Dream d2508-s: The Annex Keeps the Desk

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cloth came off someone's arm in one motion and settled across the desk without a sound, like a breath let go. Lano watched from the far end of the Annex. No one said it was a ceremony. It did not need to be.

This was the third night the ledger room had gone without him, though the desk did not appear to know this, or if it knew, it made no sign. The Annex is like that. It receives what it receives and keeps it without comment.

Word had come from the Council Hall: the seven places had gone unreadable at once to the reader's eye. Not dark in themselves - Cinderfirth still had its fires, Ivorymere its lamp-posts, Nettleness its mill turning into the evening. But from the Hall, nothing came through. The seeing had failed. Failure of that kind is not a place going cold; it is the instrument losing its alignment. Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate - the four already gone cold - were unreadable for the usual reason. The three lit places were unreadable for a different reason, and no one in the Hall had separated which was which yet.

The Scribe's seat still showed on the map. The work continued. The records - correspondence, surveys, corrections in the margins - were filed correctly because someone had kept them up. The desk held the records in its drawers. The cloth lay across the surface. That was the arrangement now: the work below, the cloth above, the Annex keeping both without being asked.

Lano did not lift the cloth. There was no reason to. The desk knew what it held.

---