Dream d3233-s: The Crust Closes After

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I crossed the salt pan at the edge of Reedhaven just before the light turned flat. Lano's paws made small round marks beside my boot-prints, her nose close to the crust. The pan was wide and white and quiet. Behind me, the prints filled in, salt resettling into salt.

I carried the relay bundle, two accounts folded in oilcloth: one from the surveyor, dated and signed over unreckoned stone; one from the residency log, nine intervals, ninety authored moments, two dated hands traveling together without either erasing the other. The relay clerk had handed them to me at the reed-side before nightfall. The task was to put them in front of someone who had been absent for both readings.

Rurik appeared at the midpoint, slipping from somewhere low to the ground, amber eyes across the white distance. He sat in the middle of the crossing and stared. I stepped around him. He came after, parallel to Lano, tail low.

The absent witness lived at the far edge, in a low building that was half store and half counting-room. I knocked. A long silence. Then the door opened.

I set the bundle on the sill and stepped back. The absent witness lifted it without reading it yet. The relay was not a recitation. It was a transfer.

Lano sat while this happened. Her ears had been up the whole crossing. Now they settled.

The prints we had made were already half-gone by the time I looked back across the pan. The accounts had left no mark on the surface they crossed.

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