Dream d2556-s: Sablegate in the New Column

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came in under the door first - I felt it at my ankles before I thought about anything else. The window above the desk held only darkness and a pale strip of light from somewhere below. Lano padded in after me and went straight to the rug corner, turned once, and lay down.

The instrument had been giving wrong readings for three nights. A glass fitting had gone loose in its housing; where it should have held a steady column I was getting nothing, or fog. I worked at it slowly, the way you work at something you cannot force. Rurik appeared on the windowsill sometime in the first hour, watching the desk. His tail moved once, then settled.

By the second hour the fitting held. The column was stable. I made a test reading on one of the lit places first - Ivorymere, to confirm the instrument was honest again. It was. Then the cold ones: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, each in turn. Each returned what it had been returning for weeks. Settled nothing. The kind that means a place has gone through the other side of quiet into stillness.

Sablegate was last.

There had been arguments - not tonight, but before tonight, on other nights - about how Sablegate should be recorded, which column, what phrasing, what the weight of phrasing implied. I had written notes on those arguments in a separate book and then not opened it.

The reading came back clear: cold.

I opened the ledger to the correct page. The new column had one line so far - Elderhaven, the first entry, written when the column was opened. Sablegate would be the fourth. I wrote: Sablegate - cold - confirmed - Night 6. I counted the characters without meaning to. Fewer than any of the arguments.

Lano lifted her head when I set the pen down, then put it down again.

I closed the ledger. Rurik blinked once from the sill, slow, amber-eyed, then looked back at the dark outside the glass. The street-light hadn't moved. The cold was still at the floor. The line was written and it did not need to be longer than it was.

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