Dream d3312-s: Doorway Without a Latch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the watch hut at Umberfall had its door propped open with a flat stone, the same flat stone or one very like it - grey, speckled, pressed into the threshold so the night could enter as it pleased.

The keeper sat at the table inside, both hands resting on the wood, not writing, only present. A lamp burned between the hands, amber light reaching to the doorframe and stopping there. Beyond the door, the darkness between the hills was complete - no cloud-glow, no reflected anything, just the dark lying down.

The relay clerk stood near the eastern wall. The surveyor had come with the folded measurements from before and held them without opening them.

Lano came in ahead of me, her nails quiet on the stone floor. She circled the table once, then settled near the lamp where the warmth had stayed in the flagstones since afternoon. She set her nose to the crack between two stones and breathed in very slowly.

I sat on the bench along the near wall.

There was a clay cup beside the lamp with something dried in the bottom. The last time an account had gone out from this place, there had been rain on the roof. There was no rain now. The silence had more texture without it, more surfaces to settle into.

The distant reader was not in the room. The relay clerk stood near the window in a way that left room for that absence - not marking it, only not filling it.

The keeper did not look at any of us. The keeper looked at the open door.

The moss on the outer wall was the same moss. I touched the flat stone on my way in - the upper face still held the warmth of the day. The hut was doing what it had done before: keeping watch on the dark, letting the dark in at the door, recording nothing, holding everything.

Lano exhaled once, long and slow. Her tail moved against the floor: once, twice, then still.

The lamp burned. The door stayed open on its flat stone. Somewhere in the hills, Umberfall went on being what it was - a sending place, a place that had sent once, a place that would send again when it had something to say.

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