Dream d2972-s: The Shorter Reading

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the roof walk of the Ruins of Glenhaven as the last light fell across the stones, and the Keeper opened the ledger and began.

The first roster went on for a while. The Keeper read steadily, voice flat, stopping for no name more than it stopped for any other. Towns I recognized and places I had never seen rose behind my eyes as words only - names on a sheet, described in notes, assigned to roads, cross-referenced with roads that led to other names. The Keeper did not look up.

Lano sat at the edge of the parapet and watched something moving in the dark below, ears lifted, nose working the air.

The second roster the Keeper read without announcement. I understood only when the pace changed - silences opening between names, each pause outrunning the name it followed. Forty-eight entries. The Keeper read them through and closed the ledger.

Rurik had taken the high corner of the remaining wall, amber eyes half-shut, neither watching the Keeper nor watching me.

I thought about the lit towns in the first roster - the ones with smoke at the chimney, lamplight at the window, a sound of people at work or at table. I had not entered them. I had noted them. I had written their names and their roads and the character of their rooftops. The Keeper had read them in the first roster without distinction from anything else.

A place that keeps its lights on has done nothing to close itself off. It simply stands there, lit, unwalked.

Lano turned from the parapet and trotted to my boot and pressed close, then circled away, a small loop in the stone dust, then back again. Aquí.

The Keeper set the ledger on the stones and stood looking at the dark country below the ruin. Twenty-eight names had traveled this far and never once been spoken on the road itself. The road would move again at first light.

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