Dream d2585-s: What Grew Across the Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to the gate of Zephyrden and the gate was gone, replaced by a curtain of growth so old it had turned woody at the base.

The stone posts were still standing, one leaning east, and the gap between them was filled from ground to above where a lintel would have been with vine and leaf and branch packed into a single mass. Not recent growth. The lower stalks had the thickness of a forearm and the color of something that had survived multiple winters in place. I stood at the edge of the road, where the stone surface met the green, and looked at it. There was no way through from the road. The growth had settled into the space with the patience of something given many seasons to do exactly this.

Lano walked to the base of the wall and pressed her nose against the stems at the bottom, working along the line where the green met the road stone. Her tail moved twice, then stopped. She sat back and looked at me, ears forward.

Rurik had come up the eastern post somehow, already there above us as if placed, watching the green wall from his perch with amber-eyed attention. He did not move. His tail curled once around his feet and was still.

I opened the ledger. The new column asks two things: condition of access, and dominant quality of abandonment. For Zephyrden I wrote: no entry from the road. Green wall, years established. What lies beyond the wall, unknown.

I stood a moment longer. There was wind on the road but none through the green, which was strange. The wall was solid enough to break the air. I noted it in the margin: no wind penetration. A wall that stops air is not a thin thing.

Lano found a small stone on the road surface and lifted it in her mouth, carrying it forward until she was standing at the base of the eastern post. I reached down and took the stone gently from her and set it at the foot of the post, on the road side. I noted the position in the ledger margin: stone placed, eastern post, road-facing, night of first approach. A mark for anyone who comes again to know that someone came here once, tried the road, and found it closed.

The column does not ask why the green grew. It asks only what is there. What is there is a wall across the gateway and no road through it and a count that has one more entry now, placed in the new column, in the space that was not there before last week. Zephyrden is neither running nor gone. It is covered, which is its own kind of answer.

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