but her attention was fixed on the pan, which had a serving of food still in it, though Mizuki had closed the burner.
“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t know when you’d be up, but it should still be warm. Hope we didn’t wake you.”
