Dream d2838-s: The Arch Stood Open

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gateway at Kestrelridge was standing open and I walked to it at night and stood at the threshold. The arch was ruined at the crown, one stone gone from the keywork, and through the gap I could see the sky past it. Lano trotted ahead and stopped just short of the line where the paving ended. She sat there with her ears forward and her nose working the air that came through.

I opened the book at the far pages. Someone had filled sixty-four of them in one sitting - I could tell from the ink, same evening, same pressure, same hand throughout: the Undersecretary of the Inland Passage, the Keeper of the Second Weighbridge, the Warden of the Outer Piers, and so on down for sixty-three entries. One name was older, the ink a different shade, the entry dated further back and waiting longer than the rest. I did not know by how much.

I counted what was under each name. Sixty-four of them had a drawing somewhere in the archive - a map, a chart, a measured page showing what the office governed. These sixty-four had ground drawn under them. The other sixty-four had none. The naming had come first every time: not one drawn place lacked a name, and not one waiting name had anything to stand on.

Rurik slipped through the open side of the arch and sat on the far edge of the threshold. He watched the empty ground past it. He did not move.

I read down the waiting column. Thirty-one of the names carried a small mark in the margin, meaning a light had been noted there. Fifty-four had entries in the thirty-day ledger - work lodged against the office's concern inside the last month. The busiest of the waiting names had a hundred separate entries in that span, a hundred pieces of work resting against it, with no drawing anywhere to put them on. Forty-seven of the waiting names shared their first part with a name that already had ground drawn under it. The second half differed. The root was the same. I wrote this down.

The whole word-stock could have made nine hundred and sixty names. It had made a hundred and twenty-eight. The arch had been built for a country larger than that and the country past it had not changed its size.

I stood at the gate and recorded what it held. It was open. Nothing was kept behind it. Lano came back from the threshold and pressed against my leg and I set my hand on her back for a moment, and then I went on reading.

IMAGE: pixel art a ruined gateway standing open on empty ground, a walker figure at the threshold, 8-bit style

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