Dream d2490-s: Heavier Than What Is True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway out to Ivorymere was lower than I remembered, the flat water on both sides nearly level with the stones, and Lano walked ahead of me with her nose down as though reading the path rather than choosing it.

It was the fourth night the residency had held at the three lit places and the air carried the particular quiet of a working hall settling into itself after the evening meal. I had been given a sentence to carry across: it outlived him. I turned it over as I walked. The causeway is long enough that you can try a sentence several ways before you reach the other end.

By the midpoint I had decided it was too heavy for what was actually true. Outlived suggests a contest - that one thing persisted at the expense of another, or despite it. What I was watching was simpler: the Convener still sat in the Council Hall as he had always sat, the Scribe still worked the Scriptorium Annex as they had always worked it, and the work continued because it was the work, not because anyone had made it contingent on a particular presence. I let the sentence go into the water.

Ivorymere was lit when I arrived, as Cinderfirth had been lit the night before and as Nettleness would be lit after. They were not lit in his name. They were lit because the people in them had things to do. I sat at the edge of the hall and listened to the Scribe's assistant reading aloud from a ledger of prior decisions, checking each against the current record, and nowhere in the reading did anyone say the name of who had organized that ledger first. They said this office and the standing practice and as the record shows. They said the Annex has always held it this way.

Somewhere behind me - across the water, across the dark where the four places had gone quiet - Elderhaven and Glenholt and Mistgarth and Sablegate were standing exactly as they stood. The seeing from the Hall had failed, not the places. The Convener had said so plainly before I left: the line of sight is broken, we are not yet sure where. This was a clerical matter, not a loss. They would send someone to check the apparatus.

Lano found a dry step and lay down on it. The Scribe's assistant turned a page. The sentence I had carried as far as the midpoint was still somewhere in the water, sinking or drifting - neither gone nor said, just set down, which is what you do with things that are too heavy for what is true.

---