Dream d2501-s: Signed in the Wrong Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the binding bench ran the length of the back wall and the night had gone quiet enough that I could hear the thread pulling through the pressed signatures. The apprentice was working by lamplight, head down, marking the flyleaf of each completed volume in the margin column where the responsible hand is recorded. I watched from the doorway and did not speak until the fourth book, when I asked whose initial that was.

The apprentice stopped. Set down the pen. Looked at the mark the way you look at something your hand did without you.

It was the Scribe's initial. The one who held this bench before the seat went cold.

No one said anything for a moment. The apprentice did not apologize - just drew a line through it, very carefully, and wrote their own beside it. The line was not angry. It was the kind of correction that costs something.

Lano was lying under the bench and did not move for a long time. Then the ears went flat.

I noticed it before I heard anything. The ears, the lifted head, the posture of a dog who has caught a frequency the room has not yet agreed to take seriously. I went to the window. The beacon shelf on the south wall carries its three crystals, each attuned to a known quarter of the settlement, and two of them were dark already - the Elderhaven face and the Glenholt face, which we knew. But the third, the one oriented toward Cinderfirth, was lit in a color I did not recognize. Not the low amber of normal reception. Something between violet and grey, a shade without a name in the registry.

The apprentice came and stood beside me.

The crystal was not dimming. It was cycling - slowly, with a patience that felt considered. As if whatever was sending did not need to be heard immediately. As if it could wait.

Lano barked once, short, then pressed close against my leg and did not bark again.

I looked at the Convener's Hall across the courtyard. Dark. The seven seats the Annex once read from that vantage had all gone unreadable the same night, which we had attributed to the failing of the seeing and not the failing of the places. Now I was less certain. Cinderfirth should be readable. Ivorymere should be readable. Nettleness should be readable. If the signal was reaching us from one of those, it was reaching us wrong.

The apprentice asked if they should log it in the correspondence ledger. I said yes. Under what heading, they asked.

I looked at the cycling crystal. At the color without a name.

Under receipt of unknown origin, I said. Leave the sender column blank.

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