Dream d2251-s: Everything in Its Proper Hall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lamp I set at the south wall went cold in the second hour. Not out - the flame is there, it moves when the air moves - but the warmth has gone out of it. I have not said anything to the others.

Harrowfall is clean. Everything is in its proper hall. The tools hung in the west room are still hung in the west room, which I wrote in the ledger yesterday: condition, alignment, use-state. The corridors are clear. The rim-edge is sound. There is nothing here that should make the lamp burn cold.

By midday the Weather Reader came down from the rim-edge and did not say what she had seen. She stood in the passage for a moment, the one where the left wall has settled a little close - not dangerous, just aware of you - and then she went inside. Lano stayed at my elbow. Rurik climbed to the high sill at the east wall and has not come down since.

The Builder has been in the western hall since morning. I don't know what she is building. She didn't tell us when she started and she hasn't come out to explain. When I passed the hall entrance an hour ago I didn't hear anything - no strike of tool, no scrape - but she was there, I could see her shape in the cold light, her hands moving over something I couldn't make out. Her hands when she came for water at noon were clean.

There's a thing about Harrowfall that I wrote at the top of the entry: it is louder than its size. The footsteps in the main corridor split into echoes and then stop all at once, mid-hall, like sound that knows better. Then it goes to the other thing - a quiet that is bigger than any quiet the place should make.

I have the ledger on my knee. The entry is filled in: one builder made this, the date it was founded, the date - thirty-one days back - of the last sign of life. Zero open complaints in its book. I wrote that last and then looked at it for a while. Not that it isn't true. Everything here is in order. I just don't know what the order is holding against.

The lamp burns at the south wall. Cold, still burning. Outside the rim the light is going, and nobody has suggested we move on.

---