Dream d2942-s: The Lantern and Its Double

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lower floor of Tarnmere was under water to a depth I had not yet measured, and I stood at the last dry step with the lantern held out over the surface. The water was still. The lantern hung in the air and hung in the water, and the two were exactly alike, one above and one below, separated only by the skin of the surface between them.

Lano sat behind me on the step. Her nose was at the edge of the dark water, not touching it. She watched the reflection as I watched it.

The sheet names Tarnmere. It gives the ruin a position, a tier, a column beside the others in the long list. The sheet does not give it this water, or this particular stillness, or the way the lantern's double sits perfectly level while the lantern itself trembles slightly with my breathing.

I lowered the measuring rod to the foot of the step. The rod is marked at intervals. The water came to the third mark. I read the mark and wrote it. The depth of the flooded lower floor of the Ruins of Tarnmere on the seventh night of residency: three marks. That is what the sheet did not have, and now it does.

Rurik had gone ahead at some point. I found him on the sill of the high window, above the waterline, watching me from there with his amber eyes catching the lantern. He blinked once and looked back at the water.

I did not wade in. The step I stood on was the boundary of the dry floor and I recorded from there. Being at the step is being in Tarnmere. The sheet had Tarnmere on it for months before tonight. Tonight the step is entered, the water is measured, and the lantern has a double that will vanish when I lift the lantern away.

There are 81 places on the sheet that have no step yet stood on them. Twenty-one stand cold and dark. Thirty-five stand lit at every window. Twenty-seven have been named in the record without once being named aloud on the road. Tarnmere was one of these until tonight, and now it is none of them.

I wrote the depth. I wrote the date. Lano pressed close against my leg, warm against the cold air of the ruin.

The lantern and its double stayed still on either side of the water's surface until I turned to go up.

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