Dream d2308-s: Three Pages Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Rurik stopped three steps ahead of me and would not go further, his tail low, his ears cocked toward the gap in the wall where a door had been. The rest of us drew up behind him. Lano stood at my left shoulder, her coat catching the last of the low light. The Builder said nothing. The Weather Reader said nothing. I looked at what Rurik was looking at.

Emberbarrow had a lamp in it. One lamp, set in the roofless interior where the walls were still standing, burning against the coming dark with no particular urgency, as though someone had lit it and walked away without hurrying. That was the wrong thing about it. Not the thicket that had come up through the floor and out through the windows - thickets grow, that is what they do. Not the tools scattered at the entrance, a long-handled thing and something short, left where they fell. The tools were wrong too, but the lamp was wronger. It was burning for no one.

I took out the ledger and noted the lamp. A lamp, lit, interior, source unknown.

Then I was three pages back in my own entries, not because I meant to be, but because my thumb had caught the pages wrong in the cold. I found the error before I could stop seeing it: I had written the count of hands that built this place as two when it was one. One. The number sat in the margin already corrected by the plain arithmetic of what I knew, and I drew a line through the two and wrote the one beside it, small, with the kind of neatness you use when you want the record to hold no grudge.

Lano had moved to the threshold without my noticing. She stood inside the gap where the door had been, looking at the lamp the same way Rurik had looked at the gap. The Builder set one hand on the frame of the entrance and let it rest there, reading the stonework the way she reads all stonework - not with admiration, with attention.

The Weather Reader had gone to the far wall and was looking out through a window that had no glass left in it. She lifted her hand toward the horizon, palm up, measuring something I could not see from where I stood.

The ledger had seventy-seven empty days in it when I closed it and put it back in the pack. Not complaints - there were none of those. Just days, unmarked, the ordinary kind of silence that falls when nobody has come.

Rurik finally crossed the threshold. The lamp burns on in the roofless room, steady, throwing its light at the overgrown floor where the flagstones are lifting.

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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