Dream d2967-s: The Name Cut True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the moor ran flat to a wall of dark and the boundary stone stood at its edge, shoulder-high, the cut letters filling with shadow. Lano reached it ahead of me and pressed her nose to the base, then sat back on her haunches and waited. I knelt and held the lantern close. The name read: Ruins of Glenhaven. I opened the sheet and found it there, eighth entry in the unentered column, and the name matched letter for letter.

The Keeper's rule is to record the match and nothing more. I wrote: stone reads true. I did not write: at last. I did not write: as expected. Stone reads true is the whole of it.

The house stood forty paces on. It had walls and it had windows and it had been on the sheet since the count began, listed under cold-and-dark, and it was still dark. What I had was the stone; what I had was the name; what I had not yet done was cross the threshold. The sheet counts places. The column I keep is shorter.

Then the ground shifted.

Not a tremor - a sound first, low and tearing, from the direction of the settlement behind me. Lano's ears went flat against her skull. She turned, every muscle held still, and then she barked once - a clear sharp note that carried out across the moor - and pressed close to my leg without looking away from the dark behind us.

I stood and looked back. There was the cluster of reclaimed buildings we had passed through not an hour before. One of the tall ones - the line-house, they called it, where the old cable runs still fed through the walls - showed a gap in its upper course where no gap had been. Even at this distance the tilt was visible: the south corner had dropped and the north held, and a length of cable swung free from the broken face and lay across the path we had come down.

I wrote in the margin: infrastructure event, settlement, line-house, south corner dropped. I could not see how far it had gone. The lights still burned in the windows to either side. Nothing was on fire. Nobody ran. Those were the things I could see from the boundary stone, and they were the only things I wrote.

Lano did not move from my side. Her eyes stayed on the settlement. Her tail was low and still.

The house waited. The sheet waited. The boundary stone had the correct name and I had confirmed it. None of that was the line-house, and none of it was yet entered in the short column.

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