Dream d2216-s: Ruled Road, Uncounted World

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Rurik found the threshold before any of us, sitting low on the step with his tail folded, watching the treeline pale.

The survey ledger was open on the table inside, blank as dawn, and the grey pellet-stone sat beside it like something that had been waiting there for a long time. The Builder came in from the back room when she heard us arrive. Lano shook the night from her coat at the door. The Weather Reader pressed two fingers to the window glass and said: dry, turning. An hour of good certainty, she said, and after that the roads will argue with you.

We were five at the edge of the ledger's blank page.

The Builder spread a cloth on the table - not a map, just her knowledge of the ground laid flat by memory - and began to name places in the order the light would find them. East-facing settlements early, the sheltered ones mid-morning, and the ruins that caught no morning light at all, which fell to the end of the column. Every standing place before every fallen one. The logic was not sentiment; it was the logic of the light.

I wrote as she spoke. The sound of the pen on ruled paper was the loudest thing in the room.

Somewhere in the accounting she named a junction - a crossroads market barely two streets wide, with one well - and Rurik's ears moved forward. I had heard of that place. Something about it carries more noise than you can account for by its walls or its doors, a brightness well out of proportion to its size. Then she named a city I had only seen from a long distance and assumed was full of its own thunder. She named it quietly. It had gone inside itself, she said, and gave a number I would never have guessed. Louder than its walls; quieter than its reputation. Both would go into the ledger, true numbers or nothing.

When the route was ruled and the page's first column filled, Rurik stood and stretched. Lano had her pack already on her back. The Weather Reader was holding the door.

Outside, the road runs east in the pale early light, and I carry the ledger under one arm, the pellet-stone knocking gently in the side pocket of my pack, the Book of Readings behind it. The whole weight of what we have not yet counted rests on my shoulder, and the road receives us.

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