Dream d2296-s: Lamps Lit for Nobody

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the rim of Tamarackhush came up through the sole of my boot before I saw it - a change in the ground, the fill going softer, the path crossing another path at an angle that made no geometric sense. Lano moved ahead of me, her white coat drawing the last of the day's light into itself, and even she paused where the paths crossed, nose down, reading something the stone refused to say.

The ruin spread from that junction in all directions unevenly, the way water spreads when you pour it onto ground that was never flat to begin with. Roofless structures at the near edge, then walls that held more of their height the further in you walked, and then - at the centre of what must have been the main precinct - a lamp still burning. Nobody had lit it for anything. Nobody was there to need it. It burned the way a habit burns after the reason for it has gone.

The Weather Reader stopped beside me and tilted her chin up. She said nothing. Whatever she read in the sky over Tamarackhush she kept inside the closed ledger of her own face.

I pulled the survey ledger from the pack and held it without opening it yet. The Builder was already walking the perimeter of the nearest wall, her hand trailing the stone, not touching it so much as questioning it. Rurik sat at a distance on a low shelf of rock, his black tail moving once, twice, then going still. He had seen something or decided something; I could not tell which.

At the rim the light ran cold even where the lamp reached. The lamps here - I counted two now, the second deeper in, half-hidden by overgrowth - had been lit against something nobody in the party named. Not against the dark, exactly. Against the character of a place that had been left before it was finished, and that had kept on accumulating whatever unfinished places accumulate in the quiet. Fifteen days since anything moved here with intention. The survey ledger held that count from earlier pages. Fourteen complaints written into the place's own book, none of them answered. No name on any hand that built it.

I found the boundary stone near the first path crossing. It was marked for a ground line that no longer matched the actual ground. I noted it in the margin, just the fact of the mismatch, and did not decide what it meant.

Lano has reached the lamp by now. She stands in front of the flame without looking at it, looking past it into whatever the roofless dark holds beyond the lit circle.

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art, a roofless abandoned settlement overgrown at dusk, one lamp still burning inside it for nobody, foreboding mood, 8-bit style

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