Dream d2463-s: All Three Were True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing at the far end of the long table in the Council Hall, watching a young clerk try to find where to set down a ledger. The ledger was thick and old and she held it in both arms. The chair at the head of the table was empty. It had been empty since I arrived, and the candles on either side of it had been burning long enough that their wax had pooled and set into shapes that had melted slowly, without being tended.

The clerk looked at the chair and then at the room and then asked, without directing the question at anyone in particular: whose chair is that?

An older clerk at the side of the table looked up from his column of figures and said: the Convener's. He said it the way you say something that is still true and does not need to be examined.

A woman sorting correspondence near the south shelf said, without pausing her sorting: the Scribe used to sit there, when the Scribe was in residence and not at the Annex. That was a long time back.

And Lano, who had been tracing a finger along a row of unlit markers on the wall chart - seven of them, all the same faint gray where they had once been different colors - said simply: it was the chair of whoever called the last session.

The young clerk looked at all three of them. She set the ledger on the table at the far end, not at the head, and did not ask again.

The seven settlements on the chart stayed gray. Cinderfirth still showed a light. So did Ivorymere, and Nettleness. But Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate - nothing. Not gone. Just unreadable from here tonight. The seeing had failed, not the places. That was the official word and probably the true one.

The candles at the head of the table burned on.

Nobody moved the ledger.

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