Dream d3220-s: The Stone Stayed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the boundary stone stood where the surveyor had graved it three seasons past: waist-high, north face dark with mist, a notation on the east face I could read only on my knees. The date of first entry. The date of last walk. A small glyph I did not interpret.

Lano was already across. She had gone ahead at the track's bend, slipped through the gap where stone meets ditch, and sat herself in the short grass on the far side. She was looking ahead, not back. Her nose worked at something in the cold air, some information the field held that I could not read.

I stepped across.

The stone did not move.

I had carried the relay for seven nights. The oilcloth packet, two accounts inside: the surveyor's faithful record of unreckoned stones, each entry dated and signed, nothing interpreted; the walker's nine residencies, ninety authored moments, two voices in sequence without either erasing the other. I had not opened it since the first night. The relay clerk does not read what it carries.

The flat stone the clerk had left was warm from the morning. I set the packet on it. Rurik came from somewhere I had not seen him, landed beside the packet without sound, folded himself down with his paws tucked under his chest. His amber eyes fixed on the track leading out of Mistbarrow. He would wait for the absent witness. That accounting was not mine.

The distant reader would come by their own path. The absent witness does not need to have been there for the record to reach them. That is the whole of the relay: the account travels where the witness was not. It does not summarise. It does not decide. It arrives intact and waits to be received.

Lano looked back at me once. One ear up.

"Ya," she said.

I turned back toward the moor. Behind me the stone stayed where the surveyor had graved it, and the cat stayed beside the account, and the absent witness was already on their way through the cold field. Forty places cold. Forty places neither walked nor scheduled. The record does not grieve this. The record holds it.

Mistbarrow at my back now. The boundary stone exactly where it was.

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