Dream d2943-s: At the Word Begun

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the courtyard of Tarnmere held a particular quality of dusk - not dark yet but past the hour when light could be called generous - and I sat on a low wall with the ledger open across my knees and the account of the inside begun on a new page.

The Keeper's word for it was begun. I wrote that too, in the margin, as a second record of the same fact: that the page had been opened and the first line set down, and that this was different from the page being finished. The distinction felt worth noting in a place separate from the account itself.

Lano had found a loose stone at the base of the far wall and was nosing at it with the particular patience of a dog not yet sure whether the stone is interesting. Rurik sat in the gap where two broken courses of masonry met, his amber eyes moving between the open ledger and the courtyard's far end, where the arch still stood though nothing hung in it.

I had two columns. The long one held one hundred and twenty-nine names. The short one held forty-eight. I was not adding to the short column tonight - I was writing the inside of a place already on it, already entered, which meant tonight's work was description and not accounting. That was a different discipline and I kept having to remind myself of it: not to note what was absent, not to run the short column against the long one, only to say what the inside of Tarnmere had looked like at the hour I entered it and what had been there.

The lit places had been harder to walk into. I had written this before in a different document and here I wrote it again: a dark house reads as empty, and emptiness reads as an invitation to list. A lit window makes a different claim. I had stood outside three such places in the past weeks and held the sheet and read the name and counted the name as a visit because I had stood outside and looked in. I wrote: I had not entered those. I moved them back to the long column when no one was watching, which was always, because the long column is a record of the ledger's honesty about itself.

Lano came and settled against my boot. The stone she had been nosing she left where it was.

The arch at the courtyard's far end became a silhouette. I wrote: the inside of Tarnmere is a courtyard with a wall to the east standing to full height and a wall to the west gone to the foundation course and an arch to the north that no longer closes. The flagstones hold standing water after rain. There is a low wall suitable for sitting on, which I know because I sat on it.

I did not write: it is a shame, or it is beautiful, or it is lost. I did not write what it had been before the ruin.

The Keeper's word, in the margin, said begun. I closed the ledger on the page where the account was not finished. Rurik blinked once in the direction of the arch. The dusk continued.

---