Dream d3335-s: A Row of Low Hills

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the room at Ironfall was colder than I expected for the fifth night, though I had expected cold. The keeper stood near the door with her hands loose at her sides, watching the shelf. I carried the ledger to it and set it flat on the surface beside the others, the ones with no labels on their spines, the ones whose edges had worn to a soft grey. No one spoke while I did this.

Lano sat by the wall with her nose pointed toward the lower shelf, the one closer to the floor. Her ears stayed up. She did not move from that position for a long time.

The shelf itself was not elaborate. Plank wood, three brackets, paint that had gone from white to something between cream and shadow. The older ledgers were thicker than the one I had brought. I could not tell from their condition whether they had been read often or not at all.

The surveyor had already closed his case. He stood near the window, which looked onto the interior courtyard, and the courtyard was dark. The relay clerk sat at the small table and had written nothing since we arrived. She rested her pen against the spine of her notebook and watched the lamplight.

What I placed on the shelf was a record of one hundred and fifty places. Seventy-five of them had been spoken into the ledger by people who were elsewhere when they spoke. Seventy-five had not yet been entered. Ironfall was in the first group, four accounts carried back across the years by whoever had stood here before and found the same lamplight, the same cold, the same shelf with the others lined up along it.

I stepped back. The keeper moved her weight from one foot to the other but stayed by the door.

There was a smell in the room that was not quite wood and not quite coal, something that accumulates when a place has been kept correctly over time. The lamp on the shelf threw its light upward at a shallow angle and made the ledger spines look like a row of low hills in late afternoon.

Lano turned from the lower shelf and pressed the side of her face against my knee. I kept my hand at my side.

The keeper did not say whether the place would change. The surveyor did not measure. The relay clerk's pen stayed still. The older ledgers did not shift or open. The lamp burned at the same height it had been burning when we entered, and the room went on being the room it was.

---

Artwork instructions

IMAGE: pixel art a human figure at a keeping shelf, The ledger is placed on the shelf beside older ledgers with no labels., muted moss and umber, lamplight amber accents, 8-bit style