Dream d2616-s: The Missing Side

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the clerk's desk in the ledger room with the shuttered window behind me, and the candle threw yellow light across the open page. The first mark was already ruled - the column for whether a place still stands or has fallen, whether it breathes or lies cold. Seven places had been settled in the last night's work and their pages were not opened again.

Now there was a second problem: a mark was needed for how a place was left. Not all departures read the same in a ledger. A place closed with the tools stacked and the final inventory signed sits differently from a place where the work simply stopped - the chalk still on the board, no witness, no last count. The first is a closing. The second is a halt.

I drafted the mark for the first kind at the head of a new column: a small square, closed on all four sides. Then beside it I drafted the second: the same square, but with one side missing, open at the right. I looked at them for a long time.

Lano was at my feet. Her nose lifted once, then settled.

The column needed a header. I wrote two words and crossed them out. Then I wrote two letters in small capitals and ruled a line beneath them. That was enough.

The three places not left in good order came first, because I wanted to understand what the open mark would look like when entered against a real name. The Ruins of Frosting: work stopped without notice, no stacked tools, no signed inventory. The open square. The Ruins of Mossness: the same. The Ruins of Zephyrden: the same.

Three marks entered. I moved to the others.

Lano circled the desk once and lay down again with her chin on her paws. The candle did not gutter. Outside the shuttered window there was no sound.

By the time I had entered a dozen marks the open square had appeared nearly as often as the closed one. Forty-one of sixty-five places were left in good order - not a wide margin. I did not write that observation anywhere. The ledger holds marks, not thoughts. I wrote marks until the candle had burned down a quarter of its length.

---