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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 163, The Sermon
🕑 Added 2023-01-09 21:29:55 +0000 UTCNote: No second chapter of TUTBAD this week, I will be pushing chapters of Thresholder instead, ideally it doesn't replace TUTBAD in that way, but we'll see how I feel about the workload. Really, I think I need to scale back word count a bit, which would help manage things.
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Hannah felt nervous about the sermon, and dealt with that nervousness by baking. She was, as a rule, up early, a baker’s habit, and this day was no particular exception. She left Marsh snoring softly to himself in their bed in Lutopia Two, then went through into the house, where the sun was still half an hour away from peeking its head over the horizon. It was a three moon night though, relatively bright. Hannah felt some comfort in being the first one up, and always had, even when she was a young girl. It was like being the first person in line, or the first to get food.
Isra had been out foraging for a long time after their dungeon, and had brought back all kinds of things above and beyond the scrumptious meal that Mizuki had prepared the day before. In this case, she’d brought back barkberries, which were actually a type of parasite, red bulbs that would grow out from an infected tree. They were a delicacy that weren’t usually found so far to the south, and while Hannah had never cooked with them before, she was fairly sure that with enough experimentation, she could make a good sauce with them.
This ended up taking longer than Hannah had planned, but the end result was a thick, sticky sauce that had a good punch to it. Hannah then began work on the dough, which would be nicely laminated, with layers of the berry jam between them.
“You’re actually using the barf berries?” asked Mizuki when she woke up and made her way downstairs.
“Barkberries,” said Hannah. “And ay, I’m usin’ them.”
“She said it was a parasite,” said Mizuki. “And no one I know uses them.”
“You’re gettin’ further from home,” said Hannah. “Besides, you eat cheese, smelly ones even, don’t talk to me about some food or other bein’ gross.” She pushed the small bowl over. “Taste.”
Mizuki was skeptical, but dipped her finger in all the same. She looked at the red sauce, then stuck her finger in her mouth.
“Alright, not bad,” said Mizuki. “How much is that being covered up by lemon and sugar?”
“Almost not at all,” said Hannah.
“I’m never going to cook with it, but I can see where people would get used to it,” said Mizuki. “Tree pustules though, yuck.”
“All kinds of things sound gross when you make them sound gross,” said Hannah with a sigh.
“Hey, shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, preparing for the sermon or something?” asked Mizuki.
“As my teacher used to say, there’s nothin’ left but the worryin’,” said Hannah with a sigh. “I think I’ve another ten minutes or so with these, just assembly and then pop them in the oven, were you doin’ breakfast?”
“What would go well with them?” asked Mizuki. “They’re sweet, so something fatty and savory to balance out? I hate to keep doing bacon and eggs, but …”
“Bacon and eggs are a classic,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ wrong with doin’ what works.”
“Is that why you used barkberries?” asked Mizuki.
“I used them because Isra plucked them,” said Hannah. “And goin’ on an adventure is also perfectly fine. Tryin’ new things, new experiences, like that.”
“Venison bacon,” said Mizuki, frowning to herself. “Nah, too lean. You know what, I think I’m going to use some of the roast and just do eggs.”
“I’ll be out of your hair in a bit,” said Hannah.
They shared the kitchen together, and Hannah tried to do her baking when Mizuki wouldn’t be cooking, but it wasn’t always so easy, especially if Hannah had a long bake and Mizuki was cooking something that took quite some time in the oven. Sometimes they collaborated, but other times it was just an awkward shuffling of things. The kitchen was thankfully rather large, as all the first floor rooms were, but Hannah had been thinking that she might move all her baking into Lutopia Two. There were downsides to that though. On top of the lack of room, the biggest issue was that she wouldn’t be in the house, a part of the rhythm and flow they’d established. Baking in the kitchen meant that people could stop by and chat. Since Lutopia Two could only be accessed by Hannah, it meant that she was alone, in solitude, unless she brought someone in with her, and there wasn’t much to do in there unless you brought in a book or were dedicating yourself to helping. Hannah liked the small space, it was cozy and profoundly hers, but it was also lonely.
