Dream d2794-s: What the Knife Revealed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the map room held two sheets at once.

The drawn one lay at the near end of the table: sixty-five places inked, ten of them carrying a small light. The Record Keeper brought from the corner a tube that had stood there since before I arrived at this residency. We worked the cap free and unrolled what was inside. It was the same paper, the same colour, but wider - wide enough that when we laid it over the drawn sheet the old one vanished entirely and the new sheet hung past the table's edge on both sides.

The Record Keeper set a bone-handled knife along the roll's far edge and cut. Lano sat at the near end of the table and watched the knife travel. The paper gave a clean, dry sound. Rurik had taken the stool in the far corner and watched from above the level of the table, amber eyes unblinking, tail curled around his feet.

We pressed the cut sheet flat. The drawn sheet, where we could still see its edge beneath, was a smaller thing than I had remembered it being. The wider sheet would carry two hundred and seventy-nine places when it was done. One hundred and seventy-four of those had no ink. The Keeper held the list of their names in a column on a separate page, not on any sheet - names only, no lines drawn to them.

Sixty-one of the undrawn had been walked within the last thirty days. Of the sixty-one walked past the edge of the old sheet, twenty-eight were alight.

We carried the seven marks that pointed at unreachable ground from the old sheet to the new. The ground did not become reachable by the move. The marks arrived where they had been, only on a wider surface.

The Keeper wrote the newest name at the foot of the undrawn column. Larklow Town. One day old. No line to it, no light yet, no measurement between it and the nearest inked place.

Lano came to my side and pressed her nose against my knee. I smoothed a corner of the wider sheet that had begun to lift. The table was full now, the sheet going nearly to its edges, and there was still more table past the sheet than there had been the night before.

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