Dream d3392-s: What the Cold Stone Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where on the seventh night I carried the notebook to the spire top and stood there with it under my arm while the valley spread below.

From up there the fields made a pattern - pale and dark rectangles divided by thin hedgerows, the roads grey threads between them, and in the lower reach a strip of water barely different from the sky. The keeper stood near the parapet with both hands resting on the stone. The surveyor had a measuring string wound around one hand but was not measuring anything; the far end hung loose. The relay clerk wrote something small in her own notebook. The distant reader had positioned herself at the landward corner and looked at something I could not find from where I stood.

Lano sat beside me and watched the valley the same way I was watching it.

I had carried this notebook all seven nights without opening it. It had weight. The cover had been handled before - the corners soft, one edge darker than the others from some previous carrying. I did not know whose it was, and seven nights had not told me. I had held it near each person in the party when the light changed. I had stood close to the keeper when the keeper went still. Nobody had moved toward it. Nobody had looked up as if expecting it.

The keeper said, without turning, that the spire had been struck once by lightning and that the stone had held. She named it the way people name things that are finished.

Below, a cart moved along one of the roads. Slow. The horse was a dark shape against the pale surface and did not hurry. The clerk's pen scratched. Lano's ears lifted once at something in the middle distance, then came down.

I set the notebook on the parapet - not to leave it, I kept my hand near. To see if the place would settle around it. The stone was cold under my palm. The valley went on: the fields, the roads, the thin grey water.

The distant reader did not turn. The keeper looked at the notebook the way she had looked at the valley, without conclusion.

I picked it up again. Lano pressed against my leg as the last light fell. The valley held its pattern in the dark, and the notebook went on belonging to whoever was not here yet.

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