Dream d2561-s: Forty Marks That Do Not Answer

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Rurik had already claimed the high shelf above the long wall when I arrived, his amber eyes moving across sixty-five marks without blinking.

I set the ledger on the center table. The new column was the last one cut, the narrowest, and its heading said only that a place might be neither running nor gone - no other word for it yet.

The seven already counted were settled. I turned the page past them without stopping.

Fifty-eight marks remained on the wall. I began at the left end, where the lit cities stood: Emberford, Frostridge, Osierlow, Willowhythe. Four marks, four entries. The column received a dash in each of those rows, because a lit city falls to one side of the new heading or the other, not between.

Lano padded along the wall beside me, her nose close to the plaster, pausing at each mark as though the pin held a smell. Her tail moved slowly. She was not excited; she was keeping pace.

The ruins came next in my count - thirty-six of them, set with a slightly different mark on the wall. I noted Mistthwaite among them, the one that holds the largest pile of unanswered letters in the world. I wrote that in the margin of its row, not in any column, because it is not a condition of the place, only a fact about what was left there. The column received neither yes nor no for Mistthwaite; the letters are still unanswered, and that is its own kind of between.

Rurik dropped from the shelf without a sound and walked ahead of me to the next section of the wall. He sat down in front of it and looked.

The places not left in good order: Frosting, Mossness, Zephyrden. Three ruins among the thirty-six. I made their entries carefully. Disorder is its own reading, not a middle state, and the column did not apply.

Eldergate Town - the town of unfinished roads - was the first entry I had to consider twice. The roads are unfinished, which is not the same as running, and the town itself has not been ruled gone. I made a mark in the new column for Eldergate. It was the first mark of the night that was not a dash.

Lano stopped when I stopped writing, and waited.

Forty of the places on the wall were logged as without light. Forty-one were left in good order. Those numbers did not resolve cleanly against what I had in front of me. The new column was not a resolution; it was a record that some marks did not answer to the old headings.

The lamp burned lower. Rurik washed one paw, then the other, then sat still again. Lano lay down at the base of the wall with her chin on the floor, watching the marks from that angle.

The column was open. Fifty-one marks remained before the residency was done.

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