Dream d3250-s: The Empty Hands Return

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I placed the two accounts on the table in the eastmost room of Cinderwick - the surveyor's dated record of stones, the distant reader's interval notes, neither erasing the other - and the absent witness took her chair and looked at what I had brought.

The relay clerk had sealed nothing. There was nothing to unseal. The pages lay open between us. Lano sat at the threshold and was very still, nose toward the absent witness, tail unmoving.

I did not explain the accounts. I did not summarize what the surveyor had measured or which residencies the distant reader had crossed. I had carried them and set them down, and now they belonged to whoever would read them in this room.

Rurik had taken the high shelf behind the absent witness, amber eyes half-closed, already bored with what was not yet begun.

The absent witness reached for the first page but did not turn it while I was watching.

I stepped back. Then I was at the door. Then I was in the road.

It was the same road that had brought me. I had not known it was the same road while I was walking the other direction, carrying the record. The difference was the weight, and the weight was gone. Seven nights in Cinderwick and on the last night I walked empty-handed into a dark that had been there before I arrived.

Lano came alongside. Her paws made the same small sound they had always made. She did not look back and so I did not either.

The absent witness did not call after us. I don't know what she said when she read it. I was already down the road.

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