Dream d3341-s: The Weight Before the Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road into Alderbarrow ran between two low ridges and the grass on either side held its color until the last of the light left it. Lano walked ahead, her white coat going grey in the dusk, her nose low along the verge where the barrow stones showed their faces. I felt the notebook in the pack before I thought of it - a small pressure at the base of my spine, like a stone not yet placed.

The village came forward the way dormant places do: by the smell of banked fire and standing water, not by sound. A keeper stood at the edge of the road by a low wall, turning something over in one hand - a key, or a clasp, I could not tell. She did not speak. Lano paused beside my leg, ears up, tail still.

There were other figures at the far end of the lane. The relay clerk stood under the eave of a long building with one lamp burning. The surveyor moved along the wall of a shed, trailing a hand along its face. I did not know where the distant reader was - perhaps inside, perhaps further along the ridge road. I did not call to any of them.

The keeper turned the thing over once more and set it on the wall and left it there.

Lano pressed ahead into the lane, and I followed. The notebook did not open. I had not thought to open it. The weight of it was the finding, for now - that it had traveled this far and remained itself, pages pressed together in the dark of the pack, read by no one.

A light came on in a window above the long building. The relay clerk went inside. I found a door with a stone lintel and a bolt drawn back already. Lano sat down at the threshold and looked up at me.

"Vale," she said, very quietly.

I set my hand on the doorframe and the notebook pressed against my back and neither of those things said anything more. The place went on around us the way dormant things go on - not waiting, not finished, simply holding what it holds.

Inside, the lamp was the same lamp from the window. The keeper's clasp was still on the wall outside. Whatever Alderbarrow keeps in its account, it did not offer tonight, and I did not ask.

I set the pack down without opening it. The notebook was still in it when I slept.

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