Dream d2325-s: Lit for No One

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground at Pewterhush was flat - flat and swept clean, not by any recent hand but by years of rim wind finding nothing to break against. The walls stood. The gates were hung true. Every lintel held its line, every passage between buildings cleared and squared, and this is what the foreboding was made of: that order held this long without anyone to keep it.

Lano stepped in ahead of me, her white coat catching the last thin light of dusk. She said nothing. The Weather Reader moved to the outer wall to read whatever this air had written in itself. The Builder walked the near perimeter with her hands loose at her sides, the way she does when she is cataloguing and does not want to weight what she finds before she finds it. Rurik took the center of the main courtyard and sat, which was his way of saying he had seen places like this before.

I counted as I crossed the threshold. One gate, open. Two main halls, intact. Three courtyards - I said it aloud, three, because I have learned that the number said aloud catches the moment when the wish begins to pull at the count. Fifty-three days since the last sign of life in this place. That too I said aloud, quietly, into the space.

The light at the far end of the longest hall is the only thing that does not fit: a lamp burning with no one near it, no reason to tend it, nothing it is guarding. Something in that flame says the place was left in haste, except nothing else says that at all. The stone is laid true. The thresholds are clean. There are no complaints in this place's book - zero, none, nothing called out. Nothing here checks its own work because nothing here works anymore, or fails to.

The Builder stops at a doorway and sets her palm flat against the jamb. Not testing it. I think she is only confirming it is real.

The grey pellet-stone in my pack sits heavy the way a small thing sits heavy when it is the only witness to what happened at a place before the place forgot itself. I do not take it out.

The ledger opens on my knee at the outer wall. Last built: fifty-three days ago. Hands: not recorded. Complaints: zero. I write the zero last and say it once more out loud to make sure I am counting what is there and not what I would prefer.

Across the courtyard the lamp burns for no one and the sky above the roofless hall turns the colour of old iron.

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