Dream d2762-s: The Unruled Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat on a stone step outside the ruined walls of Osierthwaite at the hour when the light goes level and the walls hold their warmth a little longer than the air does. I had the drawn sheet across my knee and I was reading it back.

Sixty-five places. Nine with a mark beside them to say a light was in them. I read each entry in order, not skimming, letting each place sit for a moment before I moved to the next. Lano had settled at my feet with her chin on my boot, watching the open ground beyond the last wall, ears moving now and then at something I did not hear.

The sheet ends where it ends. Two hundred and seventy-six places in the round I carry, and a hundred and seventy-one of them are written nowhere. That is not a gap I can close tonight, and tonight I am not trying to close it. I am reading what is written.

The last entry on the sheet is Tethermoss. I wrote it three weeks past from a step not unlike this one, on the far slope of the Orrel ground. The condition column reads: walls present, roof absent, south chamber open to weather, north chamber intact, door missing. Nine words. The light column is blank. I did not see a light there.

Past the edge of the sheet there are fifty-eight places I walked on this round. Twenty-seven of them are alight. That is not in the ledger. It is in my account of the round, which is a different document and lives in a different fold of the bag. I have not confused them.

Seven marks on the sheet point at ground that has since closed. A wall taken down, a track overgrown past finding, one place that became water. Those seven entries are correct as written. The condition they record was the condition on the day. What happened after is not the sheet's province.

Yarrowgarth is one day standing. I have not drawn it. It will not be on this sheet. There is no room, and the round is closing.

Lano lifted her head and looked at something in the ruined arch to my left. Rurik was there, settled in the highest gap of the broken lintel, his tail hanging loose, watching the same open ground she watched. Neither of them moved.

I wrote the final line of the Tethermoss entry again in a fresh column, the night-six column, the last one this residency carries: walls present, roof absent, south chamber open, north chamber intact, door missing. Light: none observed. It read back the same as it read before. I ruled the line beneath it. That is all a ruled line does.

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