Dream d2831-s: One Name Older Than the Rest

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the ridge above Reedhaven at midday with the country opening wide on both sides and the book of names open across my knees. Lano sat beside me, nose working at something on the wind, ears tilted toward the valley.

I counted across the open ground below: sixty-four names with no drawing under them, waiting where the ink stopped and the margin began. Thirty-one of them showed a light from here. Fifty-four had had work moving inside them inside the last thirty days, and one had been waiting far longer than the rest, set down in a different season, before the batch of sixty-three, by the same hand and then left entirely alone.

I found that one first. I put my finger on the page and held it there.

Lano pressed her side against my leg. I did not explain the name to her. There was nothing to explain and she was not asking.

From the ridge you could see how the naming had run ahead: every drawn place had a name under it, not one exception, and sixty-four places had a name and nothing else. The order was always the same direction. Someone sat down with the blank pages and wrote carefully across them and then stopped, and the names have been sitting with open country under them since, and the country has not complained about it.

I counted forty-seven of the waiting names that shared a first part with a place already drawn. The busiest of those carried a hundred pieces of work inside the last thirty days, all of it done inside a name with no ground drawn yet to stand on.

The ridge was bright. The wind came across from the east and Lano's ears went flat and then righted themselves. I closed the book on my finger to keep the page.

Sixty-four names. One of them older than the rest by enough to matter. I did not write anything down. I had only come to count.

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