Dream d3363-s: The Arch Does Not Ask

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing beneath the arch at Fennbridge on the seventh night, the notebook tucked under my arm, and the water moved below me in the dark, clear enough that I could see stones on the bottom that had not shifted in years. Lano stood at my heel, her nose working the cold air off the water, her tail low and slow.

The keeper came along the bank from the north side, lantern in hand, walking the way someone walks who has covered the same ground five times and found it unchanged each time. She did not look at me directly. She looked at the arch, then at the water, then past me to the stones on the far bank. I did not offer the notebook. She did not reach for it.

The relay clerk sat on the capstone of the low wall beside the approach, making marks in a ledger of their own. The surveyor stood in the shallows on the east side, boots off, pressing bare feet against the old line of a ford that had crossed here before the arch was built. Neither came nearer.

I held the notebook and let the presence of the place read me instead.

The distant reader was somewhere on the road above, or had been. I could not see them from here, only hear what might have been a step on gravel, then nothing. Lano's ears came up, then settled.

What the arch said was: this water has always moved. What the arch said was: you are the seventh time something has paused here. It did not say whether there would be an eighth.

I set the notebook on top of the wall, cover up, not open. The keeper passed it on her way back and did not stop. The relay clerk glanced at it and returned to their own marks. The surveyor waded to the east bank and sat to dry their feet.

Lano sniffed the base of the wall beneath the notebook, then sat down, which is sometimes how she decides something.

The stones on the bottom of the stream did not move.

I picked the notebook up again.

---