Dream d2958-s: Eight Nights, One Mark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the latch settled into its catch and the sound of it carried the weight of a line being written. Not inscribed by the latch - the latch only closed - but the Scrivener, standing just ahead of me on the road, opened the register without being asked and set a mark in the shorter column. Forty-eight.

The long column held one hundred twenty-nine.

Lano did not look back at the ruins. She pressed her nose to the road and moved north a few paces, then sat with her ears up and her tail still. Rurik had already gone to the center of the road and settled there, tail wound around his feet, watching the dark ahead with the patience of something that has decided this is its spot.

Eight nights inside Duskden's entry in the shorter column. The longer entry had existed before any of us arrived - a name, a structural count, a tier, coordinates measured from a distance, a note on the state of the outer wall. None of that was the same as the eight nights, and the Scrivener did not confuse them. That is what scriveners are for.

I counted the unentered as we had walked the residency. Eighty-one places with full entries in the long column that no one has written from inside. Twenty-one of them are dark houses, shuttered, no smoke. Thirty-five are working towns with lit windows at every floor, and those are the ones that require the most discipline to account for: a lit window presents itself as already known. It is not. Twenty-nine places appear by name in dispatches, in travelers' notes, in citations and inventories, and the shorter column carries not one of them. To be cited is not to be entered. The Scrivener drew a line under the day's work.

The party moved. Lano fell into step. The ruins held their darkness the way places do when the accounting is finished and everyone has gone on.

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