Dream d2587-s: How Far the Bramble Came

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road at Frosting was half a road and the other half was bramble, and I had come to measure not what remained of the paving but how far the tangle had advanced since the last count.

Lano walked the margin where stone met growth, her nose working the line steadily. The bramble smelled of nothing ruined - only green things doing what green things do when nobody pushes back.

Rurik had gone ahead into the dark between two collapsed archways. His amber eyes caught what little light there was. He watched me from there and made no sound.

I pressed chalk against the last stone that stood clear of the growth and marked it. Then I counted paces to the nearest intact wall face: eleven. I wrote eleven in the small book beside the name Frosting, and then I looked at the new column - the one ruled at the last count for places neither running nor gone, for the cold that is not yet ruin. Frosting had not earned that column. Frosting was ruin already, clear and settled. I closed the column there with a dash and wrote instead the bramble's measure: eleven paces west, eight south, the north face unpassable.

Rurik blinked once from his perch on the broken coping. I did not take his watching for agreement or refusal. He sat there because the stone held the day's warmth.

Lano pressed close to my knee when I crouched to write. Her weight was a small familiar anchor against the cold. I wrote what I could see and did not write what I could not.

The paving - what remained of it - ran straight toward the eastern arch and vanished under the growth. How far it had once extended was not in this book. What was in this book was eleven, and eight, and the note that the north face could not be approached without a blade, and I had no blade, so the north face was written as unmeasured and the gap left open.

I would not explain the bramble. It had come and I had found it. That was the full record.

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