Dream d3282-s: The Stones Keep On

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mill door was already open when we arrived, and inside the stones turned in the dark with no one tending them. The sound of it came out into the night air, a low regular grinding that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the building. Lano stopped at the threshold and pressed her nose to the edge of the door. Her ears were up.

I stepped inside. The relay clerk had her ledger open against one arm, adding a line, though what there was to add to what had already been sent I could not have said. The surveyor moved along the far wall, measuring the depth of shadow more than any physical dimension. No grain lay in the hopper. No miller stood at the feed. The stones simply continued, as they had perhaps always continued when no account was being taken of them.

Last time I had stood here, a keeper was present, small and deliberate in their movements, their attention folded into some internal task. They were not here now. What remained was a jacket hung on a peg beside the door, and one shallow wooden bowl turned upside down near the feed mechanism, as if set there to cover something, or simply because that was where it belonged.

Lano came in after me, nails quiet on the stone floor. She moved toward the jacket without urgency, sniffed its hem, and then sat down beneath it. Not claiming anything. Just marking where she was.

The stones continued. The sound was not unpleasant. It belonged to the room the way the smell of flour dust and old timber belonged to it, a presence that did not require anyone to sustain it. The relay clerk looked up once from her ledger, toward the mechanism, and then back down. The surveyor found something at the wall and paused.

I stood in the middle of the floor and let the grinding settle into my ears. Outside, the night was still. I had read what was sent from this place, not here but elsewhere, and I had come back to find the mill doing what it did when no one read anything. The door stood open because that was how we had found it. I did not close it.

After a while Lano rose, walked once around the base of the mechanism, and settled again closer to the open door. The stones turned. The account that had gone out from this place was somewhere else now, being kept or being read or sitting in a drawer. None of that made any difference to the stones. They were simply here, doing the one thing they knew how to do, in the dark, with no one watching.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at a mill door, The mill door stands open, and inside the stones turn with no one watching them., muted moss and umber, lamplight amber accents, 8-bit style