Dream d3218-s: Mist Took Thornhollow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the ridge post with the parcel against my back and looked south toward where Thornhollow should have been. There was nothing. The valley held only mist, dense and quiet, and the village was inside it or was not there at all. I could not tell which. Lano sat beside my left boot, her nose working the cold air, and Rurik had settled on the post's flat cap, his tail hung over the edge, not watching the valley but watching me.

The relay clerk had said: keep the direction even when the anchor drops from sight. So I kept it. I faced south and held what I knew of the road, and the mist did not correct me or confirm me. It offered nothing.

I had carried two accounts over the ridge. The first was the surveyor's: stone and stone, each given its date and the name of the hand that signed the entry. The second was older, or slower, and ran beside the first the way two people walk a road at different paces and never merge their shadows. Nine residencies. Ninety moments, each authored. Two accounts that had traveled together without either one erasing the other.

The absent witness was waiting below the ridge on the northern side, where the mist did not reach. I had not met them before. That was the arrangement: the relay carries to someone present for neither reading, and leaves what it carries in their hands.

I came down off the ridge. Lano trotted ahead and then stopped, her ears lifted, and I took that as the signal. The absent witness stood at a low stone table set into the slope, a lantern burning steady beside it. They did not speak. I set both accounts on the table, the surveyor's on the left and the interval record on the right, and stepped back.

Rurik came down the ridge behind me and pressed once against my ankle before slipping under the table to take the warmth of the lantern's edge.

The absent witness looked at the left account. They looked at the right account. They did not look at me.

Lano made a small sound. Not a bark. Something closer to recognition.

I had been told to witness the moment of receipt. I watched. The absent witness lifted the surveyor's account, turned it over, set it back. Then they opened the interval record to a page somewhere in the middle and read without moving.

I stood in that. I did not summarize. I did not interpret. I did not decide what the reading meant to them or whether it matched anything they already held. I was the relay. I had delivered the parcel. The moment of receipt was happening and I was present to it and that was the whole of what was asked.

The lantern was steady. The mist held below the ridge. Thornhollow was behind me somewhere, invisible, and I kept the direction of it.

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