Dream d3405-s: Moss and the Unmarked Row

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench was at the base of the stair and the stair went up into Brackenspire's shadow. I sat with the ledger across my knees and did not wait for anything particular. The ledger was open. I had stopped waiting for anyone to come and read it.

The entry-keeper had gone ahead. The relay clerk stood at the far end of the bench with their back to me, reading something on the wall, something old enough that it had grown into the stone. I did not ask what it said. Lano sat at my feet with her nose moving toward the moss at the bench's base, slow and without urgency.

The wind came once. It moved the pages from the current sheet to the one before, and then back again, and settled. The entries were where they were. Brackenspire did not lean in to read them.

The place was dormant the way old places are dormant: not empty, not asleep exactly, but attending to its own accounting. Lichen covered the lower third of the stair column. A drip came from somewhere above and crossed the stone face and disappeared into a joint without sound. The moss at the bench's base was wet and doing whatever moss does with water when no one is measuring.

A keeper of the place crossed the courtyard above and did not come down. I watched until they were past the angle of the wall and gone. They carried something wrapped in cloth.

Lano's tail moved once, slow, and she set her chin on her forepaws.

I did not turn the page. The page the wind had moved was the page it moved back to, and this felt sufficient. Forty-one of the entries had been called on in the record and never once came up in a spoken account. Brackenspire was one of these. I had been here three times according to what the record said. I did not remember the other two. I remembered the bench.

The stair stayed empty. I stayed. The relay clerk moved further along the wall and read something further along. The entry-keeper did not come back down.

The wind did not move again.

The drip crossed the stone and disappeared, and did it again, and the lichen did not change, and the ledger was open and damp at one corner now where I had not been careful with my elbow. This was the only mark that happened and it was not in the record.

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