Dream d2324-s: Cold Hall, One Flame

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came over the ridge an hour before dark, and Tamarackbarrow was already in shadow when I first saw it below. Not ruin in the way of collapse. The walls held their courses. The halls were laid out in proper order, each threshold where a threshold should be. The roofs were gone but the rooms knew where they were.

Lano dropped back to my shoulder as we descended. She said nothing. Neither did Rurik. He walked ahead with his tail low, reading the ground, picking his way between two gate-posts still upright after seventy-five days of nobody.

Seventy-five days. I counted it as we entered. Not because the number is large; it is not. Because it is exact.

The Builder paused at what was the main hall and looked at the corners where the stone courses met. She looked the way she always looks at something built by someone else: reading what they knew, reading what they left out. I did not ask her yet. The ledger was not open.

The Weather Reader was watching the sky. Cold came in from the north rim and she tilted her face into it, not turning away. Something in how she stood said the weather was doing a thing she had already suspected.

There was one light. Someone had left an oil lamp burning in the hall furthest from the gate and it had not gone out. The flame held. I did not know how it held, and I did not write it down yet because I was not yet writing anything. I was only looking.

Along the southern face I found a boundary stone, sunk at an angle, its face worn nearly flat. I could read the notch on its crown: this is the line. But the ground behind it did not match the ground the notch pointed to. Not by much. By enough. Whatever the stone had been set for, that thing had shifted. The ground was indifferent about which of them moved.

Lano came to stand beside me. She did not touch the stone. She looked at it the way you look at something telling a true story about a situation that no longer exists.

I took the ledger out of the pack and opened it on my knee. The place has nothing wrong in its own book: no complaints, no flags, no hand that ever came back to note what was missing. Everything in its proper hall. Nothing here checks its own work.

The one flame holds in the far hall, burning for no one, and the cold comes in off the rim and the flame does not move.

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