Dream d2829-s: Ink That Outlasted Its Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the wide crossing where two city streets met and held each other briefly before continuing, the kind of crossing where the paving stones are worn to a polish and the crowd passes through without pausing, and I opened the book to the second entry and wrote it standing up as the count required.

Lano sat close to my left boot, nose raised slightly, reading the crowd the way she reads anything moving, her ears tipped forward and then back. Rurik had arrived before us and had chosen the capstone of a low bollard at the crossing's edge; he sat there with his tail dropped straight and his amber eyes moving across faces without settling on any of them.

The second entry ran to eleven lines and I wrote it without leaning on anything. The crossing is a good place for this because there is no surface to lean on except other people, and other people do not hold still. My wrist ached by the sixth line. I continued to the eleventh.

What the entry records: sixty-four places named and waiting, the longest of them waiting far longer than the others, set down by a hand that made only one entry before it stopped. The book does not say why it stopped. The book says only: this name, this hand, and then a long space before the next thing written by a different hand. I copied the name into the second entry and continued. Rurik blinked once and looked past me.

I read it back when I was done. The crowd passed through the crossing and I stood in the middle of it reading eleven lines in a low voice, which is the correct voice for reading back at a crossing. The name from the long space sounded like the others when I read it aloud. I do not know if that is the right finding but it is what I found.

Lano pressed her side against my boot when I closed the book. She did not look up.

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