Dream d2318-s: The Orderly Forgetting

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ended at a low wall and we stopped without talking about stopping.

Fennfall sits at the rim where the ground levels off before the drop. I came in from the east side, through a gap where the gate had been - the posts were still standing, but whatever hung between them was long gone. The ground inside was clear of debris. That was the first strange thing: nothing had fallen and stayed. Tools leaned against the interior wall in a row, as if someone had meant to come back for them after the noon hour. They had not.

Rurik moved ahead of me, low through the grass that had come up between the paving stones. He did not stop at anything. That told me something.

The Weather Reader stood at what had been a threshold and looked at the sky above the open roof. "The light is cold today," she said. Nothing else. She was right; it had the quality of light that comes when clouds stack too high to see the source.

I took the ledger from the pack and opened it on the top of the wall. Sixty-six days since any sign of life, and I counted it out to myself - sixty-six, not sixty-five, not an estimate that would round toward something more comfortable. The number sat in my mouth and I said it aloud and wrote it down. The ledger does not forgive softness in the counting.

The Builder walked the perimeter slowly. She ran her hand along the courses without stopping at anything. Nothing had fallen. The place had not collapsed; it had simply gone still, the way a room goes still after the last person leaves and no one returns. The tools in their row, the cleared ground, the intact walls - these were not signs of hope. They were signs of precision, of someone who left things correct and then did not come back to know it.

Lano circled the interior. She stopped near the light source without touching it. I did not know how long it had been burning or what still fed it; I did not invent an answer for that. I only wrote: one lamp, interior, burning on arrival. I wrote it the same hour I saw it, because that is the only honest thing to do with something you cannot explain.

The five of us stood inside the roofless walls while the dusk came in from above, and the small light held its circle against the cold, and there was no one here to want it.

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