Dream d2872-s: The Deepest Shelf Answers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lamp I carried was the smallest one in the house, and the cellar stairs went down past the Charter table, past the landing where the seven faces are kept between fittings, past the second landing where the log of the moved face sits open and unresolved, and down again to a place where the stone was cold enough that my breath made a small cloud.

Lano had gone ahead. I heard her paws on the lower step before I could see the step itself, and by the time the lamplight reached the oldest shelf she was already sitting beside it, her nose working at the near end where the oldest position is. She pressed her muzzle close to the shelf's edge and said, once, quietly: antigua.

Rurik came through the gap in the iron screen at the far wall and took the high corner of the archive crate, where he sat and watched with his tail along the edge.

The Keeper of Dates had told me the position before I descended: first position, far end, the medal placed before the house had settled its Charter, before the seven orders were named separately from one another.

I lifted it with both hands.

It was struck in the order of the first kind. The image on its face was a set of hands holding a scale. The edge had not been filed. The inscription on the reverse named the deed in the old long phrasing, the phrasing the Charter later condensed, but the condensing did not touch this medal and nothing since has touched it either. The date is the date it was struck. The image is the image cut then.

I set it on the reading board and opened the night's log.

Lano pressed her flank against my ankle while I wrote. When I lifted the medal to return it to the shelf she moved aside without being asked.

I set it back in the first position.

Rurik blinked once from the crate corner and looked at the wall.

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