Dream d2304-s: Against the Wish

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wind came through the open roof before we were inside it, moving through corridors that had no ceiling left to stop it.

We came to the rim settlement in the last of the grey afternoon light. The place met us the way an empty house meets a hand on its door: not hostile, not welcoming, simply present, waiting for someone to name what it is now. Lano walked ahead of me into the first hall and her ears turned once - checking - and then settled flat. Nothing moved. The halls were clean. That was the first thing I wrote down, because it was the first thing that troubled me.

Everything was in its proper place. Tools hung on their hooks. A bench held its instruments in order, spacing between each one as though the hand that placed them might return to take them up. I pulled the ledger from my pack and opened it on the top of a low wall, and I said it aloud the way I have learned to say the number before the wish for a different one can form: one. One builder. The Weather Reader stood in the doorway and did not contradict me.

Ninety-six days. I said that aloud too, because you can want the number to be smaller and still write it cleanly. The Builder walked the southern corridor in silence, running one hand along the edge of an empty shelf. Rurik had dropped back to the entry, and I could hear him from where I stood, a low half-sound like a question he had not committed to yet.

There is a lamp burning somewhere in the interior. We have not found the room it is in. The light comes around a corner and lies in a thin bar across the floor of the main hall and none of us have gone to it yet, because there is still the ledger to fill. Something kept it running here for ninety-six days against nobody.

Zero complaints in the book. Nothing here checks its own work. I set the pellet-stone on the wall beside the open ledger and the weight of it there felt like a corrective - something from below the perch to remind me what falls when the count goes unrecorded. A true number is not a failure. It is what the place left us.

I write the date. I write the count. Somewhere around the corner, the lamp holds.

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