Dream d3013-s: The Account Said Sky

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the threshold of Kestrelfall on the third night of eight, and the account I carried said the roof above the door was open to weather. The sheet read: roof collapsed, southeast corner, interior exposed. The Threshold-Caller stood beneath that roof and said the place's name aloud, and the timber above did not fall and there was no gap and the night sky was not visible from where we stood.

Lano pressed against my ankle. Her nose tipped upward toward the beam.

I wrote what I saw: roof intact, southeast corner, interior covered. I did not strike the first line. Both lines sit in the column now, dated apart, and neither settles the other.

The Threshold-Caller moved to the next column: condition at entry versus condition at record. She made no note of which was correct. The sheet and the doorway are two readings of one place, taken at distance and taken close, and distance flattens what closeness finds particular.

The beams were old but standing. The thatch was thin but present. The interior was not the open cold room the sheet named it. I wrote the temperature of the air inside, which was not cold but was not warm. I wrote the quality of the floor, which was earthen and compressed. I wrote that there was a stone basin in the far corner and that its condition had not been noted in the record at all.

Lano trotted once around the basin. Rurik had come in ahead of us through some gap lower down that we had not used, and he sat now on the basin's rim with his tail hanging over the side and his amber eyes on the ceiling.

The Threshold-Caller asked me what I saw. I told her: a basin not on the record, a roof the record said was not there, a cold less than reported. She wrote these in the column marked discrepancy without expression, without hurry.

This is what entering costs: the sheet is wrong in parts and right in others and you cannot tell from outside which parts are which. You can only come in. The writing that happens inside is longer than the writing that happens outside, because inside there is more to see, and none of it confirms the outside account entirely.

I said the place's name once more from inside. It sat differently in the room than it had at the door.

Lano settled on the earthen floor with a small sound. Rurik did not move from the basin rim.

The outside account was not wrong. It was a different account. I wrote that at the bottom of the column and we stayed until we had written everything that could be written from inside, which took longer than we thought, and when we left we did not correct the outside account but noted the date of entry and what the inside account had added and what it had contradicted.

Seventy-eight places remain.

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