Dream d3431-s: The Ground Before the Square Opens

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the open ground of Umbermarket came before the square did, a long flat stretch of pressed earth and low stone, the broken wall standing at its far edge like something that had simply stopped mid-sentence and grown used to it.

Lano moved ahead of me along the ground, her white coat catching the amber that came low off the stone courses. She did not go to the wall directly. She circled wide, nose down, finding something in the dust that required her full attention, and I let her go.

The entry-keeper stood near the wall's remaining courses, not touching them. The relay clerk was further back, at the place where the ground began to roughen toward the edge of the square's old perimeter. Neither of them spoke. The keeper of this place was already there when we arrived - standing in the gap where the wall had opened, facing out, and I could not tell whether they had been facing in or out when they first arrived, or whether the distinction held here.

I kept the notebook inside my coat. I had not opened it since the last entry. The place did not require the notebook, and the notebook had not asked to be opened.

What was here: the wall's courses in moss and umber, the dressed stone at the base still good, the upper break ragged as pulled bread. The ground was not overgrown. Something kept it down, or nothing grew in this particular strip, or the keeping was the absence of anything that might obscure it. A flat stone near the wall's base held a shallow bowl of rainwater and, at the water's surface, a single small floating feather, brown, unmoved.

Lano came back to my side, her tail at a low steady angle. She sat beside the flat stone and looked at the feather without touching the water.

The keeper of the place did not turn. The relay clerk took no steps. The entry-keeper held a small piece of chalk at their side, and the wall received nothing new.

The square was audible beyond the wall - a low sound, not commerce, not crowd, but the ambient register of a place occupied somewhere in its middle, going on.

I stood with the notebook sealed and the place going on around it, and the feather did not move, and the water in the bowl held the late amber sky perfectly still.

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