Dream d2278-s: Six Days, Then Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the commons was smaller than I first marked it. I paced it again this morning, and again just now with the sky doing what it was doing, and the number was the same both times: smaller than I first marked it. That is what I have written. The discrepancy is mine and I put both figures in the ledger, plain, neither one crossed out.

Lano has been sitting on the low wall at the commons edge since before I started the second pass. She watches the paths. They cross each other at angles that do not resolve into a grid, and she seems to be working out which of them came first. I do not think it matters for the survey, but she has that look she gets when something does.

The Builder is here. She has been here all three days, and she has not said why she is still here or what she is still adding. The tools by the far wall are hers - I know the handle wear - and when I passed them this afternoon they were warm in the way tools get when someone has just set them down and gone inside. Whatever she is building onto what she made two months ago, she does not say. The village was raised by one pair of hands, and those hands are still at work in the evenings, and the survey only counts what can be counted.

Rurik has been following the complaint. There is one open entry in the place's book, and he has been sitting near where it was filed - a doorway that no one uses anymore, across two of the crossing paths. He came back this afternoon and sat in the grass and said nothing. He found something and decided to keep it to himself. I wrote in the ledger: one complaint, open. That is all I can write.

The Weather Reader has been looking north all afternoon. She said, some time ago, not yet. She has not said anything since. The sky to the north is a color that does what such colors do before they decide.

I have two measurements still undone when the first drops come. Not a storm - the Weather Reader is still only watching, not moving - just the sky letting us know it has made its choice. Lano looks up from the paths. The Builder, somewhere behind the nearest row of rooflines, does not stop. The staked line I set this morning holds in the grass, the bright cord gone grey-wet.

The ledger is in my pack, closed. The grey pellet-stone is beside it. I stand in the commons with rain on my shoulders and two numbers still missing, and the village spreading unevenly in all directions around me, its paths crossing paths.

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