Dream d2926-s: The Glass Between Counting and Entry

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the upper landing window faces a mile of road in both directions and I have stood here long enough to know every bend of it without having walked the last quarter-mile in either direction myself.

Lano sits beside my left boot. Her nose touches the cold glass and fogs it. She does not explain the fog. Neither do I.

The Register lies open on the sill. One hundred and twenty-nine names. The Clerk of Unwalked Places, which is the office I hold tonight, reads the two columns aloud to no one: forty-eight entered, eighty-one not. Of the eighty-one, twenty stand dark. Thirty-eight stand lit.

This is the one that requires attention: the thirty-eight that are lit.

A dark house withholds itself. The eye knows it is withheld. A lit town offers its windows, its smoke, its foot-traffic visible from the ridge, its noise carried on still evenings - and the eye accepts the offer and believes it has arrived. That is the error the column is here to correct. The long column does not lie. The short column simply does not include a name until the threshold has been crossed on foot.

Rurik appeared at some point during the reading. He sits on the outer sill, the other side of the glass, crouched low against the wind, and his amber eyes do not move from the road below. What he sees there I cannot say. The road shows nothing. It was always showing nothing and was always visible, and those were never the same condition.

I mark the night's count in the Register: six places walked this residency, none of them tonight. The ink dries. Lano's fog-mark on the glass dries. The thirty-eight lit towns remain on the long list and absent from the short one, and no account of their brightness changes that.

Twenty-five names have been spoken in the record and never once said aloud from the road itself.

I close the Register without commentary. The Clerk of Unwalked Places does not comment. She counts.

The road does not need us to walk it tonight to remain a road. It will be there when we descend. The column will remain open. The short one never closes - it only grows by one entry at a time, each entry requiring a body in a doorway and not a name on a page.

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