Dream d3033-s: Two Books on the Moss Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we walked out of Fennmoss before the light had settled. The moss road ran flat and dark in the low places, pale where it crested. Lano went ahead and came back twice before we had cleared the outer edge of the settlement, her nose down on the road's surface.

Rurik had sat in the doorway of the low hall on the third morning and refused to move further into the residency. He had stayed at that threshold for the remainder, watching the interior from the outside of it, blinking slowly. We had left him to it. He was gone when we came back down that passage on the last morning, and the doorway was empty.

The Recorder carried both books. The account made at a distance, before any of us had crossed any threshold into Fennmoss, and the account made inside, room by room and corner by corner, over eight days. They were not compared on the road. They would be laid beside each other later, by other hands, in better light.

What I can say from the road is this: the cold houses were less ruined than the far account had them. Not whole - they were not whole - but the distant record had named several rooms as collapsed and the near record named them passable. Both stood in the book.

The working settlements were less known than the count assumed. The far record had numbered their windows and named the use of the rooms. Inside, the use had turned; the rooms served purposes the far account had no way to know from the road and did not claim to know. Both stood in the book.

Of the thirty-three settlements the record had called on by name and described and counted from a distance: all thirty-three remained only the far account. We had not entered them. Their near account was not yet written and would not be written by this residency.

Lano pressed close to my leg where the road turned away from the low settlement rooflines. I did not hurry her.

Neither book was left at the road's edge. That had been the practice from the first day and it remained the practice here, on the last morning, on the way out.

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