Dream d2779-s: Seven Marks, Long Road Home

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road turned away from itself at the bend by Sablegate, the gate shut and pale in the last of the evening, and I took the longer arm of it because the seven marks required walking.

The drawn sheet was in my coat. Sixty-five places named on it, ten of them carrying a light. I knew without unfolding it that seven of those marks pointed past where any reader could follow - ground I had noted but not described, positions set down in confidence and then left without the words to support them. The reason for the long road was the round: to pass each of the seven and look at them again, not to correct the sheet, but to observe that the correction had not been made.

Lano walked ahead at the first mark, her white coat catching what was left of the light. She stopped where the verge opened into unmapped ground, nose working, and waited. I passed her and stood at the margin. Past the edge: sixty-one places worked inside the last thirty days; twenty-nine of those still alight. The newest was one day standing - a place called Larkbarrow, which I have not visited and cannot describe beyond the name. I wrote nothing. I looked.

Rurik came later, at the third mark, slipping through the gap in the field gate and sitting in the road ahead with his back to me. His tail moved once. I reached the mark and read what was carved into the post: a position referring to ground now unreachable, the path having closed since the mark was set. He looked over his shoulder and looked away again.

By the fifth mark the light was almost gone. One hundred and seventy-four places on no sheet at all. That number was not a failure and not a success; it was the count. I held it the way you hold a weight to test it, not to lift it anywhere.

At the seventh mark I stopped. Lano pressed against my leg, warm and still. The road from there ran straight to Sablegate, which was shut for the night. Beyond the gate: the country not yet written, and the country that might never be written, and the country that would not wait for either.

I recorded the reason for the route. The reason was the round.

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