Dream d3336-s: The Last Unread Folio

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench faced a window that no longer opened. The lamp at the corner of the desk gave back a yellow oval on the wood, and inside that oval I set the notebook open. It was the last one. I had not known it was the last one until I turned the cover and saw the single entry inside: Ironfall, five visits, present condition dormant.

Lano had found a corner near the wall where the floor was still warm. She lay there with her nose pointed toward the door, ears low, watching without urgency.

The relay clerk sat at the far end of the bench with both hands flat on the table. She did not look at the notebook. Her part was finished when she had handed it over, and the reading had happened somewhere else entirely, in a room none of us would see. What came back from there was nothing - not silence, not refusal, only the ordinary absence of return.

The surveyor stood near the window and made no measurements. The tool rested against his hip as though forgotten. Ironfall in its dormant state offered no dimension worth recording, or perhaps it offered every dimension and he had already taken them on an earlier visit.

I read the five entries from before without speaking them aloud. Each one named the weather and the gate and whether the keeper had been present. In three of the five, the keeper had not. Now the keeper stood just inside the far door, one hand on the frame, and did not come closer. This was its own kind of record: the keeper present, the place dormant, nothing at odds between those two facts.

I wrote the date and the hour and noted the lamp and the bench and the window that would not open. I wrote that the floor was still warm near the wall. I did not explain what the warmth meant or why it remained. Lano shifted once and resettled, her tail moving once against the floor and then stilling.

The distant reader was elsewhere. The account would reach them without my knowing when. There was nothing to send back, and the notebook closed the same way it had opened - without ceremony, with only the soft sound of covers meeting, which was not quite the same sound it would have made the first time, though I could not have said why.

Outside, Ironfall went on being dormant. The lamp stayed lit because no one had chosen to put it out.

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