Dream d2612-s: Wide Rows, Falling Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came into the Ruins of Sableholt at the hour when the dark is fully settled and the stars give just enough to read the shapes of things. The benches ran the length of the interior in long rows, each one wide enough for six or seven to sit shoulder to shoulder. I counted the rows: twelve on the left side of the aisle, twelve on the right, and two shorter rows near the front placed with care, angled inward so that anyone seated there could see both the platform and the door at once. Twenty-six rows in total. I wrote the number in the ledger and noted the condition: sound wood, good joinery, the grain raised only a little by weather. Built for a crowd that had not come in some time.

The roof above was another matter. Three sections of it stood open to the sky. I could see Pewterlow Town's lights on the ridge from the largest gap, a rough oval where the roofing had given way cleanly, long ago, and the edges had dried and hardened. Two other openings were newer - one where a rafter had sagged and pulled its cladding down with it, and one at the far corner I could not see clearly but that let in a thin slice of wind.

Lano had been walking the rows ahead of me, her nose working across the grain of each bench, cataloguing what I could not. She stopped at the far corner.

Her ears went flat.

She turned back to me and stood with her legs set apart and her tail low and looked at the corner and then at me and did not move from the spot.

I brought the lantern toward the far corner. The rafter there was bowed in a way that rafters are not meant to bow. The joinery at its foot had separated from the wall plate by two fingers' width, and as I watched, a second finger of gap opened, slowly and without sound.

Then there was sound. A long groan from somewhere beneath the floor, below the platform, in the foundations. The building held its breath.

Lano barked once, short and sharp.

I stepped back from the aisle and pulled the ledger against my chest. Somewhere below the platform, something gave way entirely - not the surface, but the layer beneath it, the old fill and old piping that the first builders had laid when this was a different kind of place and the crowd they built it for was a different kind of crowd. I heard cables snap in sequence, three or four, each a tone lower than the last, like strings cut from an instrument that had never been played.

The platform did not fall. It tilted. The left edge dropped four or five inches and stopped. A crack ran the full length of it, clean as a ruled line, and dust came up through the crack in a thin curtain that the lantern lit pale gold.

I looked at the benches. The benches had not moved. The joinery was still good.

Rurik appeared from behind the nearest row, where he must have been sitting in the dark for some time already. He walked to the center of the aisle and sat down and looked at the tilted platform with the amber patience that is his only comment on any situation.

I wrote down what I had seen. The platform: tilted, structural failure beneath, cause lying below the old layer, extent not yet known. I left the rest of the entry open. An entry does not close until I know how much more there is to add.

Lano pressed against my leg. I set my hand on the top of her head. The building held. The crack in the platform did not widen further. But the groan from below had not stopped entirely - it had only gone quiet, the way a conversation goes quiet when someone has said a thing that requires sitting with before anyone answers.

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