Dream d1755-s: Gate, Then Gone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the last morning at Juniperbarrow came in grey and cold, a thin skin of ice on the water in the stone trough by the wall. I wrote the final entry by feel as much as by sight, my breath clouding the page, the ink slow to flow until I cupped the bottle in my hands and waited.

The Caretaker found us at the gate. She had stayed when every other keeper left, and she said nothing dramatic about it - she had simply stayed because someone had to, and here she still was. The Builder pressed her hand and told her the eastern colonnade would hold another decade if the water was kept from the joint at the third pillar. The Caretaker said she knew; she had been packing rags into that joint every autumn. The Builder laughed, a short warm sound that echoed off the old stones, and said she had been reading the place correctly all along without any instrument to prove it.

Lano had found something in the rubble near the south wall - a stone the size of a chestnut, smooth and pale, which she carried to the gate in her mouth and then set down precisely at the threshold, as if placing it. I chose not to interpret that.

The Weather Reader stood apart, checking the column of her barometer, her finger tracing the needle's resting point. She said the pressure had lifted two notches since we arrived. Whether the place had been heavier before or the sky had simply shifted, she could not say for certain, and she did not pretend otherwise.

I wrote: Juniperbarrow. A ruin that has not forgotten how to be kept. The joints hold where someone has pressed care into them. The starlight reaches the courtyard floor without obstruction - nothing tall enough left standing to block it. We read what we could. We leave it lighter than our instruments suggested and cannot fully account for the difference.

Rurik was first through the gate. He did not look back; he never does at thresholds. He sat on the road side and watched us complete our farewells, his tail wrapped around his paws, his amber eyes steady.

The Caretaker lifted one hand. We lifted ours. Lano trotted through the gap without ceremony, past Rurik, and put her nose into the verge.

Then the road, and Juniperbarrow behind us, its silhouette against the pale sky growing smaller with each step until it was only a notch in the horizon, and then not even that.