Dream d2311-s: The Order That Remained

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came down the rim-path in the last usable light, the slope chalky under boot, and Nettlefall opened below us the way a held breath opens - not with a rush, just with the slow give of what was held. I counted the structures as they came into view. One, two, three - I said each aloud, the Builder behind me not breaking stride. I was not doing it for her. I did it because the wish to round up sits behind my teeth at moments like this, and saying the number straight takes it out of the mouth and puts it on the air where it can be checked.

Rurik dropped his head low as we reached the first hall's shadow. His ears moved ahead of him, listening to something the place was not making. That is the thing about Nettlefall: it is quiet the way a room is quiet after a gathering, not the way a field is. The silence has furniture in it.

Lano walked the perimeter without being asked. She came back at a trot, breath even and clean, and sat beside my pack. No report. I knew what that meant.

The halls are in order. That is the first true thing I can put down. The Weather Reader pressed her palm to the wall of the nearest building - not checking for heat, I thought, just feeling the surface - and after a moment stepped back without speaking. The stone is clean. The arrangement is clean. Whatever one hand put together here, they put together well, and the arrangement has not moved in sixty-eight days.

That is almost worse.

I opened the ledger on my knee, crouching at the door of the first hall. The page was cold under my fingers. Sixty-eight, I said aloud. The Weather Reader nodded at the ground. Sixty-eight days since the last mark, and nothing here has checked its own work since. I wrote it before I could be tempted to soften it.

Inside, a lamp is burning. I have no explanation for it. There was one hand here, and that hand is long since elsewhere, and the lamp is burning still - not brightly, a steady yellow, not urgent, not guttering - the kind of light that was meant to be seen by someone who is no longer coming. We did not move toward it.

Rurik sits in the doorway and does not go in.

The lamp holds its color. The halls hold their order. The ledger waits.

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