In the days when the earth was flat, all dice had six sides. While it was certainly common enough to gamble by tossing knuckle-bones or coins rather than an inscribed cube, a die would alwys be six-sided. Figures like the dodecahedron, the tetrahedron, the trapezohedron were the sole purview of geometers and philosophers. And precious few of those - scholars of the Flat Earth, no matter their original specialties, tended to end up in sorcery and magecraft, which had their own sorts of figures that a twelve-sided bauble of carven chalcedony or wrought brass held no fascination for. If not sorcery, then religion; and certainly enough wrough-brass dodecahedra were made for religious purposes, but their uses were not those of dice.
At any rate, religion on the Flat Earth was broadly uninterested in a seeking after abstract Truth. And sorcerers tended to the solitary. Perhaps it was the memory of ancient Simmurad of coralline fable warning them away from congregation, or perhaps simply that the sort of person inclined to sorcery was not one inclined to sharing power with a table of equals.
But once a generation, or once a century if the century had been unusually turbulent, somewhere on the broad plane of the Earth, something not unlike a university would be founded nonetheless. Scholars of the inconvenient sort would begin to gather, the kind inclined neither to religion nor to magic, but rather to the painstaking study of records and specimens and phenomena, for no further aim except to know the truth. Some would ban sorcery and prayer altogether, as disruptive to their study. If they were lucky, a rich lord or powerful merchant-king would see the opportunity to mine them of their gathered knowledge for his own benefit, and would offer them protection and wealth, and send their most intractable sons and nephews to learn.
In such a place, geometers would appears.
Such a place was by the shore of the great inland see of Thron, a few lifetimes past the reign of the Goddess-Queen Azhriaz. There was a castle built of the local yellow sandstone for a long-ended war, no longer in need of garrison or defense with the nearest frontiers - peaceful ones - a week's journey away. They did not ban magecraft there entirely but it was looked down on as crude and tasteless, so sorcerers generally avoided it as its towers and barracks had become infested with philosophers, historians, rhetoricians, the younger sons of landowners, and, indeed, geometers.
In a wide room near the base of one of the towers, a geometer had a handful of not-dice, geometric shapes regular and irregular of many configurations. He was using them to explain a theory of his to a handsome young man with golden hair and skin, who was perhaps a visitor, perhaps a student - the school did not make a strong distinction, so long as you paid the cost of your board - but at any rate was more sincerely interested than any of his supposed colleagues or apprentices.
He had developed a theory that the earth was not flat, but round; that the stars moved, like the moon and sun, though imperceptibly slowly; that this was due to their being embedded in crytal frames which spun within each other, shaped like the crystal baubles he showed his visitor, through esoteric mathematical principles. The visitor had come to him because he was widely said to be mad, and he had a personal interest in madness.
While he listened he was absently flipping a coin between his fingers, an old, old coin with a queen on one side and a leopard on the other. He didn't look to see how it landed, just mechanically picked it up and flipped it again in his gloved right hand, but the geometer kept finding his eyes drawn back to it and finally interrupted his own lecture to grab it before the other could.
"How do you induce it to land on the queen's side every throw?" he demanded, holding it up to the sunlight streaming through one of the high lancet windows that lined the walls. "Is it magery, or pure skill?"
"Neither," said the visitor, grasping it back. "There are, I fear, more possibilities than those you are aware of, my good master geometer. But all the same I thank you for the insight into your studies; it has been a very pleasant afternoon."
He stood from his chair and across the room, where he had been languidly curled in another of the windows, another man shut his book and walked over to drape an arm on the blond man's shoulder. He had rich brown skin and tumbled curls only a few shades darker, and said, "Are you finished at last, then, Yatini? Master Garosen?"
The visitor's true name was not Yatini, but he had taken of late to wandering the world in a fairer guise than his accustomed, and when he did, he would borrow another name, if only for the temporary peace of mind of those around him. Though many who told tales of him would not expect to see him at an oasis of rationality and clear thinking, he always made an effort to visit when one aronse. Unlike his unbrothers - Azhrarn who followed always his wicked passions, Uhlume whose realm was only being and un-being, Kheshmet who dwelt in the comfort of the unavoidable - Yatini valued the power of the human mind and enjoyed seeing it stretched to his limits. Besides, there was no better place to happen on people who had found entirely novel routes of driving themselves to madness.
It was a good place to find other things, too, like a king's younger son with skin of sun-licked brown and fascinating curls to run one's fingers through, a twist of mischeif in his dark eyes and no stronger mission in his education that to indulge it. His name was Phedan, and Yatini had already stayed longer than intended.
"And did you come to a decision as to whether old Garosen is mad or not?" Phedan asked as they walked together into the small, cool stone-walled bedroom where Phedan had invited him to stay.
"Madder than you, perhaps," Yatini said, "but from a geometer, my standards are high: I would expect at least a dream of a cube with twenty-four faces, or a curve that grows longer the more closely you gaze about it."
"Somehow I always feel judged inadequate when you tell me I am less mad than my teachers. From most people, that would ring as a compliment, but never from you," he said philosophically.
"I can attempt to madden you further," Yatini replied, "Though I fear it would only take for a very short while."
"That one was definitely an insult," said the Prince, with an anticipatory grin: "But you are welcome to try."