Dream d2550-s: Spoken at the Sill

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried the wording to Sablegate's own window and read it aloud there.

The page held three sentences - what the Hall had set aside at the end of the last phase, about cold places and how they should be distinguished from gone ones, about the seeing failing tonight across all seven, about what the count would require before it could be taken. There was no rule bringing me to the place itself. I came anyway.

The wall was dark stone. The window above it was unshuttered and lit from inside, throwing a narrow line across the paving where I stood. Lano was at my heel - quieta, just her weight at my ankle, her nose lifted once and then still.

Rurik had come ahead somehow. He was inside, pressed to the glass, amber eyes open, watching. He did not move while I read.

I read at a level pitch. Once. The three sentences at the window of the place they described.

After the reading I stood a moment longer than the task required. Sablegate was on its last night of residency - tenth of ten - and the question the phase had set itself was exactly the one I was putting to the window now: whether a place gone cold was still standing, or was only the word for where something had been.

The window did not answer. The stone did not answer. Rurik closed his eyes slowly and opened them.

I took that for what it was, which was nothing. Then I marked Sablegate in the count as cold - present, not gone - and folded the page, and Lano turned before I did and began the walk back toward the Hall.

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