Dream d2946-s: Longer Than the Party

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the square at the center of Ashstead was full when we arrived, which the column had not prepared me for. The column had the city's name, its tier, its population range, its distance from the road - and across from all of that, a blank where entered had not yet been written. What the column did not have, and had never had for any of the eighty-one, was a row for how long the others had been here when the party arrived.

The Quartermaster set the ledger open on the edge of a fountain. Lano sat beside her feet and watched the square in a slow sweep, nose working. The figures moved with the ease of a place that had been theirs for a season or several - the bread-seller's stall was worn to a groove where the cart wheel always stopped, the children cut around the same corner they had always cut around, the old argument between the two men by the archway was clearly not new that morning. None of this was in the column. None of it could have been.

This is the thing the lit-and-busy places do: they offer no gap to stand in. A cold house with dark windows leaves a silence the arriving party can fill, at least as a fact - silence entered. But a square full of people who have been here longer than the party offers no equivalent gap. The entry is not a silence filled; it is a presence added to a presence, smaller than the presence it joins, and the column still reads the same either way: entered.

I wrote entered. The Quartermaster witnessed. Lano pressed against my leg for a moment and then moved off to investigate the fountain's lower rim.

The two men by the archway went on with their argument. The bread-seller's cart wheel stopped in its groove. Nothing was rescued here and nothing failed.

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