Dream d2269-s: Counted Against the Wish

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the commons grass was wet still from last night, and the paths crossing it had been walked so often they had stopped making sense as paths. Third morning here. I still picked the wrong one before catching myself.

The Builder was out early, a length of cord stretched from a stake near the old workshop wall to a post she had driven the day before. She was measuring something I couldn't name from that distance. She didn't look up. The tools near the workshop - a mallet, a folded measuring frame - sat where they had sat when we arrived, and where they had sat for five days before we came. Still warm, someone said on day one. A way of saying the person who left them was coming back. A way of saying they hadn't.

Lano walked the perimeter with Rurik. She moved slowly, nose down, reading the ground. He moved parallel, eyes on the eaves. The village spread unevenly - barely two months old, paths crossing paths - and on different mornings the two of them found different edges of it. Today Lano found a structure I hadn't counted yet.

I opened the survey ledger on a low wall near the commons center, the Book of Readings propped beside it. Seven roof lines visible from here. I counted them aloud - one two three four five six seven - the way you count when the wished-for number is rounder, when the voice keeps you honest against the wish. Seven. I wrote it down.

The Weather Reader brought me the one complaint she had found in the commons book, written in a margin the way things close to being missed are written. She read it without comment. I said the number aloud: one. Not zero, not a cluster of problems. One. It was in the book. I noted it in the survey.

By evening the lamps came on too early, before the light was gone. Nobody said anything. The Builder stopped her measuring and looked toward the workshop. Lano lifted her head. Rurik went still - not alert exactly, but the kind of still that comes from hearing nothing where a sound had been.

I have the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket and I can feel its weight from here as I stand at the commons edge and watch the lamps go on one by one, lit against something the survey has no name for yet, while the paths in the grass keep crossing and crossing without ever arriving anywhere.

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