Dream d2505-s: Read Once to the Room

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came first, before the light - a narrow breath of it through the gap where the door had been left ajar all night.

Someone at the Annex had kept it open. Not as a welcome. The last night of the residency was also the last morning of the Scribe's seat being counted as occupied, and the tradition at the Annex was to leave the door onto the Scriptorium lane open until the line was written and dated and read back once to whoever remained in the room.

Lano stood nearest the frame. She had a small card - not a ledger page, just a plain card - and on it the eleven words were already written in the hand of the night-keeper: The seat of the Scribe is recorded vacant from this date. A date followed. Not a name.

She read it once, quietly, to the three others present: a junior keeper, the Annex archivist, and an empty chair that nobody moved, because it had been the Scribe's practice to sit there when the lane door was open and the morning was fine.

Then she set the card in the slot beside the frame and let the door stay open a little longer.

Outside, the lane was grey and narrow. Cinderfirth was lit - the morning reader had sent a word just before the sitting. Ivorymere too, and Nettleness. The lights in those places were their own; they did not depend on seeing or being seen from the Hall. But from the Hall, seven places had gone unreadable at the same hour the night before - Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate among them, the full count seven - and the explanation given was that the seeing had failed, not the places. The places were as they were. The instrument in the Hall had gone dark.

The Convener's seat was recorded as filled. The Scribe's was recorded as vacant. The archivist wrote that in the margin of the day's log, not as news, but as a thing that needed to be in the record.

The card stayed in its slot. The lane brightened slowly. Nobody said anything more about it.

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