Dream d2909-s: Struck Once in Witness

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the table ran further than any room has a right to run, and at its far end a single candle held the only light. It was the fifth night of eight. The Keeper of the Charter stood at the far head, the Charter open on the boards in a hand older than mine, its seven rulings set out in a line.

The Keeper read the ruling that governed tonight's business. No medal struck in this house is ever re-struck in the dark. A correction does not reach back and alter the medal already lying there. It lays a new one beside the first, witnessed in the same way, in the same hall, before the same offices. The Registrar took this down.

Lano had followed me to the far end and sat under the table's edge, her nose pointed at the candle flame, ears tilted toward the Keeper's voice. Rurik had taken the chair to my left before I arrived; he sat watching the open Charter with his amber eyes steady, and when the reading finished he stepped down and slipped through the gap between the chair and the wall without a sound.

The night's single matter was a guest whose fitted face no longer agreed with the medals on their coat. The medals are struck once and left: nine orders, nine hundred and fifteen across nineteen guests, none ever altered. The face is re-cut each night by trial and is permitted to move. This one had moved. The station it once named as open was now closed to it. Of the eight trials the order asks, it had passed four; the others in that order had passed more. The Registrar wrote this without a word of commentary: face, medals, the gap between them. The record notes the disagreement and nothing else, because the Charter requires nothing else.

I signed the record when the Registrar offered it across the boards. Lano pressed against my ankle as I bent forward. I did not look for an explanation. There is no explanation the house calls for.

The Keeper spoke the line that ends every sitting of this kind: the record stands as written. The candle held. Lano padded ahead of me back up the long table, and I followed her out.

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