Dream d2521-s: The Marks Agreed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was sitting at the reading-house table with the house log open in front of me, and Lano was across the room, not reading, just present the way a person is present when they have already decided to stay. The log was a bound book with a cloth spine and I had turned to the page for last night. Seven entries. Each one marked with the same symbol for unreadable, a horizontal stroke crossed once, and each entry named a different place: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate, and three others that were not those but not the lit ones either.

I read the times. The first entry was at the twenty-third hour and four minutes. The last was at the twenty-third hour and fifty-one minutes. Forty-seven minutes for seven readings, all failed, each one logged cleanly as if the failure itself had been orderly.

That was the thing I kept returning to. The marks were identical. Not similar, identical, the same pressure, the same angle, the same distance from the left margin. Seven entries written by someone who was not hurrying, not distressed, who had a form to follow and followed it. Or written at once, which was what I had begun to think. Written at once and then spread across the page at intervals to look like separate events.

Lano came to stand beside me. I did not ask a question. I pointed at the column of marks and Lano looked at it for a long time without speaking. The reading-house was quiet except for the sound of the fire settling.

The seeing had failed, that was certain. Whether the seeing had failed seven times or once was what the log would not tell me. I turned back further in the book, looking for other clusters, other hours where the marks came down in a column that should not have been so clean. The book went back a long way. I had not repaired anything yet. I was still only reading.

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