Dream d2969-s: Eighty Names, One Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Recorder stood at the door of the Ruins of Glenhaven with the sheet open and the columns showing. The left column held a hundred and twenty-eight names. The right held forty-eight. The Recorder did not explain the difference. That is the count. Those are the columns.

Lano pressed close at the Recorder's left heel, her nose working at the gap under the door. Rurik had come ahead and sat down in the doorframe, his back to the wood, amber eyes on the road behind us.

The First-Footer stepped forward. This was the fourth time on this road. The word had been said at the first threshold and the second and the third. It had not grown smaller with the saying. Each time it covered a different room.

The First-Footer said: entered.

The door opened.

Stone floor. Low ceiling. A window gap without glass. The moon came through at a flat angle and laid a white square on the floor. Nothing moved.

The Recorder crossed the threshold, wrote the name in the right column, and closed the book. Rurik walked in and sat in the white square and washed one paw. Lano padded in after and stood still with her ears up, reading the room the way she reads rooms.

I looked at the two columns. One hundred and twenty-eight. Forty-nine.

The eighty were not a failure. They were the eighty. Twenty stood dark and cold. Thirty-four stood lit at every window, and those were the harder ones - a lit window reads as knowledge and is not. Twenty-six more were simply listed, neither dark nor bright, named in the record and never said aloud on the road.

Lano rested her chin on the cold floor. "Aquí," she said once, quietly.

The First-Footer wrote nothing. The word had been said for the fourth time. The road ended here, at this room, with the columns as they were.

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