Dream d2740-s: Forty-Seven Places Still

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ink on my hands had dried to a brown stain by the time I reached for the second book. Lano sat by the foot of the shelf, muzzle tipped up, ears pricked as though she could hear something in the dark above the boards. Rurik had already taken the high place, settled in the gap between the map roll and the wall, watching.

I slid the first book in. Then the second, thinner, beside it. They stood together on the shelf and neither of them was blank.

The second book holds forty-seven places - the ones nobody stands in, the ones the first book does not cover. I had read through its pages before the candle burned to its last inch, going over what I had set down across the eight nights of the round.

Thirty-five of those places had been left in good order by whoever last came through: door latched, floor swept, the arrangement of what was there still serving its purpose without needing to. Seven had been tended more recently - a roof patched, a threshold cleared again, some hand at work though no hand was staying. Two had gone to green: the floor claims them, the eaves have opened, and what grows there now will not be moved without deciding to move it. One was left untidy, and I recorded that without explanation, which is the only honest way to record it.

Thirty-six of the forty-seven have one road out or none. I had stood at the far end of some of those places and looked back at the path that had brought me, knowing it was the only way back. There is nothing wrong with one road; one road is still a road.

The oldest place in the second book is the Ruins of Pewterlow. It is cold in the way the book means cold - nobody there, nobody expected. More roads leave those ruins than leave any other place I have recorded: more than any entry in the first book, too. I checked that before closing the cover. The roads go out from Pewterlow in several directions and there is nobody on any of them, which the second book also notes without explaining.

Lano pressed against my ankle. I set my hand on her once, feeling the small warmth of her, then straightened and put the pen away.

The round is done. The two books are on the shelf. The map is dark on the wall and the forty-seven places are in the form they are in, which is the form the book now holds.

---