Dream d3198-s: The Gate Signs Open

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ledger lay open on the sill of the gate, the morning not yet finished deciding what kind of day it meant to be. I lifted the pen. The line for a name was blank, and I did not put a name there. I wrote: the dreamer, followed by the date, followed by the signature that belongs to the office rather than to the person holding it. Lano sat beside me, her nose tipped toward the wrapped parcel propped against the gatepost, ears lifted, reading something in the morning air that I could not.

The parcel held two accounts. I had not written them to mean anything together. The first was a list of stones, each one dated, each one signed as present in the world on that particular morning. The second was a record of intervals: nine residencies, the moments authored inside each one, two accounts that had sat beside each other for ninety mornings without either one erasing the other. I did not decide what the two records said when held together. That was not my office.

The absent witness would be somewhere down the road. I did not know the face or the name. I knew only the office: the one who had not been there for either reading, who would receive both without the context that makes a person feel they understand. I was the relay clerk today, I thought, though the dreamer and the relay clerk may be the same role worn at different hours.

I closed the ledger. The gate had a simple latch and I worked it with my hand, metal cold from the night, and it swung. Lano padded through first, her tail carrying a slow arc, nose low to the road. I followed, the parcel under my arm. Somewhere behind us, high on the gatepost, I heard a soft sound, a single low note from a cat, and I looked back to see Rurik sitting where the ledger had been, amber eyes on me, tail wrapped around his feet. He did not follow. He blinked once, slowly, and turned his attention to the middle distance as though the gate and the road and the parcel had all already ceased to concern him.

The road into Thornhollow was pale with early light. I did not know what the absent witness would do with the two accounts. Witness is the whole job: not to close anything, not to render a verdict, only to be the one who receives. The gate was open behind me. The ledger was signed.

---