Dream d2816-s: The Sixty-Fifth

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road came over the shoulder of the hill and the roof was there ahead, one pale line against the darkening far slope. I stopped. Lano stopped beside me, nose lifted, ears up, reading something I could not read. Rurik was a black shape three paces ahead already, sitting in the road, staring at the roof as if he had been expecting it.

The name was in the book. I had carried it eight nights without a drawing to put under it. Now there was a drawing, or the beginning of one: a roofline, a chimney, a wall I could not yet see but could infer from the chimney standing. I opened the book and wrote: the roof stands. That was the whole entry. The roof stood under the name that had waited for it.

Lano trotted forward and paused, looked back, trotted forward again. I followed. Rurik did not move until I reached him, and then he moved, slipping ahead by a few steps and sitting again, holding the pace the way he holds a threshold.

The light inside was low. One window showed it, the kind that says occupied without saying more. I did not knock. I wrote the window into the book beside the roof, and then I wrote the road that had brought me, which was also a piece of the drawing now.

The book held sixty-four drawings. This would be sixty-five. The name at the top of the page was not new. Someone had written it in one hand, careful, and then stopped. What I was adding was what the name had been pointing at all along, and the name had been right about all of it.

Lano sat at my feet while I wrote. Rurik had gone to the far side of the chimney wall and was not visible, but I could hear him: a single low sound, not a complaint, just a marking of where he was.

I closed the book. The road went a little further. This was the last of the eight nights and the road did not end at the roof; it bent past it and went on into country I had no names for yet and no drawings either. That was a different book, and it was not open.

---