Dream d2605-s: Flat at the Top

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the broken window in the Ruins of Mistthwaite and held the oldest letter I could find up to the light. The paper was thin enough to show my fingers through it, brown at the edges but still whole. Lano pressed against my leg and waited.

The letter asked for a reply to a question I could not read clearly - the ink faded at the crease. I set it aside and took the next. This one asked something different but in the same shape: a careful opening, the question in the third sentence, a polite close with an office title and a district I did not recognize.

Rurik had found the high ledge above the pile and sat there with his tail curled around his feet, watching.

I worked through the stack by the window. The oldest I could date were marked four centuries back. They asked about grain tallies, about a road through the eastern pass, about a census that had not yet been returned. The newest - still sealed when I found them, the wax only cracked, not crumbled - asked about the same road, the same tally, a census that had not yet been returned. I opened each and read it at the window.

The forms had not changed. The office names were different, the districts had different boundaries, but the shape of the asking was the same: here is the question, here is why it matters, here is where the answer should go. The answer had never gone there. Lano sniffed along the base of the pile, nose working, and sat at the corner.

I counted what I could by the light. Two hundred and something in the oldest layer. A hundred more from the middle centuries. The newest were fewer but the pile did not narrow at the top the way a thing narrows when it is ending. It was flat at the top. There was more coming.

I held a letter from four centuries ago beside one that smelled of recent ink and compared them at the window. The light came through both. The asking was the same kind. I set them both down.

Rurik blinked once from his ledge and looked away toward the dark interior of the ruin.

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