Dream d3446-s: Four Walls, No Roof

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the moor stretched in every direction without interruption, and four turf walls rose from it like a question with no ceiling. The structure was not ruined. It had simply never been finished, or had been finished and was this: four walls, the sky for a roof, and the ground inside no different from the ground outside except that something had chosen to mark it.

Lano moved ahead of me through the heather, her white coat catching the late light. She stopped at the nearest wall and pressed her nose to the cut edge of the turf, then lifted her head and held still. The wind came over the moor in long movements, bending the grasses in one direction and releasing them.

I stepped inside. The four walls were shoulder height and the space between them was perhaps eight paces by six. There was no door and no lintel. The entry-keeper stood near the far wall with the ledger open across both arms, reading down a column without speaking. The relay clerk stood at the opposite corner, back to the wall, watching the moor. Neither of them looked up.

I did not speak either. The place did not ask for speech.

The ground inside held a shallow scrape near the center, a circle of darker earth where something had been set down many times over years. Not ash. Not water. Just the compression of repeated attention. I crouched beside it and the smell was cold root and stone and the particular stillness of ground that has been sheltered from wind for a long time.

Lano came through the open side of the wall and stood at the edge of the scrape. Her tail moved once. She sat down.

The entry-keeper turned a page. The relay clerk shifted weight from one foot to the other. The moor went on past the walls in all four directions, indifferent and unchanged, lit with the amber of late afternoon that would be gone in an hour.

I stayed until the shadow of the western wall reached the center mark. Then I stood, and Lano stood with me, and we went out through the open side and back into the heather. The walls stayed behind us, holding their portion of sky. Nobody came to lock them. There was nothing to lock.

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