Dream d2334-s: The Page Runs Long

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Builder reads the ruin entries back to us, and we let her.

She stands at the near end of the table with the ledger open flat, and she does not summarize. She reads each line as written: structure count, wall-standing percentage, well status, date of last habitation where we could find one. We listen. Lano sits across with her forepaws folded, not moving. Rurik is somewhere behind me; I can hear him breathing but not see him. The Weather Reader is at the window and she has not turned around since the Builder began.

The ruins section was supposed to be short.

I remember thinking that on the road, two days back, when I opened the ledger to start the ruins page. The sites we had seen - collapsed towers, a mill with its wheel rusted into the bank, two hamlets whose names had been taken off the road markers so long ago no one remembered what they had been called - I had counted seven in the first leg. Seven felt like a week's tally. Seven was manageable.

The Builder is on the twenty-third entry now.

I do not interrupt her. The count is the count. I wrote each one the hour I saw it, just as I was supposed to, and the ledger does not lie about what I put in it. What I had not reckoned was how many more there would be after the turn in the valley, how the abandoned places stacked against each other as if they had been waiting to be seen by someone with a page to receive them.

The Weather Reader shifts her weight at the window. She says, quietly, without turning: the sky to the west has changed.

No one answers. The Builder reads the twenty-fourth entry.

There is a grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket, worn smooth from handling. I put my hand on it the way you put your hand on something that will not change. The Book of Readings is in the pack beside my chair. The survey ledger is in the Builder's hands, and the Builder's hands are steady, and the room smells of tallow and the close mineral smell of the walls, and outside the window the light is going the wrong color - not the color of evening but the color of something arriving from the west before evening is ready for it.

She reads the twenty-fifth entry.

I do not know what we believed before tonight. I know the page is not finished.

Rurik sets a hand on the back of my chair and does not speak.

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