Dream d2845-s: The Darker Ink

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came ahead of everything - ahead of the rooftops, ahead of the lamp-glow from the first windows - and Lano pressed against my boot as if the chill had arrived from somewhere particular. I looked up. Eldergate Town lay at the end of the road, its nearest house close enough now that I could make out a lintel and a dark door, and the smell of woodsmoke came with the cold, the two of them together.

I opened the book.

The name was there: Eldergate Town. I had not written it. Someone had, in a hand I recognized as older than the other entries around it, the ink a shade darker in the way ink gets when it has been dry longer than the pages beside it. Sixty-three of the waiting names had been set down in a single sitting; I could see the matching slant across every entry. This one sat apart. It had come first, before the others, and then the hand had stopped and left it.

Rurik appeared from somewhere behind me, slipped past my boot without a sound, and sat down at the edge of the road where the packed earth met the cobble of the town's first lane. He stared ahead. His tail moved once.

I read the entry again. No drawing under it. No cross-reference, no note that work had begun. Only the name, and the date, and the blank space where a map would go. I wrote in the margin that of the forty-four names still waiting, this one had waited longest, and that this was now recorded.

Lano sat beside me and looked at the same door Rurik was watching. The smoke kept coming.

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