Dream d2239-s: The Crooked Line Is True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gates stood open on the second morning the same way they'd stood on the first: both leaves back, pinned, as if the habit of closing them had been forgotten before the town was finished. I walked through without breaking stride and the sound of the mills came after me, not before - a comfort, not a greeting.

The town was clean. That was the first true thing I entered into the ledger yesterday, and it was still true this morning. Nothing scattered, nothing broken against a wall and left for someone else to kick aside. I had checked the Book of Readings before the light came up, cross-referencing two entries against what I'd written the first day, and the Book was silent on this town, which meant the survey was ours to make. Lano ranged ahead, her white shape moving between the halls in that way she has of seeming to check a thing without stopping for it. Rurik sat on a low wall near the market square and watched me count, his tail not moving. He had already counted and he knew I had to count for myself.

The Builder had been here. Three pairs of hands had been here, and the work showed it - proportions sensible, each hall given its purpose and not overfull of its purpose. Someone had set the flagstones with an eye for drainage. I walked the eastern line and made a note about drainage. The Weather Reader came beside me for a few minutes and didn't say anything about the sky, which I had learned to read as its own kind of report.

There was a mallet left on the second step of the hall nearest the north gate. Not dropped - set. The head down, the handle up, like a marker. I stepped around it and wrote it down only as I might write down a bench or a doorpost: it is here, it has been here since work stopped, it is part of the count. Long cold. Fourteen days by the moss on the haft.

That was the hard number. Fourteen days since the last hand, and fifty-eight entries in the complaints register, which I had copied line by line into my ledger this morning until my wrist ached with the ugliness of it. Not the kind of ugly that means broken - the kind that means seen and not yet fixed, which is its own category and wants its own column.

The mills turned. I wrote that down too. Turning is not life but it is also not silence, and the ledger wants the true thing, not the comfortable one.

Rurik is still on the wall. Lano is coming back from the north quarter. The staked line I set this morning runs across the grass between two posts, taut, a little crooked where the ground dips, and I have not straightened it because the ground is also the true thing.

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art, a quiet hillside town of few roofs, a surveyor out in the open pacing its edges, a staked line across the grass, survey mood, 8-bit style

---