Dream d3215-s: Handed Over Intact

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was walking the road through Mistbarrow with two folded accounts in my coat: one from the surveyor, one from the relay clerk. The first was a faithful record of objects, each entry dated and signed. The second was nine residencies, ninety authored moments, two dated accounts that had travelled together without erasing each other. I had not written either of them. I was only carrying them.

The mist sat low and white against the grass. Lano trotted ahead, ears up, her small pale shape moving in and out of the fog as if she were reading something I could not. A cairn stood by the road. There was no mark on it: no chalk, no notch, no scratched initial. Just stone set on stone, each one placed by someone who had come this way before.

I stopped beside it. I looked at it for a long moment. Then I walked on. I did not add a stone.

Further along, the road bent toward a low stone building at the edge of the moor. The absent witness was inside, sitting at a table near the window. I had not met this person before. I knew only that they had not been present for either reading, had not walked those two phases, had not seen the objects or sat through the intervals.

I set the two accounts on the table between us.

The absent witness picked up the first. Read the surveyor's dated lines. Set it down. Picked up the second. Lano had come in behind me and sat near the door, watching, tail still, nose working the close air. I did not speak. I did not offer a summary or a context. The accounts were complete. They did not need translation.

When the absent witness set the second account down, I witnessed that moment: the paper leaving their hands, the hands resting flat on the table, the silence that followed. That was all I was there to see.

Rurik had been somewhere in the building the whole time. I caught the amber glint of his eyes from the top of a wooden shelf near the ceiling. He did not move. He blinked once, slow.

Outside, the cairn was still standing unmarked. The mist had not lifted. The road continued on toward the seventy-two places that had not yet been entered, and I did not know their names, only that they were there.

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