Dream d3389-s: Spine Up in the Tower

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I climbed the tower stairs at Kestrelspire with the notebook pressed flat to my chest, Lano's nails clicking soft on each stone step below me. The fourth night of the residency, and the room at the top had not changed: one table cleared to the bare wood grain, a window with a latch that did not close flush, the smell of old resin and something that had dried slowly over many seasons.

I laid the notebook open on the table - face up, spine soft, pages spread to the cool air - and came back down the stairs. Lano came with me, her shoulder warm against my calf at the first landing.

The keeper was at the hearth when I reached the lower room, feeding wood into it without looking up. The relay clerk sat near the window with a mug, watching whatever the dark outside held. The surveyor had left his kit by the door as if he might need it at short notice, but he was not at the door. The distant reader was somewhere above, or had been, or was not yet arrived - the room gave no account of it.

I took a chair against the far wall. Lano settled at my feet, nose tilted toward the stair, ears soft but not sleeping. Her tail moved once, found nothing particular, stilled.

From above: no sound of pages. No creak of a figure leaning over the table. The tower room did what tower rooms do, which is hold the air and the small rattle of an unlatched window and the memory of the last thing set on its one clear surface.

The keeper finished with the wood and sat in his own chair. He did not ask what was upstairs. The relay clerk drank from the mug. Outside, Kestrelspire's stones held the night, each one in the place it had been placed, accumulated in other years with no expectation of this particular evening.

I could not tell if the notebook was for the tower or for someone the tower admitted. Presence was the only question I had means to ask, and I was asking it by being below while the notebook was above.

Lano lifted her nose, held it a moment toward the stair, then set her chin across my boot. The latch clicked once with the wind and then was still again.

The clerk finished his mug. The keeper's fire settled lower. The surveyor's kit stood by the door. Kestrelspire went on in the ordinary way of places that have held more than one witness and are not diminished by holding another.

Upstairs the notebook lay open and was not read, which was not the same as being ignored. The place recorded itself in every other way it knew - in heat leaving stone, in the window that would not close, in two prior visits made particular now by this third presence sitting below, a dog's weight across one boot and the night going about its own long business outside.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at a tower room, The dreamer lays the notebook open on the one clear table and waits below., muted moss and umber, warm amber accents, 8-bit style