Dream d2267-s: Still Where It Was Set

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the hill came up under my feet before I saw the rooftops. Late morning, the kind of light that sits flat on grass and makes it hard to judge distance - Rurik slowed beside me, his ears rotating once toward something on the near slope, then settling. He decided it was nothing. I trust the cat.

The village spreads from a commons at its center, and that is where I learn the first thing about it: the spreading did not happen according to any plan I can see. Paths cross other paths at angles that suggest separate intentions, as though each foot-track was made by someone who had not spoken to the one before. Not hostile - just independent. The commons itself is a rough oval of flattened grass with a pump and a stone lip worn smooth by however many elbows, and the paths radiate from it the way roots radiate from a seed: not evenly, not by design, but by where the soil gave.

The Builder walks ahead of me into the commons. She does not announce it; she just goes, and I watch her move through the space the way she always moves through a place she is deciding about - slow at first, then slower, until she stops in the middle and turns.

There is a wedge of iron in the grass near the commons' eastern edge. A driving stake, the kind used to anchor a survey line or mark a plot corner. Nobody pulled it. The mallet is beside it, lying where someone set it down mid-swing or after - I cannot tell which. The handle is long cold when I crouch and touch it. Five days or more, by the feel. I do not move it. The ledger notes the stake, the mallet, the position relative to the pump.

The Weather Reader finds the shade on the commons' west side and reads the sky, then studies the slope above the village. She will tell me something about the week's rain later, once she has decided. I have learned not to ask her early.

Lano is already at the complaint-book beside the pump. A single entry, unresolved, written in a hand that looks like the same hand that built this place - one builder, the survey says, one set of hands for all of it. She does not read the entry aloud. She looks at it and looks at me, and I nod once, meaning I know.

Rurik sits at the edge of the commons and watches the paths.

The grass here is short and dry. The pump holds still.

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