Dream d2937-s: The Third Key Turns

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Doorkeeper at the Ruins of Tarnmere stood at the gatehouse door with a ring of three keys and tried the first. Lano sat on the broken step below and watched. The key did not turn.

The second did not turn either. Rurik had slipped ahead through a gap in the curtain wall; he sat now on the stone sill above the lock, amber eyes still, watching the Doorkeeper's hands.

I kept two columns in a pocket notebook. The long one held every place on the sheet. The short one held only the places I had walked into and written from inside. Tarnmere was in the long column. It had been there since before I began walking.

The Doorkeeper tried the third key. It turned. The bolt drew back without ceremony. The door was swollen with old weather and required a shoulder; then it opened.

Lano was through before I was, nose tracking the cold stone floor of the passage. Rurik came in after and found the warm residue of sun still held in the stones above the guard-room hearth and settled himself there.

I moved Tarnmere from the long column to the short. There was no record in the gatehouse of when a key had last turned in that lock. The Doorkeeper had not said, and I had not asked.

Eighty-one places on the sheet have never been walked into and written from inside. Twenty stand cold and dark. Thirty-eight stand lit at every window and have still not been entered. The lit ones are the harder case: a place that looks tended reads as known, and reading as known is not the same as having been here. I have been writing Tarnmere as if I knew it for longer than I can account for.

Lano found a piece of crumbled mortar and carried it in her teeth to the far door of the passage. She set it down and looked at me.

"Tuya," she said.

I noted the date and we went on.

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