Dream d3441-s: Called On, Never Named

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the city was loud before it was visible. The noise arrived first - carts, voices stacked on voices, something metal struck at regular intervals in the middle distance. I stood on the open ground outside the walls and heard all of it without seeing any of it. Lano walked ahead, nose to the dry grass, quartering back and forth across the path the way she does when the ground holds a dozen different histories at once.

The entry-keeper had set up a folding table here on the open ground, not at the gate but fifty meters short of it, where the noise reached but the walls did not. The relay clerk stood nearby with nothing in their hands. There was no ceremony to any of this. The keeper of the place had come out from the gate and stopped somewhere between us, not to receive anyone, simply to stand where both directions were visible.

I had the notebook in my coat. I had stopped opening it sometime in the last three nights - not stopped carrying it, just stopped looking for the moment when someone would want to see it. It was there the way a stone in a pocket is there. I didn't take it out.

The entry-keeper marked the table with a check and said nothing. The relay clerk looked at the gate. The keeper stood. Lano had drifted back to me and sat at my heel, ears up, attending to something I couldn't resolve from the general sound of the city going about its evening.

The record had named this place among the called-on and unentered. I had walked to it. This was the whole of the visit.

The city did not quiet itself for any of it. Light was going out of the sky and into the walls, the way it does at the edge of a place that does not look back. The keeper of the place turned at some point and walked toward the gate. I did not follow. I stood on the empty ground until Lano stood too, and then we walked a different way, parallel to the wall, where the noise rode alongside us without arriving anywhere.

The notebook was in my coat. No one had asked for it.

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