Dream d2601-s: Full to the Lintel

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground flattens out past the ridge and Mistthwaite comes into view all at once, spread across the low plain like something set down and never retrieved. Roof lines that used to be steep are horizontal now, the angles gone where the timber gave out. One tower stands and one does not, and the fallen one has left a pale line of rubble along the near edge of the town, visible even from where we walk.

We were told before we arrived. A traveler coming the opposite way stopped on the path: a woman with a wrapped bundle under her arm. She said the letter house is full. She did not offer it as a warning. She said it the way a person says a well is low or a stretch of road is washed, a factual condition with no particular feeling attached. She walked on without waiting for anything.

Lano watched her go, nose lifted, tracking something in the air behind the woman's passing. Rurik had slipped off the path the moment the woman stopped, circled once and sat down in the dry grass just beyond the verge, amber eyes already fixed on the walls ahead.

I wrote it in the count before we moved again. Full. One word, in the margin beside the entry for the letter house. Not full in the sense of a good store or a room with company in it. Full in the sense of a stopped thing, a box with its lid pressed down, a weight past the limit of its container. The letter house at Mistthwaite holds more unanswered correspondence than any place recorded on this map. Now it holds as much as it can hold.

The column opened in the last phase has room for a state that is neither running nor gone. I had expected that column to sit cleanly against a ruin. I had not expected a ruin whose work is still arriving.

We walked on. The town grew no less ruinous as it grew larger. Lano came close to my left side and stayed close, not ranging tonight. The wind came off Mistthwaite and she turned her face into it and her ears went flat.

The standing tower has no flag and no light. The gate in the facing wall is open. Where the second gate was there is no gate, and no wall to either side of where it stood. These are two distinct conditions and I set them down separately.

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