Dream d3421-s: Nothing Asked of the Tower

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky over Ironspire was wide enough to make the tower look like a pin pressed into dark cloth. We came to it at the hour when light stops pretending it will return. Lano walked a little ahead, her ears low, her nose working the cold air that moved off the stone.

The tower stood dormant. That was the word the record used, dormant, though the record meant something by it I could not hear from this side. Its windows held nothing. Its door, a low arch of blackened iron, was closed without being locked. The entry-keeper stood a few paces back from it, neither entering nor withdrawing, watching the door the way someone watches a thing they have already decided not to touch.

I had the notebook. I did not open it.

A keeper of the place came around the far side of the base, where weeds had grown through the pavement in two crooked lines. He did not look at us. He carried a long-handled brush, moving it slowly across the lower stone. Not cleaning so much as touching, the way a person runs a hand along a wall they have passed ten thousand times.

The relay clerk was somewhere behind me. I could hear a faint scratch of notation, though I did not turn to see what was being marked.

Lano sat down at the edge of the tower's shadow. She did not cross into the space where the keeper moved. Her tail made one slow arc and was still. The sky was immense above, and the stars it carried were the cold kind, the ones that withhold.

I stood with the notebook under one arm and held it there. No one reached for it. The entry-keeper moved once, a single step toward the arch, then stopped, as if she had found the stopping-place sufficient.

The keeper disappeared around the tower's far side.

Wind moved through. Lano lifted her nose and held very still, catching whatever thread the air had brought in from the plain beyond. The tower stood where it had always stood. The sky over it did not narrow.

The record had called on Ironspire. Three times the record had called on it. No dream had said its name aloud.

I did not write in the notebook. That was all.

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