Once Hannah had the pastries in the oven and was cleaning up, she stuck around to watch Mizuki at work. Mizuki was swift and sure in the kitchen, and it was undeniably her domain, though Mizuki herself always demurred when anyone pointed this out, and didn’t seem to think all that much of her clear skill and competence. She was a decent enough sorcerer, though Hannah didn’t really have a point of comparison for that, and a neophyte wizard, but when watching Mizuki cook, it felt like everything else that Mizuki did was like watching someone trying to cut through meat with a spoon.
By the time breakfast was ready, the only one not up was Verity, which wasn’t all that unusual. For everyone else, it was a matter of either waking with the sun or as the activity downstairs rose to a dull murmur, but Verity seemed able to sleep through all that, and sometimes need to either be prodded through the party channel or have someone physically go into her room and give her a poke.
Everyone was dressed in their temple best, more formal and finely made clothes for special occasions, though generally more conservative than at a nice party or a wedding. Hannah had her old chasuble, with other liturgical vestments below it, and she’d spent some time in the mirror, both praying and making sure that she was properly symmetricalized, which mostly involved getting her hair into place.
The food was particularly amazing, especially the day-old roast, which Mizuki had worked some kind of magic on to make it tender and moist. Venison wasn’t a meat that kept extremely well, but this came with flaky salt and a white sauce, and the eggs had a nicely gelatinous center to them. The pastries were something that Hannah could have taken or left, but they were a good first attempt at using the barkberries, and she was certain that the next batch would be better. Baking often put the focus on recipes where cooking was focused on the feel, but the truth about baking was that it was as much about all the variables as it was about everything else. As much as Hannah loved the precision of baking, you had to account for differences in the basic materials, the flour, eggs, even the water, and you had to deal with changes in humidity too, and temperature variance that happened even with the elemetals to even things out.
She jotted down the idea for a sermon of some kind, though she wasn’t certain that there would be a second sermon. Certainly there would be a second sermon in her life, but if this one was a disaster, or not what she wanted, she would drop it like a hot rock and try to put her focus toward something else.
The house hadn’t moved terribly much, and had been put back into position near the small town, within a very easy walking distance of the small temple. They filtered out using the unfolding wooden steps that Alfric had made — a temporary solution, he’d assured them, since he had something more fanciful in mind — and made their way in.
Hannah immediately regretted not making extra baked goods in large quantity, because there was a table of refreshments that the barkberry pastries would have looked nice on. Temples had different rules about food and drink, but especially for the smaller ones, it was common that people would grab something to eat before sitting down. It was also a way for the churches to help feed those in need, distributing some of their largesse, which ultimately came to them by way of taxation. There were other systems in place to feed people who didn’t have food, but the churches functioning to provide support was a very old tradition for all of them, dating far, far back, and it seemed as though it was a function that wouldn’t easily be pulled from their hands, at least not entirely.
Hannah found her place up at the front of the temple, where CeeCee was already standing and in conversation with one of the parishioners. There were forty people or so, which was more than she’d expected, though it did include some small children, who were sometimes disruptive to sermons.
“You’re ready?” CeeCee asked. “I was almost worried you wouldn’t show.”
“I’m ready,” said Hannah. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
“We don’t get wandering clerics all that often,” said CeeCee. “We aren’t large enough for them, usually, no more than the mandate, which is only one week a year.”
“You’ll introduce me?” asked Hannah.
“Of course,” said CeeCee. “We’re just waiting for the last few to filter in.”
Hannah stood near the front, trying not to feel awkward, but it had been too long since she’d done one of these, and she didn’t know anyone here. In Pucklechurch, Lemmel had done most of the Garos sermons, and Hannah had known and spoken with a large percent of the congregation, though usually on temple days or during town events rather than in private consultation.
“Well, it looks as though everyone is here,” said CeeCee. “As I think I’ve mentioned to a few of you, we have a surprise special guest to give a sermon today, which I’m grateful for. This is Hannah, a cleric of Garos, and I’ll let her take it from here.”
CeeCee took her seat, and Hannah stood before the audience, trying her best to feel natural in the moment. It didn’t feel natural, but she pushed on ahead, which was what you needed to do.
