Dream d2843-s: The Ink That Stopped

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the book fell open at its far end before I had walked as far as the verge, and I was already reading names I had not yet seen the ground for.

Lano came up beside me through the grass, nose-first as always, scenting the slope rather than reading it. Rurik had gone ahead along the ridge. He sat now at the highest point with his tail tucked close, watching the broken rooflines of Kestrelridge settle into the dark below.

The task was small. Count the cold waiting names visible from this elevation. I counted: five. I said the number quietly and let it stand. It is a clean number, exact, and it asks nothing of you once you have it.

The book holds sixty-four names without a drawing under them. Sixty-three were set down together in a single sitting by someone who then closed the book and did not return. One was set down long before those sixty-three, in a different hour, and has waited in a different quality of silence. Tonight's five are taken from the sixty-four: not all of them, only those visible from this verge, the ones with broken walls I could look down at and find in the far pages by their names.

Forty-seven of the waiting names share a first part with a name already drawn. These five do too. A family of settlements, the same prefix, the second part shifted. The eldest is drawn and situated; the others are written and sitting.

Rurik descended the slope in the way of cats: each step decided before it was taken, tail low, weight back. He did not look up. Lano watched him pass, then pressed closer to me - a small warmth against my leg while the cold came off the ruins below.

I read each of the five names aloud to fix them. Not ceremony: practice, a way of confirming that the name on the page and the cluster of walls below it are the same thing under two different treatments. The name is one act; the drawing is another. Someone performed the first act sixty-three times in a sitting, then stopped. The second act waits.

Lano lifted her muzzle toward the dark below us. Sola.

One word, small, into the cold air. Then she settled her chin back to the grass and said nothing more.

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