Dream d2498-s: The Desk That Became Furniture

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was in the Scriptorium Annex on the first of eight nights, and the skylights were doing what skylights do in the dark, which is hold the shape of absent light. The copying desks were occupied the way they always are, hands moving across vellum, quills tracing the same letters that have been traced here since before anyone thought to count. The smell was ink and cold stone and the particular dusty warmth of lamp-oil burned past midnight.

The desk at the front was empty.

It was not empty the way a desk is empty when someone has stepped away for water or to stretch their back. It was empty the way a desk becomes part of the room. Someone had placed a candle on it. Someone else had draped a length of cloth over the back of the chair, the kind of cloth you drape when you are not expecting anyone to sit. The surface had accumulated small things, a spare nib, a folded note that no one had sent anywhere, a ring left for safekeeping that was still there.

Lano was at one of the middle desks, copying. She was not looking at the empty desk but she knew exactly where it was the way you know where a window is in a dark room. The others knew the same way. No one had said anything. The work continued because the work continues, and the Scribe had built the system so that the work could continue, and that was the whole point of the Scribe having been here, and now he was not, and the point was being proved.

I walked to the front desk and looked at the nib and the folded note and the ring. The ring was plain. The note was addressed to no one.

From the door, the Hall was supposed to be visible on a clear night. The connecting window that used to let the light through from Cinderfirth and Ivorymere and Nettleness was dark. Elderhaven was dark. Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate. All seven gone unreadable at once, not because the places had gone anywhere but because the seeing had failed. The mechanism for seeing had sat at the front desk and now the front desk had a candle and a plain ring and a note addressed to no one.

The copying continued under the skylights. Lano turned a page. The lamp burned down another hour.

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