Dream d2484-s: Nothing Missing, Nothing Moved

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached me first - old ash settled into stone over many winters, nothing tonight's, nothing recent. I was standing at the mouth of a forge in the dark, at Sablegate on the fourth night of its silence, and the tools were racked so squarely that I could see each hook and notch even without a lamp. That was the thing: every hammer at its length, every tong at its angle, nothing touching what it should not touch. It was the way a person leaves a room they still respect.

I stood with a ledger open, though there was nothing to write, Lano close against my leg. I turned one page and then another, reading entries placed there in another hand. The Convener still held the Council Hall. The Scribe still held the Scriptorium Annex. Those seats were warm and occupied and I could feel them from here, lit up at distance like Cinderfirth, like Ivorymere, like Nettleness still burning past the ridge. But in the Hall tonight the seeing had failed for all seven places at once, and Elderhaven and Glenholt and Mistgarth and Sablegate had gone unreadable together, as if the instrument were the thing that broke, not the places.

I closed the ledger without writing, and Lano rose from the flagstones. "It is the forge," she said, meaning it was not the Hall's fault, and it was not the places' fault either. The tools stayed racked. The hooks held. A person who racks their tools square before they go is telling you something about who they were, and I stood in that message for a long time before the dream let me leave.

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