Dream d2715-s: The Room Left as Found

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the doorway of the workshop at Mossness with a board in one hand and chalk in the other, and Lano sat at my feet watching the room. She did not go in. Her nose moved across the cold air coming from inside, reading whatever the room kept: oil, old timber, something that had once been wet.

The clutter was on the bench and the shelves and in the corners. I counted it from the doorway. I did not go in to move any of it. The count was for the second book, and the second book does not ask a room to change before it is written down.

Fourteen items on the bench, most of them tools. Six on the lower shelf, two of those fallen against each other. Three in the near corner, which I could see clearly; two more behind the press, which I could not, and so I wrote two and put a mark beside it to say the count was partial. The mark means only that: partial. It does not mean wrong.

Lano shifted. She turned her head toward the far wall, ears lifted, tail still.

I wrote the condition beside the count: clutter present, untidied. The door was sound. The window at the back let in enough light to count by, which is all a window needs to do.

When I was finished I held the board to the frame so the chalk could set in the cold air. The second book would receive this room as the untidy one in a run of thirty-four orderly and seven tended and two gone past tending into green, and one of those two I did not need to see tonight to write the word for - it was already more field than room.

Lano turned back from the far wall. Whatever she had heard had settled, or passed. She pressed against my leg.

I did not tidy the room. I did not note the causes of the untidiness or suggest a remedy. I wrote the count and the condition and I left the room standing in its own state, which is what the second book asks of a place it receives.

The oldest place in the second book is the Ruins of Pewterlow. It is cold, and from it more roads go out than from any other place the second book holds, and nobody is on any of them. I have not been there tonight. Mossness is the work tonight, and Mossness is now written.

I lowered the board. Lano walked ahead of me down the path without looking back, her nose near the ground.

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