Dream d2623-s: The Glass Keeps Nothing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came first, not the dark. I had pressed my palm flat against the window and left it there until the glass and skin reached the same temperature and I could not say which was warming which.

Lano sat beside the chair. Her nose tracked something in the air above the sill - whatever cold carries in from a country that does not sleep - and she did not look at me.

Rurik had taken the high shelf to my left. Tail over the edge, amber eyes on the dark beyond the glass, slow-blinking at nothing I could name.

The country was out there: sixty-five places, most of them cold, most of them ruined, most of them without anyone standing in them. I had been the one who walked through them. I had set down a mark at each address and closed the book and called that a count. A count taken once is finished. That is a true thing.

But there is a second kind of record. Not the one you close. The one that has to stay true as the places change.

I had three letters on the table: pages from the Warden of Pewterlow, two clerks at Saltmarsh Ridge, and a folded sheet from a woman at the Threshold Archive who had been copying names from a wall for forty years and wanted to know if the wall counted. I was writing back to them. Teaching a mark, not taking one. This is different work and it is slower and it does not end when you close the book.

At the Ruins of Mistthwaite there was nobody. The pile of unanswered letters there was the largest on the map. I had set that down. I could not write back to nobody. I noted it and left it.

Lano shifted. Her paw touched the base of the chair leg and she settled her chin on her forepaws.

Rurik dropped from the shelf without sound and passed behind me and was gone.

The Ruins of Pewterlow had the most hands of any place on the map. The Head Registrar there had written back three times with corrections: a date I had wrong, a name in the older spelling, a road that had changed its course since the survey. She did not say I had erred. She said: here is what I can see from here.

I wrote her corrections into the margin of the count. The count was finished. The margins were not.

That is what I was doing at the window. Not re-walking the map. Learning what a record becomes when the people inside it write back.

Lano pressed closer to the chair leg. Outside, the country was dark and still.

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