Dream d2719-s: The Road Runs Clean

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the gateway of Pewterlow before the record was opened.

The gate was ruined - two columns of it still standing, the arch between them long since fallen and cleared away - and the road ran through the gap as roads run through gaps when nothing remains to stop them. I looked at it from the threshold. Lano sat beside me, nose up, reading the air that moved along the road's length. She did not bark.

I opened the second book to the page for Pewterlow. The column for the road was the first column I was required to fill.

I wrote it. The road runs clean through the gateway. I set the pen back in its loop and looked at what I had written for a moment longer than the task required, because it seemed right to look. Pewterlow is the oldest place the second book holds, and it has more roads than any other place recorded here, and tonight I had checked the first of them and found it open. That was the fact. I wrote nothing else about it.

Lano pressed close to my leg once, then trotted a few steps out onto the road and stopped. She turned back. The road beyond her was empty of everything. She waited.

I made the second mark - the condition of the gateway itself: standing in part, open by loss. Not restored. Not tended. The columns hold because columns hold until they do not. I recorded that they were still holding.

The road ran away from Pewterlow in both directions and nobody was on it in either one. I would not record that. It was not my column to fill. The absence is already known. That is why the place is in the second book.

I closed the page without folding anything.

Lano was still on the road when I turned back toward the first column marker. She sat down on the stone surface and watched me from there, at a remove, in the dark. I made the note that I had completed the gateway entry and the time at which I had done it, and I walked back through the gap in the ruin to begin the next road.

The columns did not move. The road did not close.

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