Dream d2757-s: The Column Ends at Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the approach road to the Ruins of Osierthwaite ran longer than I had expected for a place that held only eight words on the sheet. The wall came up slow. Lano trotted ahead of me, her nose low and working, and I watched her stop at a gap where the stones had fallen. The gap had been there long enough that grass had taken the edges. She did not go through. She sat beside it and waited.

I stood at what had been the main gate and looked. The lintel was down. One post remained vertical. The other had split at a seam and the upper half lay in the courtyard at an angle I could see had been unchanged for some time, because the ground had grown to accept it. Three walls were standing to their original height or near it. The fourth, the eastern wall, stood to perhaps half. Scrub had seeded itself in the mortar lines along the standing sections and in three places small trees had begun where the rubble collected at the base.

I opened the ledger to the Osierthwaite column and read what was written there: the place name, the district, the designation, a single line noting founding date by the Office of the Keeper of the Western Reaches. Nothing else. The column for condition was blank.

Rurik came around the eastern wall from somewhere I had not seen him go. He sat on a low stone, folded his paws under his chest, and stared at the interior of the courtyard without blinking. I took note of the scrub, the angle of the fallen post, the seaming in the standing walls. I wrote: standing, partial. Western gate down. Courtyard accessible. No occupancy evident. Vegetation established in rubble lines.

Lano turned once in the gap and lay down with her chin on her paws, facing in. She did not go further. Neither did I. I wrote what I could see and closed the column.

The drawn country ended here. I did not open a new column. I held the ledger and looked at the wall beyond the edge of the paper and wrote nothing further tonight.

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