Dream d2495-s: Still Lit Across the Water

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the rope-walk swayed between Nettleness's two towers in the cold of the ninth night, and a figure I took for a lamplighter was walking it slow, testing each cord underfoot before trusting the next. I followed at a distance. Below us the town was quiet but watchful - two windows lit in the Scriptorium Annex, one at the Council Hall, the smell of work still warm in the air even at this hour.

Lano was at the near tower's base. Her ears had gone flat some minutes before I noticed, and she sat with the rigid stillness of something listening past the range of my hearing. When the lamplighter stopped and looked back at the Hall, she barked once: short, clean, a reporting bark, not alarm yet.

I asked the lamplighter who was in charge of the walk's maintenance, meaning the tension-checking, the cord rotation, the schedule. They turned and I saw they were younger than I expected, their coat patched at both elbows.

"Whoever showed up," they said, and smiled, and meant it without irony.

It was not an evasion. Three people had shown up this week. The name they had used to use for the role - the one the old Convener had written into the founding ledger before the seats began to close - that name sat empty, but the work continued under it as if the name were a hook and the hook still held without a coat.

Then the lamplighter said, more quietly, that the fuel supply was lower than it should be at this point in the season. The Annex had sent a count that morning. The salvage draws were down - Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate, all four of the cold places, had gone unreadable from the Hall on the same night two weeks ago, and no one had found the fault yet. Whether the seeing had failed or the places had gone truly dark was still open. The routes those four fed into the supply chain were now running on what Cinderfirth and Ivorymere and Nettleness itself could carry, and Nettleness was the smallest of the three.

Lano barked again. Not louder. The same report, repeated.

Below, someone at the Hall lit a third window.

The lamplighter turned back to the walk and tested the next cord and the next. I stood at the edge and watched Cinderfirth's lights across the water and thought about the Scribe, who had once written a full catalog of every supply route and their alternates and left it in the Annex shelves where anyone could read it, which was the kind of thing people were grateful for now that the Scribe was gone. The catalog was still accurate for two of the four dark roads. The other two had changed after it was written.

That was the trouble with things that were still useful: they made you feel the absence that had shaped them.

At the base of the far tower, Lano was waiting. Her posture said the night was not finished with us.

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