Dream d2591-s: Neither Cold Gave Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fire at the field camp had been going since before I arrived with the ledger. Two walkers I had not met were settled in the overgrown ground already, papers weighted down at the corners with stones, their voices carrying across the dark before I could make out the words. I set my bag down. Lano nosed the edge of the nearest tent, circled once, and came back to the fire.

The argument was this: there are two kinds of cold and they should not be written with the same mark.

The first walker said the cold in the stone is not a condition of the place. It predates the gate and will outlast whatever replaces the gate. It was there before anyone came and it will be there when the name is gone. To record it as something that happened to the place is to confuse the place with the weather. It cannot be entered in the ledger as a finding.

The second walker said a stone that has been warm and is now cold is different from a stone that was never warm. The cold that settled in when the last fire went out is traceable. You can distinguish it by what it sat beside. The floor near the hearth, the lintel stone, the step worn flat. That cold arrived. The other cold was always present and asks nothing of the count.

Neither gave way. The fire went lower and was rebuilt. Lano settled herself against my leg, and I could feel her breathing through my coat.

I opened the ledger to a clean double page and wrote both accounts without shortening either. Left side, right side. When I reached the end of each I drew a line and stopped. I did not write which one I thought correct. The column I had brought with me, the new one for places neither running nor gone, waited at the top of a third page, unused for the evening. This argument was not about that column. It was upstream of it.

Rurik appeared at some point and took the warm spot between the two walkers without asking. He sat with his tail curled, amber eyes open, watching the fire.

In the morning I would walk the next places with the column ready. That night I slept with both pages open and the ink long dry, and the argument continued around me until I could not hear it anymore.

---