Dream d2766-s: Standing, Then Lit

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grass on the far side of the gatepost was longer than the grass on the drawn side. I noticed that first, the way the stems stood above the knee and the light had gone from copper to grey while I was still walking. The sheet ends at a gatepost with a notch cut into it by whoever came before me, and I stepped past it without ceremony because there was no ceremony to make.

The roof was standing.

I wrote that first: standing. The ridge holds, the walls show no lean, the chimney is whole. I paced the near face and counted no fallen courses along the base. Whatever holds the place up has not yet quit.

Then I wrote: lit.

The south-facing wall carried a window with a light behind it. Not bright, not moving, a held glow the colour of tallow. Lano had stopped twenty paces back and sat in the long grass with her nose lifted, reading the air in short passes. I could hear her breathing from where I stood at the sill.

I did not knock. The task is to record what is, and what is here is a lit window in a standing farmhouse, a dog sitting in the grass at my back, and room left on the sheet for both facts.

The place has no name on the sheet. I wrote the grid reference by the gatepost and I wrote: structure standing, light present, south window, one source, tallow quality. I did not write what I thought about it. I did not write whether the light was a welcome or a warning, because neither of those is the task.

Yarrowgarth is one day standing from my count, though whoever lit that window has been counting longer. I am not the first to know this roof exists. I am the first to put it on the sheet.

Lano pressed close on the walk back to the gatepost. She did not bark. She walked when I walked and stopped when I stopped, and when I paused at the notch to look back she sat in the grass with her ears forward, patient as the undrawn country itself.

The light was still there when I passed through.

---