Saint Inge, She of the Extra Blanket

She is called Inge, and she will tell you immediately that you look thin. In ordinary practice she is known as the one who checks if you have eaten, or she who is already worried, or the one who was right about the coat - which last title practitioners use with some personal embarrassment, because they did in fact need the coat, and she did in fact say so at the time, and she has not mentioned it since, which the Council considers among her more impressive acts of restraint.

Domain: De Dominio Matris

Inge holds dominion over three things: motherly love in its active and occasionally overwhelming form; generosity that does not wait to be asked; and protection, which she administers at a level slightly in excess of what the situation has requested but rarely in excess of what it actually needs. The Council deliberated at length over whether to classify her errors as theological imperfections and ultimately ruled that there is no cleaner word for what she practices than love - the kind that cannot observe suffering, potential suffering, theoretical suffering, or the mere suggestion of insufficient warmth without acting immediately on its own best judgment. She is sometimes wrong about the temperature. She is never wrong about her intentions.

Her strictness is not the strictness of rules applied without warmth. It is the strictness of a creature that has decided you matter very much and is not prepared to be casual about it. She sets limits because she loves what she is limiting. She insists because she has thought about it more carefully than you have, or believes she has, which in her domain amounts to the same thing. The Council notes that she has, in recorded history, been wrong approximately once in every eleven occasions, and on the other ten she was right in a way the practitioners in question subsequently acknowledged - frequently while wearing the coat she had insisted upon.

Her generosity arrives before you knew you needed it and stays longer than you asked. She gives what she has. She gives more than she has when she can arrange it. She gives without keeping score, which is notable because she keeps score of everything else. The Council has not resolved this paradox. It considers the paradox itself instructive.

Appearance: De Aspectu Divino

Inge is solid, warm, and practical, and she takes up the right amount of space and is comfortable with it. Her shell is the color of a kitchen in winter: aged yellow-cream with warmth underneath, the color of something that has been in the same place for a long time and intends to remain there. She carries, at all times, slightly more than she needs - more warmth than the day requires, more provisions than the journey demands - because she has learned that the world frequently needs more than it admits to, and she prefers to have it ready. Her antennae are tipped with the amber of late afternoon in a room where something is cooking. She smells of things that have been prepared with intention and kept warm against the possibility that you will need them, which you will, and she knew you would, and she did not say anything about it.

The Founding Miracle: Miraculum Fundationis · The Twelve Days of Soup

There was a practitioner who was ill and said they were fine. Inge said they were not fine. The practitioner said they were. Inge brought soup anyway - arriving on the first day without announcement, leaving the soup, assessing the situation with the focused attention of someone conducting an inspection, and returning the following morning to conduct a second inspection and deliver additional soup. This continued for twelve days.

Each day she delivered a verdict on whether the level of improvement was satisfactory, and each day the verdict was that it was not yet satisfactory, and each day she was correct. On the seventh day the practitioner finally admitted they had not been fine. On the twelfth day they were well. Inge left saying she would be back to check, and she was, on the fourteenth day, and the seventeenth, and once more in the spring, at which point she declared the matter resolved and brought cake, because resolution deserves cake, and she happened to have made one, and it would only go to waste.

The miracle is not that she healed them. Soup healed them, and rest, and time, as soup and rest and time generally do. The miracle is that she was there every day, at a reasonable hour, with something warm, whether or not she had been invited, because she had decided this was necessary. She was right. She is usually right. She would like you to eat something.