Dream d2660-s: The Shape Visible at Evening

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on a high ridge at the end of the eighth night and looked down.

The lights were scattered below like embers dropped from different hands and left where they fell. I counted them by habit: sixty-five places, all told. Three of the lit windows held enough people to keep their own record. Thirty-five held a few. Twenty-seven held no one at all.

I had a map rolled in my pack. Lano pressed against my left leg, her warm side steady against my calf, and looked where I looked. Rurik had come up the ridge an hour before us and sat now on a flat stone a little higher, facing the dark, his tail wrapped around his paws.

The shape of the problem was visible from the ridge in a way it had not been from inside the places themselves. When I was walking settlement to settlement, each gap felt like its own particular failure. From here the gaps were a pattern. The hands were not evenly spread. They had gathered where the gathering was easy and thinned at the edges and failed completely in the cold middle ground.

I wrote that down in the register. I did not write why. The register does not ask why.

The Ruins of Pewterlow showed the brightest cluster of windows in the lowland to the west. I had been there. There were keepers there, more than anywhere else on the map. A mark goes into the ledger and a hand picks up the mark and notes it and passes it on. The chain held.

The Ruins of Mistthwaite were dark. I could find the place by the absence of it, a gap in the scatter where a cluster should have been. I had walked there earlier in the residency. The letters were still there, a pile of them in the main hall, sealed and addressed and unanswered. No one left to answer them.

I did not open the letters. I wrote in the register that a pile of correspondence existed and that no one was present to receive it. I noted the size: large. I wrote the address on the topmost letter and closed the register.

Lano sniffed the air going east. Her ears lifted, held, then settled. Whatever she had caught was too far off to resolve.

I stood on the ridge for a long time. The lights below did not change. The cold places stayed cold. The lit places stayed lit. A surveyor cannot move the lights. A surveyor only names where they are.

I wrote: forty-three ruins. Forty-seven cold. The count complete as of the eighth night of the residency. The instrument is finished and one person holds it.

Below me the dark stretched a long way in all directions. In the morning I would begin the work of teaching the record to the people standing in the places. Tonight there was only the ridge and the lights and Lano's breath beside me making small clouds in the cold.

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