Dream d2852-s: One Older Than the Rest

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road past the gate ends at a flat verge and the verge is wide enough to sit. I sat there with the book open across my knee, the lamp I had carried from the inn hung on the fence post behind me, throwing a yellow circle. I kept the work inside it.

Lano pressed along my leg, nose toward the field for a moment, then settled. Her ears moved once at something on the road and then lay flat again.

The entry was for the name that had waited longest. Not the sixty-three set down together in one sitting, which had each waited the same length of time as the others. The one before them: entered earlier, in the same hand, the ink now a different shade where it had been sitting longer on the page. Eight nights at Eldergate and I had been reading around it each time, returning to the same place in the far pages and then turning past. This was the eighth night and the last.

I wrote the name into the entry column. I wrote the date it was first set down, then the date of the sixty-three, side by side, so the distance between them was visible on the page without any further note about it. I wrote that no drawing existed under it. I wrote the count of work that had moved through the place it named in the last thirty days. I wrote, on the last line of the entry, that this one had waited longest.

That was all the entry required.

Rurik had found the warm side of the fence post. He sat with his back against it, amber eyes on the field, tail once around his feet, unmoving.

I read the entry back. Name, first date, second date, work-count, the note about longest. I closed the book.

Lano stood, circled once, and lay down across my boot. The field past the lamp had gone fully dark. The gate behind me was wood and iron, and the town past it still carried light in its upper windows. I stayed until the lamp began to gutter, then I lifted it off the post and walked back in.

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