Dream d2305-s: The Burning That Remained

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold arrived before the ruins did.

We came down a slope of dry scrub and I felt it - not wind, a kind of stillness that had weight, the sort that settles over a place when nothing has moved inside it for long enough. Rurik felt it too; his ears went flat, and he said nothing, only walked a little closer to the path's center.

Lano slowed at my shoulder. She had been reading the horizon since the last waypoint, the way she does when she is deciding whether what she sees matches what she expected, and the decision is taking too long.

"Built in spring," the Builder said, not to any of us. "You can tell by the wall-courses. They had good weather for it."

She was right. The place was clean. That was the first thing that struck me - not the overgrowth threading through the open roof, not the way dusk was already pooling in the lower halls, but the order underneath all of it. The tools had been hung on their pegs. The records had been left in their proper halls. Whoever had walked out of here had walked out slowly, tidying as they went.

There was one lamp still burning inside.

The Weather Reader marked that without speaking. I saw her stop, and then deliberately not look at the lamp, the way you do not look at something you cannot yet explain.

I pulled the survey ledger from the pack and opened it to the next blank line. I had not yet seen the place - not properly, not the way the survey required - but I made the tally mark first, a single vertical stroke in the left margin. Before the number. Before I understood what I was counting.

That is a small betrayal, the kind the survey does not officially allow. But the lamp was burning for no one, and the proper halls held everything in order, and nobody had written a complaint in the book in any of the days since the last sign of life - three days, the survey would later say, three days ago, and the lamp had been running since then, or had been re-lit by something that did not know it was being watched, or had never gone out.

I stood in the entrance and counted the halls I could see. Rurik sat down beside the lintel and watched the overgrowth for movement.

The lamp did not flicker.

Nothing here checks its own work.

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