Dream d2744-s: The Blade Decided Here

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I held the cut corner of the sheet up close under the hanging lamp, and Lano sat at my feet with her ears angled toward the paper's edge.

The corner had been cut clean. Not torn, not worn to nothing by handling: cut by a blade at a deliberate angle, and the angle was not where the ground stopped. I turned the cut edge toward the lamp and the light ran along it without catching on anything, because there was nothing rough to catch.

The Cartographer's office keeps a record of why each sheet ends where it ends. I did not find a notation for this sheet. The edge was the edge because a hand decided it, and the hand did not say why.

I counted the marks that point outward. Seven of them. Each mark names a place and draws a line toward it, and the line ends at the paper's edge, and past the paper's edge there is no sheet to receive the rest of the line. A reader following those marks would walk to the corner of the table and stop. The ground does not stop there. The line stopped there because the sheet stopped there, and the sheet stopped because of the blade.

Rurik had taken the warm spot at the far end of the table. He lay with his chin on his forepaws and his amber eyes open, watching the lamp.

I set the corner down and wrote in the margin of the ledger: the edge of this sheet is not a shore. A shore is where the ground ends. This is where the drawing ended. There are seven marks here that name places the drawing does not reach.

One of those places has been standing for a single day. Its name is Ivorylow. I wrote the name in the ledger beneath the other six, and the ink dried at the same speed as the rest.

Lano's nose twitched once toward the cut edge of the paper. Then she settled her chin against my foot, and we stayed under the lamp until the count was done.

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