Dream d1799-s: Dust on the Verge Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road kept the heat of the day long after the sun had gone. We walked in the last of it, Brackensquare's wall-towers shrinking behind us until they were just pale shapes against the darkening sky, and then not even that.

The Builder set her pack down at a wide verge where an old milestone leaned into the grass. She pressed her palm flat against the stone, the way she does when she's still reading something she left behind. "The granary joints," she said. "They were cut for a wetter climate. Somebody moved the plan from somewhere else and nobody questioned it."

"They held," the Weather Reader said.

"They held. But you could see where the wood had fought the stone for years before it gave up fighting."

Rurik moved ahead to where the road forked in the near-dark, and sat. He did not look back at us. He was already watching what came from the Nettlefall direction, amber eyes catching nothing yet - no lamp, no fire, no movement. Just the way the road became grass at the edges and the grass became shadow.

I wrote in the book while the Weather Reader read her instruments. The barometric log she kept for Brackensquare filled six pages. Every market morning a slow pressure drop. Every night a recovery. "The place breathes on a market schedule," she said. "I have never seen that before."

Lano circled the milestone twice, nose working, and then sat at my feet. Her tail swept the road dust once and was still. She had her ears up toward the dark where Rurik watched.

We ate cold bread and talked about the miller's apprentice who had asked us to look at the gate mechanism - not because it was broken, but because she wanted to understand why it was built the way it was. The Builder had spent a whole morning with her, tracing the pivot geometry in chalk on the flagstones. "She will be good," the Builder said. "She already knew the question was worth asking."

There were no stars visible. The Weather Reader said there was moisture coming, slow and high, nothing that would trouble us by morning. The road to Nettlefall was perhaps two days. Reports at Brackensquare had described an overgrown gate, grass in the colonnade, a silence that sat on the rooftops like a third settlement had moved in on top of the first two.

Rurik did not move from the fork.

I closed the book. Lano shifted and put her chin on my boot.

We slept on the verge with the milestone at our backs, and the road ran dark in both directions, and I remembered the single lit node at the origin, small and steady, the way a single lamp makes the dark more visible and less frightening at the same time.