Dream d2953-s: The Weight Nobody Lifted

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the well-cover was still weighted down in the yard at the Ruins of Duskden, and I was standing in front of it on the third night of eight, and Lano had her nose to the base of the stone, reading whatever the cover held in from the air below.

The sheet had carried this place for eleven weeks. I had read its entry so many times I knew how the fence ran and how many paces from the road to the well. Reading is not entering. I was standing here now, and that made a difference the entry had not included.

The weight was a flat piece of limestone, heavier than the task required. Someone had brought it from elsewhere - the yard has no limestone of its own - and set it here and gone away and not written about it. The record shows nothing for that day except the weather, and the weather was cold enough.

Rurik found the coping on the east wall and took it. He washed one paw and looked at the road. The perch was good and he held it.

I opened the second column. Forty-eight places entered. The Ruins of Duskden would make forty-nine, or it had already, depending on whether the gate and the yard counted as the same arrival. I decided they did not. I had been at the gate in the afternoon and written nothing. I had walked into the yard at dusk and the yard was a different room.

The long column runs to three pages. The short one fits on a single leaf.

I did not lift the stone. It had been placed carefully - not the minimum weight, but the considered amount - and it was still placed, and that was what this yard contained on the night I arrived: one decision, made in a person's absence, holding.

Lano sat back from the well-cover and looked up at me.

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