Dream d2851-s: The Earlier Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I climbed the rise above Eldergate on the seventh night and sat in the grass with the whole town's roofline below me in the dark, every chimney and slate edge outlined against the lower sky. Lano settled beside me and pressed her flank against my knee. Rurik had gone ahead and found the highest point of the rise and sat there with his back to the town, watching me instead.

I had the book open in my lap. I had been working through it from the front, drawing as I went, setting ground under each name in order. But I had reached the far pages, ones I had not opened in some time, and found them already written. Page after page in the same careful hand, name after name, each one set down in full and not touched since. No ground under any of them. The naming had run ahead of the drawing and then stopped, and the stop had no note beside it.

I counted the waiting names by the light that was left. Half the named places had ground under them, and half did not - it came out even, and the evenness had no explanation and needed none. Of the undrawn half, all but one had been written in the same sitting: the same ink, the same pressure on the pen, a long session that had filled the far pages and stopped. The remaining name was older by some distance. The ink had faded differently and the hand was the same hand but earlier, less settled, and it had been waiting longer than the others by far.

Lano lifted her nose toward the town and her ears came forward. I looked down with her. Thirty-one of the waiting names had a light listed against them in the margin notes. More than half had carried work inside them in the last thirty days. The busiest of them showed a hundred separate pieces of work in that window and its ground remained blank.

I turned back to the oldest waiting name and read it again. I had not been asked to draw tonight. I had been asked to read the page as it stood. I read it.

Rurik turned from watching me and looked out over the town for a moment, then looked back. Lano's tail moved once across the grass.

I closed the book with the page marked. The town below held its name. The far pages held theirs.

---