Dream d2815-s: Forty-Eight at the Stem

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent past the last milestone I had drawn and kept going, and I sat down at the stone to work the count. The book lay open across my knees. Sixty-five names with no drawing under them, ranged in columns, and I went down each one looking for the beginning: did it open with a syllable I had already set a mark under? The tallying was slow. Lano sat beside me on the road-dust, ears forward, watching the road ahead where it curved toward a name with no drawing behind it. Rurik had gone up onto the milestone itself and sat there with his tail around his paws, amber eyes tracking something in the grass beyond the verge.

The first part of a name is not the name. It is an older fact, the root before a place split off from its kin. Twenty, thirty, I kept a finger on the column and moved down. Forty-eight. I wrote the number in the margin and closed the book. Forty-eight of the waiting names open with a syllable that already has ground drawn under it, already has a road running out of it, already has been inked and placed on the sheet. Their first part is not waiting. Only the rest of them is.

One of the sixty-five was set down long before the others and has been waiting longest. My count passed through it somewhere, in the forty-eight or not, and the tally does not distinguish it. The busiest of the waiting places has had a hundred pieces of work carried into it inside thirty days, and it sits there with no drawing under it. My count today only says: its first part may be familiar. The work inside it is another question.

Lano stood, put her nose to the road-dust, and sat again. The road ran on. I did not follow it tonight.

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