Dream d3403-s: The Spire Never Nears

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lane into Brackenspire was rutted so deeply that my boot caught in each groove and I had to watch the ground, and when I looked up the spire was exactly where it had been. Lano trotted ahead, her white coat grey with road dust, and she stopped to sniff at something in the ditch - old bracken, or the memory of water - then came back to walk beside me.

The entry-keeper was there, a little behind, carrying the ledger under one arm the way a person carries a thing they no longer think about. The relay clerk came alongside after a while, not having come from anywhere I could name, as if the lane had produced them the way it produced each new rut underfoot.

I did not look at my notebook. I had it in my coat but I had stopped taking it out. The account of this place was old - two visits, the record said, both witnessed, the place itself gone quiet. What I carried did not change that. The lane did not know what I was carrying and I did not tell it.

The spire was the same size at the top of the next rise as it had been at the bottom. I had been walking toward it for an hour and it had declined to come closer. There was something steady about that. The bracken on either side had gone to seed, pale and feathery in the low light, and Lano moved through a gap in it, disappeared, came back with burrs along her ear.

A keeper stood at a field gate further along, not watching us, watching something in the field I could not see. They did not turn. The relay clerk did not call out. We passed at the distance the lane allowed and the keeper went on watching the field.

I wrote nothing. There was nothing to repair or explain. The place was dormant and going on the way dormant things go on - not stopped, just unhurried, running at a register too slow for a visit to disturb.

The spire was the same size. The lane was rutted. Lano shook the burrs from her ear against my leg and said, very quietly, "ya," as if she had simply remembered something small.

We walked.

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