“I don’t know how many of you might have seen it, but I came to this town in that giant walking house,” said Hannah. She spoke loudly, so she could be heard, pushing as much confidence into her voice as she could. She was working to soften her accent, something that she’d learned to do in seminary, not just so she’d be easier to understand, but so that she’d seem less foreign. “I’m a wanderer, a dungeoneer, moving from place to place, never staying in a hex for all that long. A friend of mine recently called us ‘unmoored’, which I thought was an interesting analogy, as an unmoored ship will drift, and that’s the feeling that it calls up. In some sense it gives that wrong impression: that we’re off on our own, subject to the whims of the winds. This isn’t really what being a dungeoneer is like, as we have our own chart plotted out, and are much more like a merchant vessel sailing from port to port. But in another sense, I think it’s apt: we’re unmoored from the rhythms of any given town, no longer tied to any institution.”
She was finding her rhythm, which was a good thing to find now that the opener was done. She’d established the theme of the sermon, that of connection, finding a place, and now it was time for the meat.
“I think it happens to everyone, from time to time, that feeling of not fitting in,” said Hannah. “It happens in times of loss and grief, but also when we have a change in circumstances, moving in or out of a relationship, or from one stage of life to another. Sometimes a falling out with someone can produce that feeling, the unmooring.” She took a breath, hoping that the point had come across. Loss was traditionally the realm of Kesbin, and there was a chance she’d be ruffling some feathers.
“There’s an exercise done within the Church of Garos, that of finding symmetry between two things,” said Hannah. “It’s a common exercise, and a common prayer, a meditation on the ways in which two things can be seen as a reflection of one another, finding a common axis, or axes, which explain away much of the differences. It is not so much an exercise in finding similarity as it is commonality, and there’s where I’ve found much of the comfort and thoughtful reflection in my travels. Every new place that I come to, every town we pass through, every hex that we see — even the dungeons themselves — are cause to think about how we were formed from the same clay, molded by the same pressures.”
Hannah gave a smile. “There’s a dictum within the Church of Garos, a somewhat controversial one, which is that symmetry between any two things can be found through the application of the correct axes. We think of this in terms of glyphs, or possibly even mathematical constructs at the higher levels of the Church, but the dictum applies to everything, and it’s quite powerful in that regard. In practice, finding symmetry between complex things like people is a matter of feeling and faith much more than it is a struggle to puzzle your way through the math,” said Hannah. “There is, as yet, no way to reduce a person to math, but until that day comes, we’re stuck with feeling it out — and I personally love to feel it out.” She paused for a moment, looking out over the crowd. She was starting to lose them, which was fine, because this was the point in the sermon when she expected to lose them. The thing to do was to pivot to concrete examples, which was exactly as she’d planned it.
“When I was young, my grandmother passed,” said Hannah. “It was the first time I had ever felt true grief. She hadn’t been too old, only barely starting to fade, but it had come in the night, and the next morning she was gone. And I, of course, immediately began packing my bags, determined to follow her soul as best as I could and help it to make its way to the Spirit Gates. My parents stopped me, since I was only seven.” That got a chuckle. “With no way that I could help, nothing that I could do, I was left with that unmoored feeling, a ship that had found itself sailing to an island that no longer existed. In truth, it’s a large part of why I became a cleric, or at least where the idea of being a cleric first entered my head. It’s a hard thing to deal with, death, especially when it comes sooner than it was expected, when you haven’t had to time make peace with it before it happens. Where it hits most often, in my experience, is when you have those things that used to be touchstones, constants, which are no longer there. My grandmother used to bake cookies on temple days, big flat ones with a nice crisp to them, and suddenly they were gone. I had taken them for granted, in the way of a seven-year-old. They became a part of the unmooring, and so I decided to take up her mantle, to bake the cookies on my own, which I’ve always thought was a good way of dealing with things. It brings me closer to her.”
