Dream d3407-s: What the Clerk Left Out

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the yard at Brackenspire had been swept, and someone had done it recently enough that the moss lines were still bright where the broom had turned. The fallen stones along the east wall had been sorted and stacked by size: the smallest in a low row near the gate, the larger ones rising in tiers toward the wall's broken end. Lano moved between them, nose close to the lowest tier, reading something I couldn't see.

The relay clerk sat on a flat-topped stone near the center of the yard, a page open on one knee, writing without looking up. I watched the pen move: the date first, in the margin, then a line about the yard itself, then another about the stacked stones. The clerk wrote slowly. The notebook I carried was not described, and I did not offer it.

A keeper came from the far side of the spire and stood near the gate for a moment, then walked the length of the stacked rows without touching them, looking at the sorting the way a person looks at something that was already there when they arrived. Then the keeper went back the way they came.

The entry-keeper sat in the shadow of the west wall with a tin cup, steam rising and scattering. Not looking at the clerk. Not looking at me. Watching the yard the way you watch a field in autumn, for no particular reason except that it is there and the light is doing something to it.

Lano left the stone row and trotted to the center of the yard and sat. Her ears were up. She was watching the gate, or something past the gate, or nothing - it was not possible to tell.

The relay clerk turned the page. Wrote the condition of the mortar between two of the larger stones. Wrote that the yard had been swept. Wrote the date again at the top of the new page. Lano's tail moved once across the ground.

I set the notebook on the lowest row of stones. It sat there the way things sit when no one is going to pick them up right away. The moss that had been swept from the base of the row was already beginning to return at the corners, a thin green edge reclaiming the base.

The steam from the entry-keeper's cup disappeared. The clerk kept writing. Brackenspire stood the way it had stood through other accounts, other dates, other swept yards. Lano put her head down and rested her chin on her paws. I stayed where I was. The record would say what the record said, and the yard would go on.

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