Dream d2844-s: The Book Ran On Without Me

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road past Kestrelridge ran through knee-high rubble, nothing dramatic, just the ground insisting it had been here before anyone thought to record it. Lano trotted ahead, nose down, following something in the verge that I could not smell. Rurik had taken the high spot on a broken wall and watched the road from there, tail hanging down over the crumbling edge, amber eyes moving once to follow me and then going still again.

I had the ledger out, walking and reading at the same time, which is a way of going slowly without admitting it. Sixty-four entries on the left-hand pages had a map reference beside them. Sixty-four entries on the right-hand pages had nothing beside them but the name itself, written in the same hand, with the same care, as if the hand knew that care and completion were separate things and had made its peace with that. One name near the back had been entered long before the others, set down in a different season, the ink slightly different in tone. That entry had waited longer than any of the rest. I turned to it and read it and turned away.

The busiest entry in the undrawn column had a hundred cross-references beside it, work of all kinds done in connection with a place that had never been surveyed. I noted this without drawing any conclusion about it. Work happens around a name the same way weather happens around a hill.

Lano circled back and sat beside my boot for a moment, looking up. Then she was off again, ears moving. Rurik descended from the wall by a route I did not see, and was simply on the road ahead of me when I looked up from the page.

I closed the ledger on the entry as I found it. The road ran on. The ruins held their positions on both sides, neither falling further nor standing straighter than they had when I arrived. The naming had come first here every time, and now I had come after the naming, which placed me third in the order of things, after the hand that wrote and the ground that waited.

I made the last entry for this residency: eight nights, road continues, ledger closed, no lesson appended. Lano put her nose to the ink and sneezed once, softly, and walked on.

---