Hannah stopped for a moment, pursing her lips. “My other large unmooring was a happy one: going off to seminary. I went a bit early, at twelve, and all the old rhythms of life, all the old chores and duties, the old friends, were washed away. I was in a new city, in a new order, with a job to do. It was freeing, liberating, in a way that becoming unmoored can be, and even though I had new chores and duties, they benefited from that newness. It was cause for reflection then, and I’ve done more reflection now, making sense of the ways in which tearing things out of our life can feel so different. Now I think, with these two examples, that it might be tempting to say that it’s as simple as good things being good and bad things being bad, but I do think it’s worth our while to meditate on the nature of the differences — the axis the concept is being flipped on.”
Hannah tapped her fingers against the side of her legs, a nervous habit, done with both hands at the same time. It was hard to know whether it was going well. “There’s an element of choice that always makes a loss easier to handle. Some don’t deal with adulthood well, since it inevitably gets thrust upon us whether we feel ready or not. Puberty can be a troublesome time, an unmooring time, even if we’re properly prepared for it, this new strength and power, this new body, not necessarily one that we’d have chosen, beyond our control. There are losses we choose though, and sometimes they sting just as badly, especially when there’s a trade-off involved. Cutting loose a relationship that’s no good for you can be just as difficult as a loss from death, I’ve talked to enough people to know that. The same goes for the bittersweetness of leaving a vocation that doesn’t suit you, or a community that can’t give you what you deserve.”
“I’ve found this helpful, in bringing context to my life, to relate the good and bad together, to see how they are each other, only flipped,” said Hannah. “It helps to make sense of our emotions, and why we feel them, to bring clarity to our decisions. I’m a traveler now, and I’ll be on my way later today, but even for those who have found a firm place to sit, there are changes in our lives to reflect on, marriages and births, deaths and times of moving on.”
There was some polite applause, and Hannah took her seat as CeeCee said some words. The sermon was on the shorter side, but Hannah had always preferred a short sermon, in part because attention tended to wander when a sermon went long. It was also the case that many sermons included far more than they needed to in order to hit the proper word count and expected length, which irked Hannah to no end. Not every concept needed four thousand words and a half hour of speaking time.
There followed two short songs, sung without hymnals, apparently well-familiar to the locals but which Hannah was a little rusty with. She hummed along but didn’t try her hand at singing. Verity’s voice dominated the songs without really trying to. The first was a palindromic song of Garos, while the second was a fugue of Bixzotl, and once that was concluded, CeeCee came up again to speak some final words and say the ending prayer to the six gods, which was a rather recent invention in religious terms.
When the sermon was concluded, the real work of temple day began, which was socialization. Temples were a “third place”, with the first two being the home and the workplace, and served a vital function within the community, namely to bring people together on a specific day of the week to speak with one another and ensure that the community didn’t grow too far apart from itself. Temple day was important for political and social reasons, and had always been Hannah’s favorite day of the week, even before she’d become a cleric.
The first parishioner to approach her was an older man with gray in his beard, his younger wife in tow.
“Thank you for the sermon,” he said with a brief bow. “I had never heard that, about the dictum. Everything symmetrical with everything else — it’s a beautiful thought, though I think it might take me some time.”
“It’s Harlon’s Dictum, if you’d like to know more,” said Hannah. “There’s a strong and weak version of it, the strong being that it applies to everything, the weak being that it applies to only certain classes of things. I don’t believe that I’ve heard it brought up much, and never in a sermon to the laity, so thank you for giving me the opportunity.”
“I’m just glad that it wasn’t the usual for Garos,” said the wife. “We get a cleric of Garos here one week a year, and the sermon is always on the usual issue.”
Hannah refrained from frowning, but only just barely. She knew perfectly well what ‘the usual issue’ was, and while she had her own disagreement with the church’s focus on that, she didn’t like hearing someone say that they were tired of it.
“The stock sermons are stock for a reason,” said Hannah. “But ay, hearing the same thing over and over again can wear on us, especially when we’ve heard it all before — though I suppose you must get a bit of repetition with your primary cleric being of Bixzotl.”
They smiled politely at the joke, then moved on, which was more or less what Hannah wanted. If she’d been a mainstay at this temple, she might have wanted to interrogate it further, but it seemed like a fight that wasn’t worth having, not when she’d be leaving so soon.
