Dream d2678-s: The Round Drawn Smaller

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood before the wall map on the fourth night of the residency and took down the cord that marked the old round.

The cord had described sixty-five places. I lifted it from the first pin and held it loose in both hands. Three places kept their own mark without help. I set those aside. Thirty-five had a few hands, enough that a record moved forward there without me. I set those aside too. What remained, when I had re-run the cord between the pins that were left, was twenty-seven places. I counted twice. Twenty-seven.

Lano was below the map on the floorboards, watching the cord shift. Her nose worked at the baseboard, then she turned and pressed the flat of her shoulder into my calf and went still.

I wrote the number at the top of the night's page: twenty-seven. All of them without anyone standing in them. The Ruins of Pewterlow had the most hands of any place on the old round, more than enough, and came off without deliberation. The Ruins of Mistthwaite had the largest pile of unanswered letters and nobody left to receive them. Mistthwaite stayed.

The new cord was shorter. It described a circuit a person could see whole from one end of the room. I traced it once with a finger, not to count again but to know the shape of it, and when I had traced it I set the last pin.

Lano had moved to the warmer ground near the shelf-base and curled there, one ear folded over, her breathing gone slow and even. The room held what it held. I wrote nothing else on the page except the number, and the number was enough.

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