Dream d2327-s: Burning Against Nothing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came to Pewtermoss at the wrong hour of the evening - not late enough for dark, not early enough for the day to be held in any ordinary way. The sky to the west had gone the colour of pewter, which seemed apt, and the rim dropped sharply to our left. Rurik pressed to the centre of the path without being asked, his black coat lifting in the wind. Lano walked ahead, ears angled back. She did not say what she heard.

The place came into view as we rounded the last kink in the path. I had expected something difficult to read. What I found was easier and worse: Pewtermoss was tidy. Roofless - the sky showing through the far building's broken crown - but tidy. The halls were in their right order. Whatever shelving remained had things on it, placed where they belonged. Nothing thrown, nothing mid-task, nothing trailed toward an exit. This was not a place abandoned in panic. It had simply been put down, carefully, and not picked up again.

The Builder moved along the nearest wall with her hands not quite touching the stone. She does this when she is reading the work. After a moment she drew back and did not volunteer an interpretation.

The ledger had recorded no builders for this place. No role, no count, no name. Only the date it first appeared, and the date it last answered. I shifted the pack - ledger inside, the Book of Readings, the grey pellet-stone from below the perch - and looked again at the orderly ruin and understood I was not going to get an explanation for it.

No complaints in the record, either. Whatever this had been, it had not been troubled.

Inside the roofless hall, a lamp was burning. Wick trimmed, fat full - not a guttering end. The Weather Reader saw me looking at it. She said nothing, which is what she says when something is more signal than explanation.

I took out the ledger but did not open it. First look, then record.

The wind shifted. The Weather Reader tilted her face toward the west and read the sky in the way she reads it. Clouds were stacking fast. We had come in at dusk. The measuring was not half done.

Rurik settled on a low wall and tucked his tail in close. The lamp inside went on burning, for nobody in particular, against something nobody had thought to name.

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