The second couple to come up to her seemed much less pleased with the sermon. “What can it mean for everything to be symmetrical with everything else?” asked one of the men. He was with another man, and Hannah couldn’t quite tell whether they were related or married. “I don’t follow that at all. All this stuff about axes … where does it come from?”
“I did my best to refrain from quoting scripture, as I know it can make eyes glaze over,” said Hannah. “But the Garam Ashar is clear on this point, ‘All life is separated by boundaries and all boundaries are axes upon which truth is reflected’, section seven, verse one. There are others, but that’s the most straightforward.”
“That would be like saying that everything is a copy of every other thing,” the man insisted.
“I’m no cleric of Bixzotl, so perhaps we could take the matter up with CeeCee,” said Hannah. “From my understanding, it’s a common claim for every religion to make in one way or another, though I think it’s more apt for Garos than the others. It dips into the history of theology, and a time when the gods were worshiped separately. They had incentive to claim all creation for their own. The dictum is principled, but we must also be aware that it was motivated when it was written, and if your understanding of Garos doesn’t work with the application of the dictum, that’s for you to decide.” This was a polite way of telling him to sod off.
The others who spoke with her were much less confrontational, but there were a few of them, perhaps because she was a novelty. An old lady came forward to talk about cookies and baking, and a younger boy came forward to express that he was happy to have a cleric of Garos come through. Hannah was tempted to stick around for a day or two and offer something in the way of consultation to these people, but the house would be moving on soon enough, off to the next hex if they wanted to keep to their schedule.
“I thought it was nice,” said Mizuki on the way back. “A bit short though.”
“It was lovely,” said Marsh. “I never realized how much I had wanted to hear a sermon from you.”
“I like a short sermon,” said Pinion. “Depending on the subject matter, I guess.”
“You’ve never really talked about your grandmother,” said Verity.
“I’m not sure any of us have,” said Alfric. “Aside from Mizuki.”
“My grandpa is great,” said Mizuki. “Also we all literally live in his house, it would be weird not to mention him a bunch.”
“I never met my grandparents,” said Isra.
“We saw each set once a week when I was growing up,” said Alfric. “But we weren’t particularly close.”
“Well, my parents were both among the youngest, their parents older,” said Hannah. “So they’re elderly now, save for the one grandmother. And I don’t know that I ever had cause to bring her up, save for when I bake using her recipes.”
“Also, can you just suppress your accent like that?” asked Mizuki. “You sounded so weird.”
“Ay,” said Hannah. “Learned it in seminary, as some people have trouble understandin’ me. Can’t be a cleric and let the way you say things get in the way of what you’re sayin’. Harder than it sounds though, because people have different ways of speakin’ all over Inter, and what works for one won’t work for others. I’ve a few accents I can do well enough, smoothin’ things over so that people don’t focus on it.” She gave Mizuki a glance. “You never have trouble understandin’ me, right?”
“No,” said Mizuki. “And now I’m used to it, it’s just fades into the background. Like I said, the sermon sounded weird.”
“Did you enjoy it?” Marsh asked as they came to the house.
“Ay,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure how much they appreciated it, overall, but it was good to get my thoughts out, and I’m already written revisions to it, figurin’ out ways to make it land better. I think the core was good, but it was written in the course of one night, so … traditionally, in a place like Pucklechurch, you have almost six weeks between sermons, plenty of time to draft, redraft, and refine. Here, it was a day, almost spur of the moment, and I’m happy enough overall.”
“I’m still not sure that I get it,” said Mizuki. She flopped down on the couch. “But I did like hearing about your grandmother.”
“I guess I never realized that you were so young when you went into the seminary,” said Verity. “As young as I was when I went into the conservatory.”
“I was about twelve when I joined the Junior League,” said Alfric. “It’s a common age for starting on a vocation.”
“The Junior League isn’t really a vocation, is it?” asked Pinion. He’d taken a seat on the floor.
“It is,” said Alfric. “Or, it’s where people get the training and knowledge to effectively pursue the vocation of dungeoneering. I don’t consider it any different from going to a seminary or conservatory, or wizarding school for that matter.”
“Except it’s not, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, when you join Junior League you’re still in normal school, or with tutors or whatever, you said that it was more like once a week, or a few times a week, and no one took it all that seriously.”
