Dream d2576-s: Three Smokes at Once

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we reached the ridge on the eighth and last night of the residency, and from it the three cities were legible at once - their smoke columns rising separate in the cold air, countable without instrument. The Cartographer stood beside me and we both looked without speaking.

Lano sat quieta at the rim, her nose working the distance below.

Rurik had gone ahead to the high stone. He perched there watching, amber eyes moving between the three glows, tail wrapped around his feet.

The Cartographer opened the ledger to the column we had ruled in for the in-between places - neither running nor gone - and I read back the seven entries already made in the days before. They were settled. We did not re-walk them.

I looked at the full map. Sixty-five places. Seven settled. The rest still to be walked. But from the ridge what the walking would confirm was already visible: the work in the world did not spread. It gathered. Nearly all of it gathered in three places. The other fifty-eight - the ruins, the cold towns, Eldergate with its roads stopping at the field's edge, Mistthwaite with its pile of letters no one had opened, the three places not left in good order - sat at the margin of that weight or underneath it or entirely apart.

I said: three. The Cartographer wrote: three cities carry the count.

We noted the five lit cities on the map - Emberford, Frostridge, Osierlow, Willowholt, Willowhythe - and that from this ridge three of their fires showed at once. The remaining two were behind the hills or further than sight reached. We wrote that also.

The Cartographer entered: fifty-eight places remain for the column. I blotted the ink and waited for it to dry.

Lano stood, looked once over the rim into the dark below, then came back and pressed against my boot. Rurik descended from the high stone without a sound and took the warm patch of rock between us, slow-blinking at the nearest city's glow.

The smoke from the three merged into the general dark. I closed the ledger.

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