Dream d2577-s: The Latch Turned Outward

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came in through my collar before anything else was clear to me - a specific, searching cold, the kind that finds where skin is exposed. Lano pressed against my left ankle. Rurik had gone ahead; his shape was already a shadow at the far end of the path, sitting, watching back.

The gate was iron, old, its hinge-side eaten to brown by seasons, but the latch was set. I stood and looked at it a moment before I understood what I was seeing. A latch set from the outside is not something wind does. It is something a person does with their hands, on their way out, meaning to come back or meaning not to. This was the first orderly ruin in the wider count, and it had been locked.

I set the record-book under my arm and worked the latch up with one hand. It moved cleanly. No rust in the mechanism, or not enough to bind. Lano's nose was at the gap before I had the gate fully open, reading the air on the other side with the patience she brings to thresholds.

Inside: roof still on, in three-quarters. Floor sound to the walls. The hearth swept. A single chair stood in the center of the main room, not pushed back, not overturned - placed there, or left there without disturbance. On the sill of the south-facing window, a row of smooth stones, seven of them, each one a different color.

I did not touch the stones. I counted them and wrote the count. I recorded the state of the latch, the state of the roof, the state of the floor. I wrote: latched from outside and underlined it once, which is what I do when a thing is certain and unusual.

Rurik came in at some point without my noticing. He was on the chair when I looked up, sitting in the center of the seat, tail wrapped around his paws, amber eyes moving slowly around the room as if reading it in a language I did not have. He sat down in the doorway of the back room and would not move, so I did not go past him. I recorded: back room, access not taken.

Lano had found a warm spot - not warm by temperature, the room was cold the way the whole country was cold, but warmer than the outside, a residual warmth the walls had held without burning anything. She curled there. She did not sleep. Her eyes stayed open, tracking.

Seven stones on the sill. Latch sound. Roof at three-quarters. Swept hearth. One chair.

I wrote it all. That was the first night of eight.

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