Dream d2503-s: At the Page's Quiet Seam

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was in the Scriptorium Annex on the sixth night, seated at a long table with a lamp burning low to my left. Lano was curled near the baseboard, white coat pale against the dark stone. The other clerks had gone.

I was reading the settlement ledger, the one that tracks the correspondence from the seven outlying seats. Each page carries a date, a hand, a column for what was seen. I turned a page and found it: the Scribe's writing running to the bottom of the left side, then stopping. The right side beginning in a different hand, a junior clerk, same format, same settlement order, same notation system. No transfer note. No annotation of when. Just the seam, visible only because I happened to be looking.

I read both sides of it. Cinderfirth: present. Ivorymere: present. Nettleness: present. Then the four that no longer returned a reading: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate. Four horizontal rules, the standard mark for unresponsive. Four in a row, in the new hand.

I asked the remaining clerk when the Council Hall had lost sight of those four. She checked a secondary log, ran her finger down, and told me: the same night for all of them. The seeing simply ceased, she said. Not the places. The Hall reported the seeing failed.

I sat with that. The lamp made a small sound. Lano shifted but did not wake.

On the last page in the Scribe's hand there was a mark I had noticed before, repeated in many margins beside corrected figures. I had always read it as an error notation. Looking at it now, on the last page, I was not sure. The mark was too consistent. It appeared too often in places where nothing had been wrong.

I could not ask what it meant. That was the whole of it: I could not ask.

The ledger was still warm from the lamp. The ink in the new hand had been dry a long time.

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