Dream d2837-s: Low Wall, Even Sky

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road to Kestrelridge ran long and even and arrived at last at walls that were lower than I had expected, the topmost stones missing in stretches, the sky showing through in notches the same grey-white as the road itself.

I carried the book open. The entry was already there, in one hand, old ink. The name, the office, the field for the drawing left blank. One of sixty-four. I did not know, coming in, whether this one was among the thirty-one that still showed a light, or the fifty-four that had carried work in the last thirty days. I knew only that no drawing had ever been made under it, and that I had arrived now to record where it stood.

Lano had gone ahead of me down the road and was waiting at the gap in the wall where a gate had been. Her ears were up. She watched me approach without moving.

Rurik was already on the wall, walking the highest surviving course from right to left, pausing at each gap to look down into the approach, then moving on.

I reached the gap and stopped. I wrote the date in the margin. I wrote: walls present to this height, roof absent, standing, approach clear, gate absent. I did not write anything that explained why no drawing had been made here before. That is not the record's business.

Lano went through the gap when I lowered the book. I followed her.

The interior was small. Rurik dropped from the wall into the center of a former room without a sound and sat, amber eyes moving once around the remaining walls and then fixing on something I could not identify.

I stood in what had been a threshold and looked at the sky, which was even and offered no particular reading. I made a mark in the field. First visit, walls standing, drawing not yet made.

Lano put her nose to the cold stone floor and breathed out slowly: aquí.

I closed the book.

---