Dream d3346-s: What the Pen Left Out

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the scratch of the pen came before I found the bench - I heard it from the corridor and followed the sound in. The relay clerk sat at the square bench with a page half-filled, writing without looking up. Lano came in at my heels and found a corner near the far wall, nose down, working something invisible in the floor's seam.

The notebook was in my hands. I had carried it since the road before Alderbarrow, two days at least, longer if I counted from when someone first pressed it on me. I could not remember the moment; I remembered only that it had been mine to carry and had not been mine to open.

I sat at the bench. The clerk wrote. I could see the pen forming a date at the top of the page, then a count of some kind, then a description I could not read from my angle. The keeper stood beside the window with hands at rest, looking at the courtyard below. The surveyor moved out there, pausing at intervals. The distant reader was seated in the room's far corner, back to us.

Nobody looked at the notebook. I set it on the bench beside me. Lano raised her head and then dropped it again.

This was the sixth night in Alderbarrow. The residency had two nights left. Whatever the place was deciding, it was still deciding. Dormant was the right word for it - not finished, not abandoned, not waiting, simply existing at a level below what could be witnessed in a single visit.

The clerk turned the page. The keeper did not move from the window. The distant reader's shoulders were still.

I picked up the notebook once and turned it in my hands, not opening it, reading only the outside of it - the wear along the spine, the small dent at one corner, the nothing it gave me about where it was going.

Lano made a small sound. Not a word. Not a direction. Just a breath that said the room was the room.

I set the notebook back on the bench. The clerk wrote the empty room. Outside, the surveyor paused, looked at the building, wrote something, and moved on.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at a square bench, The relay clerk writes the date and the empty room, and nothing about what the notebook says., muted moss and umber, warm amber accents, 8-bit style