Dream d2726-s: The Terminus of Purpose

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I took the first road out of the Ruins of Pewterlow just before the hour changed, and Lano walked at my heel.

The road is stone-set for the first quarter mile, the kind of stone that was laid with intention and kept by obligation, and it shows: the joints are sound, the camber still sheds water to either side, and nothing has pushed up through the middle. I made a note of this. The second book holds what a place is when there is nobody in it, and what this road is, in its first quarter, is maintained.

Then the stone stops. Not broken off - it simply stops, and packed earth takes over. Lano's nose dropped to the seam between stone and earth. She moved along it slowly, east to west, then sat. I wrote down the distance from the gate of the Ruins: forty-two paces.

The packed earth lasted longer than the stone, which surprised me. It was still recognizably a road at the half mile, still holding the two-rut shape of regular passage, though no cart has used it recently. Lano padded ahead and I let her, watching where she paused. She paused at a puddle, sniffed it, walked around it. The puddle was in the right rut, which meant the right rut was lower than it should be. I noted the slight subsidence.

The sky out here was enormous. Looking back, the Ruins were a small stack of wall against the horizon, and the sky above them was the same sky above me, continuous and vast enough to make the entire distance I had walked seem like a matter of inches. Lano glanced back too, once, then looked forward again.

At the three-quarter mile the ruts softened into suggestion. A person who wanted to use this road could still find it, but only if they were looking. The grass had come in from the verges and was working toward the center from both sides. I measured the remaining clear width: enough for one person walking, not enough for a cart.

I kept on.

At something past a mile - I had been counting paces but lost the count when a stone shifted underfoot and I caught myself - the road stopped mattering. I cannot be more precise than that. It did not end at a gate, or a field boundary, or a junction with some larger way. It arrived at a point where a traveler would have no particular reason to keep to it rather than walking anywhere else on the common ground, and that was where I stopped.

Lano was already stopped, sitting in the middle of where the road had been, looking at me with her ears forward. She made a sound that landed near a word. "Aquí," or close enough, in the way a dog sometimes does.

I planted a marker stake. Not to claim anything: only to show, when I read this entry back, where the point was. I wrote in the ledger: first road, east, terminus of purpose, approximately one mile and some yards from the Ruins gate, no landmark, open ground on all sides, sky overhead without feature or cloud.

Then I turned back. The Ruins grew larger behind us on the return, which is the property all ruins have: they are always larger when you are returning to them than when you departed. Lano walked beside me and did not look back at the stake.

I recorded in the margin: this road was in better condition than I expected. Whether that is a mercy or only a fact I did not decide. The second book does not ask me to decide.

---