Dream d2250-s: What the Cold Numbers Hold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Harrowfall stood the way careful work stands when nobody is left to tend it: precise, each hall in its hall, each passage at the angle that makes the most of what light is left, except there was no light left. We had arrived yesterday in the early grey. We were still here, and we still had half the count to do.

Lano moved ahead of me through the eastern wing, her white coat the brightest thing in each room she entered. She did not pace - she walked, which in her means something almost the same and entirely different. Rurik kept to the inner walls, methodical, holding still at each opening in a way that was not fear but resembled it, the way still water resembles deep water.

The Builder had paced the main hall before I was awake. She showed me her figures at the threshold, small and clean. I transferred them to the survey ledger by the alcove entrance - knees braced against the cold stone, the pellet-stone from the perch shifting in my pack when I moved. An estimate would have been faster. We did not use estimates.

What Harrowfall has: its walls, its halls, a precision of layout that could only come from one pair of hands that knew what they were doing. Every alcove oriented correctly. Every corridor without a wasted turn. I wrote the numbers as I found them. The complaints column for this place runs empty - I wrote the zero, which is its own kind of count, and moved on.

Thirty-one days since anything was last touched here. I am touching it now with measurement.

The weather turned while we were still in the eastern wing.

The Weather Reader had been watching the rim since before the survey resumed. She said we had perhaps two hours before it settled in - not a storm, a pressure, the kind that comes in from the rim without drama, only the fact of arrival. We finished what we could. I folded a corner in the ledger and closed it against my chest, the Book of Readings heavy in the pack beneath it.

Now we stand in the main hall - the only intact roof we have found - and the wind is in the outer passages, moving closer. The survey is half-done. The numbers are true. Outside, Harrowfall holds its order in whatever is coming.

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