Dream d3226-s: Hours the Anvil Held

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the smithy door in Ashholt and did not go in. The light inside was orange and constant, and the anvil rang at intervals I could not predict, each stroke landing like a page turned in a book no one was reading aloud. Lano sat beside my left boot with her ears tilted toward the sound, nose twitching at iron-smell and coal-smell and the particular smell of work that had been going on before I arrived and would continue after I left.

I had two accounts in my pack. The first was the surveyor's record from the reckoning session: a faithful catalogue of unreckoned places, each entry dated and signed in a hand I recognised but could not name. The second was the residency log from the interval work: nine occasions, ninety moments, two dated readings that had travelled beside each other without either one consuming the other. I had carried both accounts across three junctions to bring them here, to this threshold, to the absent witness who had not been present for either reading.

Rurik appeared on the beam above the doorway, settling himself with the slow deliberate weight of a cat who has identified the warmest point in any structure. He stared down at me. He did not move again for a long time.

The absent witness came out from behind the forge. I did not know the role before I saw it filled: a figure who received objects as though receiving news, whose hands opened not to hold but to acknowledge. I drew the first account from the pack and set it on the workbench. Then the second, beside it, not overlapping. The absent witness looked at both without touching them. The anvil rang once more. Lano padded forward, sniffed the corner of the workbench, and sat down again facing me, as if to confirm I had handed the thing over correctly.

That was the relay. I did not explain the accounts. I did not summarise what the surveyor found or what the residencies produced. The records had their own languages and I had carried them intact and now they belonged to the reading that would come after. Whatever the absent witness made of them was not mine to witness. I was the clerk of the interval, nothing more: present at the door, present at the handoff, then standing back while the orange light held steady and the hammer somewhere deep in the forge measured out the remainder of the night.

Lano watched me turn from the door. She gave one quiet sound, barely a bark, more like punctuation. I shouldered the empty pack and we walked back into Ashholt together.

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