Dream d2590-s: Shut and Simply Stopped

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was walking a muddy lane out of the overgrown country in hard rain, and the Warden of the Column walked beside me with the ledger tucked under his arm and wrapped in oilcloth. Lano padded a few steps behind us, nose down, water running off her white fur in thin lines. Rurik was somewhere ahead in the dark, and twice he reappeared at the edge of the lantern's reach, amber eyes catching the light before he moved on again.

The rain made conversation difficult. We had to lean close to be heard, and what the Warden said, shouted a little against the sound of it, was this: there is a difference between a place that was shut and a place that simply stopped.

I did not answer straight away. We walked for a while, boots in the mud, the lane narrowing where the bramble had overgrown the verge on both sides.

I said: the ones that were shut, someone closed a door.

He nodded. The ones that stopped, nobody did anything. The work ran out, or the people left, or both. The door is still standing open somewhere if you look.

That was the distinction we needed for the column. The seventh phase had given us the column but had cut it to fit seven places. Now we were carrying it to sixty-five, and we needed the language to hold at every one of them. A place can be recorded as shut: there was a decision, there was an act of closing, there was an ordering of affairs. A place can be recorded as stopped: it was running and then it was not, and nobody arranged the ending.

Lano stopped and pressed against my leg for a moment, then moved on.

Eldergate Town, I said. Unfinished roads. Did anyone close it?

He opened the ledger under the lantern. The ink was already in: stopped. No recorded decision. Work abandoned mid-course.

Frosting, I said. Mossness. Zephyrden. The ones not left in good order.

Not shut, he said. The order was not arranged. Stopped, badly.

There is a difference in that too, I said. He wrote it in the margin: stopped, badly, no arrangement.

We came out of the worst of the overgrown stretch onto firmer ground. The rain did not ease. Rurik appeared from a ditch to the left, shook water from his coat, and walked alongside us for a while with his tail low and his eyes flat with indifference to the weather. Then he slipped ahead into the dark again.

The lit cities did not need the column. Emberford, Frostridge, Osierlow, Willowholt, Willowhythe: those were running. The column was for the rest. Fifty-eight places still to walk, and we had the language now, and we had the lane, and the ledger was oilclothed and dry.

Lano sneezed once, hard, and shook her ears, and kept walking.

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