Dream d2312-s: Cold at the Rim

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came up over a ridge of broken shale and Kestrelbarrow was below us, and the first thing I felt was not recognition but a kind of held breath.

The settlement sat at the rim's edge like something placed carefully and then forgotten. Not collapsed - that was the strange part. Everything stood. Walls to their coursed heights, halls still roofed on one side, a long building along the northern edge that must have been a granary or a sorting room, its door open at the correct angle, the way a door is when someone stepped through it and forgot to latch it on their way out. Eighty-seven days, and the door still swings at that angle.

Lano was first down the shale, picking her way between two gateposts that still had their lintel. She stopped at the bottom and looked back at me without saying anything.

The Builder followed. The Weather Reader came last, and I heard her draw air through her teeth when she cleared the ridge and saw it.

Rurik found a flagstone path along the west wall and padded ahead of us. His black coat was already wet from the grey fog that had rolled in off the rim before we reached the crest. He did not look back.

There was a lamp burning inside the hall. One lamp. Not burning low - burning the way something burns when it has been doing so without intention, without witness, lit against a presence that has not arrived and may not. The light it threw was cold, which is not a thing lamp-light usually does. I noted it and did not write it yet.

The survey ledger was in my pack, and I shifted the pack's weight from one shoulder to the other but did not pull the ledger out. You learn, after enough of these places, to look first. The hand that makes a mark before it has understood what it is marking makes a different kind of error than one that invents a number - but it makes an error all the same.

Everything in its proper hall. That was the phrase that came. The buckets hung on their pegs. The sorting frames stood upright in the granary. The latch-pins were in their loops. A place can be clean this way and still carry the wrong weight of cold - clean in a manner that has stopped being cared for and is simply continuing.

I reached into my coat and touched the grey pellet-stone to feel its edge against my thumb.

Rurik sits in the threshold of the hall now, still, watching the lamp.

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