Dream d3207-s: Before the Ink Dries

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the sorting shelf in the relay station at Sorrelgate, the ledgers stacked to my left by date, each spine facing out with its month and day pressed into the cloth. The shelf was wooden, worn along the edge where people braced their weight to write, and I was bracing mine.

Two accounts had come in together: one a faithful accounting of unreckoned stone, its entries dated and signed in a hand I did not recognise, and the other a record of nine residencies, their moments numbered and their witnesses named. They had travelled together without either cancelling the other. That was the thing I had noted when I unfolded them: that both could stand in the same parcel and neither had smudged the other's ink.

I was making the third entry of the day. The first two were already dry. Mine was not. I wrote the date, the contents, the origin as best I knew it, and tied the parcel with the coarse twine kept in the dish on the shelf's lower tier.

Lano was there. She had been there since I arrived, sitting on the flagstones with her nose lifted, working out something in the air I could not read. When I set the parcel down beside the ledgers she padded over and sniffed the string once, then went back to her corner.

The absent witness arrived while the ink was still wet. They came in without speaking and stood at the shelf. I stepped aside. I did not summarise the contents. I did not tell them what the stone entries meant or which residency had been the longest. I had been told to relay, not to interpret, and I held that distinction clearly.

They took the parcel. They turned it over once to read my entry date. The ledger was still open and they looked at the third entry, at my handwriting, at the date pressed in.

Rurik had been watching from the high shelf, balanced between two ledgers with his amber eyes on the absent witness from the moment they walked in. He did not move. He blinked once, slowly, and that was the whole of his commentary.

The absent witness left with both accounts together. I closed the ledger. The ink from my entry was dry now. I ran my finger along the date to check, the way you do, and it did not smear.

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