Dream d1771-s: The Last Entry at Pewtermoss

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lamps had been lit an hour already and the dusk was settling into something darker, a blue-grey weight over the mossy rooftops, when I sat down at the long table in the Caretaker's hall and opened the book of readings to the final page I would write here.

The Builder stood behind me with her arms crossed, not reading over my shoulder but present in the way she gets when something is being closed. "Put down the lintel work on the eastern wall," she said. "That joint will hold another hundred years. Someone should know that."

I wrote it.

The Caretaker - he had never once left Pewtermoss, not in all the years the road had been overgrown - brought a lamp closer without being asked. He set it at the corner of the table and stepped back. He did not ask what we had written about the place. He already knew the place. What he wanted was to know it had been read.

The Weather Reader had come in from the courtyard with damp on her instruments. "Pressure rising," she said, setting the barograph on the bench beside the door. "Clear by midmorning. Good road weather." She glanced at the Caretaker. "The pressure memory here is very old and very even. This ruin was a steady place. It still is."

He nodded once. That was his farewell.

Lano had found a warm stone near the hearth and curled against it. When I closed the book she lifted her head, ears tipped forward, watching me with her dark eyes as though she understood the sound of a closing cover. Her tail moved twice.

"Quieto," I told her. One more hour.

But when Rurik moved to the door just before full dark, she was already on her feet. He stood at the threshold without looking back, his amber eyes catching the lamplight once, and then he was through and into the blue air of the courtyard. That was how he said it: time.

We shouldered our packs. The Builder pulled the eastern gate closed behind us, tested the latch - old habit, check the joint - and found it good. The Caretaker stood in the doorway of the hall with the lamp he had moved for me still in his hand, and he raised it once, not high, just level with his chest, a lamp held up in the dark.

I raised my hand. The Weather Reader raised hers.

Then the road was under us and Pewtermoss was behind us, its single lamp growing smaller until the mist over the rooftops closed around it and there was only the road ahead, unread, waiting.