“Sorry,” said Mizuki, shrinking back slightly as she looked at what must
have once been a garden. “I just
“Nah, trees and nature,” said Hannah. “Reminds me of the prairies, which are kind of like home.”
“All right,” said Mizuki, turning away from the overgrown backyard and toward Hannah. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“You’ve already seen most of it, haven’t you?” asked Hannah. “In the dungeon?”
“Well,” said Mizuki. “I guess, but not under controlled conditions.”
“Sure,” said Hannah. “You should just know that I can’t do ‘magic’ all day, not like you can. Simple healin’, usually I don’t run out of that, but anythin’ more, there are some limits.” Hannah hated the feeling of Garos leaving her, but it came with the territory if you were pushing things. Broken bones could only be fixed a limited number of times, and that depended on how bad the break was.
“Start simple then,” said Mizuki. She was bouncing from foot to foot, limbering up and getting ready, as though her magic was something that needed flexibility.
“Basic symmetry repair,” said Hannah. She held up her hands. “My hands are perfectly identical, aren’t they, just flipped versions of each other?”
“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Hey, wait.” She moved closer and peered at Hannah’s hands. “The freckles are mirror images.”
“My whole body is like that,” nodded Hannah, grinning. “It’s called symmetricalization, it’s somethin’ loads of clerics of Garos go through. I can do it for you too, if you want, but it takes about a day, and it’s a bit,” she paused, “intimate.”
Mizuki squirmed slightly. “So you mean your
“I’m a healer, first and foremost,” said Hannah. “I’ve got familiarity with bodies. But I can also limit it, if you’d like, to just your face, your arms, your legs. It would make healin’ easier.”
“It would?” asked Mizuki. She was looking at Hannah’s face a little closer, scanning its features, and Hannah stood there, letting her look. It was a perfectly symmetrical face, which allowed easy removal of blemishes and things like that. Clerics of Garos were known for their beauty, and in the larger cities, it was a rare member of the upper class that didn’t have some kind of symmetricalization done to them. A symmetrical face was beautiful, as a general rule, but symmetricalization had to be done carefully, and sometimes the results could be odd or represent so fundamental a change that the person wouldn’t be recognized by their friends and family. Verity was upper crust, as Mizuki had said, but didn’t seem to have had symmetricalization done. That might have been because she was pretty enough without it.
“Basic symmetry repair needs the two halves to be very close to the
same,” said Hannah. “So, somethin’ like an oak shield, the grain of the
wood means it’s harder, ay, because the two halves of the shield are so
different from one another. That’d be
“Okay,” said Mizuki slowly. “Hey, why do you think that Alfric was trying to rush us in without training and stuff?”
“No idea,” said Hannah. It felt a bit like Mizuki wasn’t paying attention, which Hannah had found somewhat the norm when she talked about religion with the laypeople.
“I was thinking it was just big-city energy, but the more I think about it, the less it feels right,” said Mizuki. “Feels… fishy.”
“Are you ready?” asked Hannah. She took a penknife from her pocket, then held it above the back of her hand.
“Blegh,” said Mizuki. “Blood.”
Hannah hesitated. “Well, I could symmetricalize somethin’, I suppose, but this is faster, ay.”
“Fine,” said Mizuki as she took in a breath.
Hannah cut herself, a long stinging cut across the back of her hand, then lined everything up in her mind and connected to the wonder and majesty of Garos, God of Symmetry and Order. People described the feeling differently, but for Hannah it always came with a tingling at her extremities as a mark of success. She let the heightened sense of her own symmetry fade away once the cut was healed.
“See?” asked Hannah. The wound had vanished and the pain with it. Her hands were once again perfectly symmetrical.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” asked Mizuki.
“A bit, ay,” said Hannah. She shrugged. In the course of her time at seminary, she’d hurt herself so many times that she was used to the pain. “Did you see it though? The… magic?” The word she’d grown up with was ‘miracle’, but in the seminary they used ‘manifestation’, which had never quite sat right for Hannah.
Mizuki nodded. “It’s still there. It’s got a kind of… energetic flavor to it.”
“Flavor?” asked Hannah.
Mizuki waved a hand. “You know sorcs don’t go to school, right?” she asked. “Or at least not most of them. It’s a very personal magic. We end up making up our own words for things a lot of the time.”
