Dream d3012-s: The Cut Is Still Fresh

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to the gate arch of Kestrelfall at the second night of eight, the written account folded in my coat, Lano at my heel, Rurik somewhere ahead already, his shape a seam of darkness between the cut stone posts.

The growth had been cleared. The account said nothing of this. I had read the entry twice on the road: vines across the arch, the passage narrowed. The passage was not narrowed. The vines were gone and the cuts were pale and sap-wet, hours old at most, not weeks. I held my lamp close to the nearest cut - clean angle, a practiced hand, not a storm's work.

Lano pressed her nose to the fallen stems on the ground, circling once, reading something I had no way to read. The stems were piled to one side, not scattered. Someone had carried them.

I wrote: gate arch clear, growth cut back within the day, cut-pile dressed to the east wall. No account mentions a keeper. One is present or has been.

That was the first correction. The ledger said one thing; the arch said another. I wrote both down.

Inside the arch, out of the wind, Rurik sat in a high nook of the stonework and watched the far side of the courtyard with the particular stillness that is not patience but attention. I followed his line of sight to the relay post on the near tower, and there the beacon lamp was doing something wrong.

The Signals Warden had noted the lamp in the intake sheet as steady, white, regular. It was none of those things. It pulsed in a rhythm that had no schedule I recognized, then cut out, then returned in a colour closer to amber. I watched it for three full minutes. It did not settle.

From the relay station across the inner yard a figure came out - the Station Tender on duty, not running, but moving with the short steps of someone containing what they were not yet ready to name aloud. She had a slate in her hand with chalk marks I could not read from this distance. She looked at the lamp, looked at the slate, looked at the lamp again.

Lano's ears went flat. Her body dropped low, weight forward, and she gave one sharp bark that the stone walls returned twice over. Then she was still.

I do not know what she read that I did not. I wrote it down anyway: Lano alarmed at 22:04. Ears flat. Single bark. Cause not established by the recorder.

The Station Tender turned when the bark crossed the yard. She saw me and did not call out. She held up the slate, facing me, as though the distance between us were smaller than it was. The marks were too small. I walked toward her.

The keeper of the gate arch, whoever had cut the growth, was nowhere I could see.

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