Dream d3337-s: The Hill Keeps No Reply

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the slag hill at Ironfall and the nine places were behind me and none of them visible. The ground was cold and fine, the cinders settling with each step like a soft refusal. Lano stood a little ahead, her nose down against the dark crust. She did not raise her head for a long time.

The keeper was near the old cooling pit. He did not speak. He stood with his hands at his sides the way a person stands when the reason for moving has not yet arrived. The lamplight came from a low iron hook, a single flame in still air, and it lit the near ground and nothing beyond.

I had been here before. The place remembered nothing of that. The relay clerk had her ledger open but was not writing. The surveyor stood at the edge where the slag dropped off, looking at the dark below, and I could not tell from where I was whether he was looking for something or had stopped looking.

The sent account was gone. That was the condition of it. Sent and received and read by someone I would not see. Whatever arrived in that reading had not come back. The place did not know that an account of it existed. It continued.

Lano sat down in the cinders and I sat beside her. She was warm against my arm. The keeper moved once, from the cooling pit to the hook, and adjusted the flame, and went back to where he had been. The nine places were still behind us and still not visible, and the hill did not lean toward them.

The relay clerk closed the ledger without writing anything in it. The surveyor came back from the edge. The flame in the iron hook burned at the same height it had always burned, unaffected by what had been read elsewhere, unaffected by our presence, burning because it was burning, the way the slag hill lay there in the dark because it lay there.

Lano pressed closer. I left my hand on her back and did not move it. The keeper stood by the cooling pit until the lamp guttered once and steadied. None of the nine places appeared. The hill held its shape in the dark, the same shape it had held before the account was made of it, the same shape it would hold after.

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