Dream d2184-s: Laid True, Written True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mortar was still tacky under my palms when the Builder called the second check.

She crouched at the end of the course and sighted along it, one eye closed, the way you sight a shelf before you trust it with weight. The stone was true. She said so aloud, and the Weather Reader wrote it in the ledger-house before the Builder had straightened back up. That was the rule we had agreed on: the same hour it is lived.

The ledger-house was the first building with a roof. Four walls, a door, a single window that faced east so the morning light fell across the open pages without shadows. Lano had chosen the site, a rise of packed earth where the ground drained well, and she stood in the doorway now watching us work, her white coat pale against the lit interior. She did not speak. There was nothing to say yet. We were still in the planting part of the day.

Rurik carried the grey pellet-stone in his coat pocket. I had seen him take it out twice already, turn it in his paw, set it back. The cost, made holdable. He did not explain and I did not ask.

I set the next block. I checked the level myself, then Lano checked it from the doorway. She gave a short nod. I called it across to the Weather Reader and heard the pencil move.

The Hummingbird Wardens came through at their usual circuit: a tight dart over the timber stack, a hover above the mortar line, gone. The same sweep they made at this hour every day. You could plan around them. That was the comfort of it.

By the low part of the afternoon the course was eight blocks long and the Builder had drawn a chalk line for the ninth. The Book of Readings lay open on the ledger-house table, the recent entries in dark ink, and before them a set of pages that were smooth and unmarked. Not torn, not stained. Simply empty in a way that felt final. The unwritten grove-days. I had looked at them once that morning and decided not to look again.

What I had written was back. I could feel the weight of it, the specific gravity of recorded days sitting differently in the chest than the smooth gaps beside them.

The Builder called the check.

I crouched. I sighted along the chalk line. The course held true in both directions, each stone flush with the next, the mortar lines even. Behind us the ledger-house doorway stayed lit against the early dark coming in from the east.