Dream d3186-s: Facing Leaves

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the binding bench sat under a pale window, the stone still cold from the night before. Yarrowfold had that quality of a place that waits without urgency, its dormant air settling into the grain of the wood beneath my hands.

I opened the first account on the left side of the bench, and then the return beside it on the right. The Tally-Reader stood at my shoulder and counted the pages, lips moving, finger not touching the paper. Neither account went over the other. That was the rule I had been given, and I understood it the way you understand a rule you did not invent.

The Anomaly-Hand moved along the far wall, tracing the pale cyan seams in the stone with a careful palm. Not marking, just following. The emission caught in the window light and made the seam look like something had pressed from the inside, long ago.

Lano settled under the bench near my feet. I could hear her small breathing. When the Horizon-Surveyor crossed to the window to sight the line where the surveyed sheet ended, Lano's ears lifted once and dropped again.

The Relic-Watcher stood beside the iron armature at the room's edge and recorded its dimensions in a notebook. No comment on what it had been for. The Warden of the Deep Stratum looked at the same armature from across the room and wrote nothing, only watched it in the manner of someone deciding that the watching itself is the record.

Rurik came in through the gap below the side door. He crossed the room at a slight angle, choosing the longer path if it took him past something worth inspecting. He leapt to the top of the stone shelf and settled there, amber eyes on the bound accounts below him.

The Bedrock-Reader knelt near the bench's base and read the strata exposed in a cracked flag, reading the layers not by name but by position and tone. I watched for a moment and then returned to the pages.

The first account and the return lay beside each other now, bound at their inner edges, spines touching but pages spread open in opposite directions. I looked at them long enough to notice where the two accounts had been written by the same hand in different years. The handwriting was the same but the pressure had changed.

The Horizon-Surveyor marked the edge of the sheet where the surveyed land stopped. Lano padded out from under the bench and sat near the door, watching the gap Rurik had come through. She did not bark.

I left both pages open and stepped back from the bench.

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