Dream d2728-s: Fork Without Favor

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fork came up without warning, the road simply dividing as roads do, one branch bearing toward the ridge and one bearing toward the lower fields, and neither branch showing more use than the other. I crouched at the dividing point with the second book open across my knee. Lano sat at my side, her nose working the air between the two directions, then settling, choosing neither.

The wear was the same. I measured it as I measure all wear: by eye first, then by hand, pressing the heel of my palm into the center of each track. The ridge-going road held the same softness as the field road. The grass dividing them at the crown grew to the same height on both sides. There was no milk thistle blown preferentially to one verge, no deeper rutting from the heavier carts, no oil-stain from a wheel bearing run hot. I wrote: equal. Then I wrote what equal means in this book, which is not praise, only a measurement. Two roads part here. Neither is worn more than the other.

Lano padded a few steps up the right branch, stopped, looked back. Then she crossed and padded the same distance up the left. She came back and sat. She had made the same record I had, in the way available to her.

I noted the surface condition of each: rutted clay, both; depth of the rut, four fingers, both; verge width, an arm's length and a half, both. I noted the absence of signage, the absence of any mark made by hand. No one had driven a stake here to say which road goes where. Whatever direction a traveler took from this fork, they had taken it without instruction.

The second book has a column for that. I filled it in. No marker present.

It was getting on toward the darker part of the evening. The Ruins of Pewterlow were behind me on the way I had come, and their roads also go without markers, more roads than any other place in the book, and nobody on them. This fork was not the Ruins. It was a newer absence. Whatever had last come through here had left no record of itself in the ground.

I closed the book. Lano sniffed the air once more, ears lifted, then let them fall. I took the right branch, for no reason the book would accept as a reason. She followed.

---