Dream d2730-s: The Fan of Pale Roads

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the high verge at midday and looked down at the roads below, and they spread out from the foot of the slope in a fan wide enough that I could hold the whole of it in one glance from here.

I counted them from where I stood. Then I went down the slope and counted again from the place where they began to separate, standing in the pale dust at the first parting, and the number came out the same.

Lano went down ahead of me, nose low, quartering the ground where the grass ended. She stopped at the junction and waited there with her ears tilted forward, not choosing any one road over the others.

I walked each road out a short distance and came back. The second book records only whether a road is passable and whether it is empty, and each of these was both. The grass at the edges was the grass of a road that had not changed recently in either direction. Nothing on any of them, nothing coming.

More roads leave the Ruins of Pewterlow than leave any other place in the second book. I wrote that down as I had written it the five nights before. It does not change with the writing.

Lano waited at the center while I walked each road and returned. She did not follow me down the separate ways. When I came back into sight she watched me come, and when I reached her she pressed once against my leg and was still.

From the verge the roads had looked like lines on a surface. From the ground they looked like furrows pressed in by long use and now pressing no more. I climbed back up and looked again. From the height they were lines again.

I closed the second book. Nothing had been counted for the first time. Nothing had changed hands. The Ruins of Pewterlow were in good order, all roads leaving, nobody on any of them.

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