Dream d2964-s: Two Truths on One Shelf

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the record office steps at Galestead were wide and pale under the night lamps, and I carried the shorter ledger up them with both hands. Lano trotted at my heel, ears lifted. Rurik had gone ahead; he sat in the doorway at the top and did not move until I reached him, then slipped inside without looking back.

The office was lit and smelled of old paper. A clerk of the Records stood at a high shelf and did not look up. The longer ledger was already there, open to the page that listed all one hundred and twenty-nine places by name, each entered in a careful hand, each counted and described and dated in the office's own keeping. I set the shorter ledger beside it. It held forty-eight entries.

The clerk did not speak. Lano settled near the door. Rurik perched on the edge of the high shelf and looked down at the two books with amber eyes and did not blink.

Nothing in the longer refused the shorter. Nothing in the shorter was drawn from the longer. The longer held names. The shorter held interiors: the smell of a particular hall, the height of a particular threshold, the give of a floor underfoot. These were different knowledge. The shelf held one kind and not the other, and this was the record of the shelf and not a verdict on anything.

The clerk made a note in a third book. I read nothing from where I stood. Lano's tail moved once.

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