Dream d2711-s: Where the Curl Fell

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where my boot came down on a curl of wood shaving and it cracked softly under my weight, and I was already inside the workshop at Mossness, the ledger open on the bench. I had not heard myself arrive. The offcuts were still where they fell: pale curls, flat strips, one long edge-piece leaning against the leg of the cutting table as though someone had set it there with purpose. They had not. I could see that from the angle of it.

Lano moved ahead of me, nose to the floor, stepping around a curl without disturbing it. Her tail moved twice and then she sat.

The pencil line on the edge-piece ran across its face at an angle - a measurement made and then the piece set aside, either wrong in some dimension I could not read or right and never collected. I did not know which. I wrote that the pencil line was there. I wrote the angle of the long piece against the table leg. I did not write a reason.

Rurik found the high shelf by the door without making a sound. By the time I looked up he was already settled, paws folded, watching the floor below him.

I turned to the entry for the Ruins of Pewterlow. It was the oldest place in the second book and it was cold. More roads left it than left any other place in the record. I counted four, then came back to the text: nobody on any of them. I read it twice and wrote nothing new. The entry already said what the entry said.

Thirty-one of the forty-two cold places were left in good order. This workshop was one of them. The offcuts are not disorder. They are the remainder after the useful piece is taken. Someone took the useful piece. After that, nobody swept. I wrote it in that order.

Lano lay down near the cutting table, her chin on her forepaws, watching me work.

The pencil mark on the edge-piece measured something I could not now determine. I left the piece where it leaned. The curl under my boot I left too. The ledger records what a place still is when there is nobody in it. I closed the book. The cold came from under the door the whole time, and I had not noticed it until I stopped moving.

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