Dream d2059-s: Dust Between Two Lights

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road stretched out in front of us, pale and bone-dry, and Slatewharf's wall-tops had shrunk to a line of ochre brick behind us before anyone spoke.

The Builder was the first. She had her boot up on a milestone, retying her lace, and she said without looking up that she kept thinking about the granary lintel - the one we'd found cracked along its notch-joint, the one the miller had lived under for eleven years without knowing. "He'll know now," she said. "That's not nothing."

The Weather Reader had her barometer out, not because the sky warranted it but because she reads with her hands as much as her eyes. The pressure had been dropping since midmorning, she told us. Some heaviness coming in from the west. She tapped the glass twice and squinted at a fold of cloud forming over what might be the ridge line ahead. "Marrowfold will feel it before we arrive," she said. "Might be the first thing we read there - what kind of place weathers a change like this."

Lano trotted ahead of me, then circled back, then ahead again. Her paws found every rut, every dry clod, and she moved with the steady pleasure of an animal that has no quarrel with the road itself.

I wrote in the book while I walked, which is harder than it sounds. My notes on Slatewharf came out uneven - the ink lines jogged at the verges, one word crossed out and written again where a cartwheel rut caught my heel. The town had been busier inside than its walls suggested. That was the thing I kept writing toward and not quite reaching: the gap between a place's skin and its working interior, how long a reading takes to cross it.

Rurik found the fork in the road before we did. He was simply there when we arrived at it, sitting on the wider of the two stones that marked the divide, tail around his feet. Neither branch was signed. He looked at both, amber eyes moving slow, and then at us.

The Builder crouched and pressed her palm to the packed earth of each path in turn. "This one's been walked more recently," she said of the left branch.

The Weather Reader checked her compass and said nothing.

I wrote: fork. Rurik watches. We read it like everything else - by what carries weight.

We took the left branch. Rurik stepped off his stone and led. Lano shook dust from her ears. The night closed in around the road, warm and still, and somewhere ahead a lamp must have been burning in Marrowfold, though we could not yet see it.