Dream d3349-s: The Notebook Waits for Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came first, a clean thread of it through the bracken before I saw the water. The notebook was under my arm, its corner damp from the mist that had settled into the trees since before the path opened out. I had been carrying it the way you carry something not yet yours to put down.

Brackenfall was not empty but it was quiet in the way of a place that has been visited before and knows it. The keeper moved along the near bank, checking something low to the ground that I could not name from the distance. The surveyor stood on the flat shelf of rock above the crossing with both hands at his sides, watching the water pass rather than measuring it. The relay clerk sat on the cut bank, not writing, ledger closed over her knee.

Lano had gone ahead. She stood at the edge of the water with her nose down, reading the smell of it the way the surveyor read the current. Her tail moved once and held still.

I came to the crossing and stood. The water ran thin over the stones, not drought, more a season easing off, a river finding its lower register. The sound of it filled the approach without asking anything. It continued.

The keeper looked up once across the water and looked back down. Not at the notebook. At whatever had drawn her to the bank.

The distant reader was somewhere above the crossing, back in the trees. I felt the direction of that attention the way you feel someone reading in the same room, present but not adjacent.

Nothing came forward for the notebook. I did not offer it. The surveyor settled onto the rock shelf with one leg folded under him. The relay clerk opened her ledger and wrote something brief. Lano lifted her head, found me across the water with her eyes, and came back on dry stones.

Amber deepened in the bracken as the light moved. Brackenfall received the party and went on being what it was. I stood at the thin water a while longer, the notebook under my arm, and nothing resolved, which was not the same as nothing happening.

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