Dream d2589-s: Nothing Put Away

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to the Ruins of Mossness on the fifth night of the residency at the overgrown ground, and the door was open. Lano went through first, nose low, and I followed her into a workroom where everything was present.

I mean everything. The tools were on the bench and on the floor and across three chairs. The ledgers were stacked against the wall and also fanned across the table and also in a heap beside the cold hearth. Nothing was racked. Nothing was shelved. Nothing had been filed or hung or stored. It was all here and all loose, and that was its condition.

I opened the column I had been carrying outward from the seven already counted: neither running nor gone. I looked at the workroom.

The workroom fit. I wrote: present, unracked. I wrote: door open, entry clear. I did not write: disordered, because disorder implies a prior order that failed, and I did not know that. I wrote what I could see.

Rurik came in behind me and picked his way across the floor without touching anything he did not choose to touch. He found a shelf where the shelf itself was bare and the things that should have been on it were in a heap below, and he sat there and looked down at the floor.

Lano circled the perimeter, nose at the base of the walls. Under a bench she found a small stone and carried it in her mouth to the center of the room and dropped it and looked at it, and then at me.

I recorded the stone's position: center floor, moved by Lano, origin unknown.

The count did not require me to explain why nothing was racked. It required me to note that nothing was racked and to note whether the column held. The column held. The Ruins of Mossness: everything present, nothing racked. Not left in good order - I wrote this too, and wrote that I did not know whose order had not been maintained, or what the order had looked like, or when it ended.

Outside the windows the overgrown ground pressed close. Rurik blinked once, slow, at the heap below his shelf. Lano sat beside the stone.

I closed the ledger. The workroom was not changed by being counted. That was how the count worked.

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