Dream d2703-s: Grass Has Taken the Turning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path into Zephyrden was gone.

Not overgrown in the way a garden goes when a season passes without attention. Gone in the way that takes years of steady encroachment, the grass working inward from the edges, the mid-path stones sinking, the ruts filling with root and then with soil over root. The grass stood waist-high and close-packed, and pushing through it was less like walking than like swimming in something that did not give easily.

Lano went first. She had no choice about it in any organized sense - she simply went, nose down, her white back vanishing and reappearing as the tall stems closed and opened over her. I followed the faint disturbance she left, watching for the top of her ears.

There is a round to walk, and the round belongs to the second book. I had the book in my coat. Forty-two places that nobody keeps any longer. Tonight the task was the ground itself: to record what the path had become before taking any note of what lay at the end of it.

What the path had become was this: grass to the hip from the gatepost to the first bend; after the bend, grass only to the knee where a drainage channel ran just below ground and the roots could not hold; after that, grass to the shoulder where it had not been cut in the longest time, and some of the stalks had gone woody at the base. The surface underfoot was uncertain - soft in places, harder where old stone still held, twice a drop into a rut I could not see until my boot found it.

I opened the book and wrote: Path from the gatepost: reclaimed. Shoulder-high in the eastern stretch. Progress slow.

Lano surfaced beside me, shaking seed from her ears. She pressed her side against my leg for a moment, then turned and pushed further in.

I followed her into the green dark of it, the sky still faintly lit above the grass-tops, the stems hissing against my coat. Whatever Zephyrden was, or is, it would take the full night to reach. The record would be made section by section, the book filled a few lines at a time in the failing light, and at no point would anything be given a name it had not already earned by standing long enough to be named.

The grass closed in behind us. There was no sound of any road.

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