“I guess,” said Alfric.
“We should be looking at the symmetry,” said Isra. “That was what the sermon was about.”
“I don’t think there’s need or cause to apply it here,” said Hannah.
“I guess I don’t get how this is different from Qymmos?” asked Mizuki. She had her legs crossed and was bouncing one on the other. “Comparing and contrasting things, that’s Qymmic.”
“It’s the focus on the axis,” said Hannah. “Or on the plane. Garos is often — though not always — about reversal or rotation, and Harlon’s Dictum is about taking two things and seeing all the ways in which we’d need to change things to get the two to match. It is of Qymmos, though of course most things can be of one or two gods.”
“I assume it’s mathematically sound,” said Pinion. “But I confess that I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s one of the things that I want to bring to sermons,” said Hannah. “Those parts of Garos that are often not touched upon. There’s more than just the usual.”
“You’re going to do this again?” asked Marsh.
“I can scout ahead for you,” offered Isra.
“Ay, I’ll be doin’ it again,” said Hannah. “Though … I have some thinkin’ to do.”
“Thinking about what?” asked Alfric.
“I need to get started on lunch,” said Mizuki. “It’s just sandwiches.”
“I love sandwiches,” said Hannah. She turned to Alfric. “Thinkin’ about how long I want to do this, bein’ on the road, if I’m honest. I gave the sermon because I was feelin’ restless, and it made me want to do more, to get back to the life of a proper cleric rather than a dungeon runner.”
Alfric froze. Hannah expected that he might, as his gears started turning. “You’re talking about quitting the party?”
“No,” said Hannah. “But as Verity seems to be gettin’ along, I feel like the party’s need for a cleric is far less than it was, and will be diminished as she improves. Healin’ is a vital part of normal dungeons, but we’re not doin’ normal dungeons anymore. And as far as what the party needs outside of healin’, there’s less and less of that over time too.”
“Wait, so you are talking about leaving?” asked Mizuki.
“I live in a lute,” said Hannah. “I’m goin’ to keep livin’ in that lute for probably the rest of my life, I hope. Whether that lute lives here or somewhere else seems not to matter, and I want to be on hand, but ay, I’m thinkin’ about how my life might be different. I’ve been floodin’ the house with bread for lack of anythin’ better to do, you’ve all seen that.”
“But … you’re our friend,” said Isra.
“Well I’m not goin’ to stop bein’ your friend,” said Hannah. “And whatever happens, I’ll come by on the regular, so long as there’s a path for it, and I’m hopeful that we’ll expand our travel even more in the comin’ month. But I will be lookin’ for some way to satisfy my need to be a proper cleric.”
“It’s a lot to spring on us,” said Verity. She was frowning, the mild, controlled frown that she sometimes used.
“To spring on you?” asked Hannah. “I’m not movin’ out tomorrow. I’m not even planned to move out at all, I’m just lettin’ you know that there’s a sunset on the horizon for me.” Marsh was sitting next to her, and slipped his hand into hers. They had talked about some of this before, always with him encouraging her, though she didn’t know for certain that she’d ever find her way back to the church.
“We appreciate it,” said Alfric. His voice was firm. “I’ll start looking for a replacement, if we end up needing one, and I’ll also be on the lookout for travel entads to make sure that you can come with us no matter where we are or what else you have going on.”
“We’ll talk about it more later,” said Hannah. “In depth. I’m just lettin’ you know where I stand now. I liked bein’ up there, talkin’ about somethin’ dear to me.” She had known that she would like it though, and that was one of the reasons she’d jumped at the chance.
“Is this why you decided to do a sermon about unmooring?” asked Mizuki. “Also you said ‘unmoor’ a lot.”
“Too much?” asked Hannah. “I’d hoped it to be a motif.”
“Nah, it was fine,” said Mizuki. She frowned for a moment. “Is there such a thing as a grief sandwich? Because I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”
“Come,” said Hannah, getting up from the couch. “I’ll help you invent one.”
Comments
Nick
Will we get Thresholder chapters in Patreon as well?
Dan
Thanks for the chapter loved the last bit of dialogue between Hannah and Mizuki the most
