Dream d3506-s: The Warmth Left in Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground gave a little under each step, the way ground does when the living part of it is very close to the surface. The walls of Brackenmoss rose out of the moss to the height of a shoulder, no higher, stone going the colour of the thing it stood in. There was no gate, no threshold marked, only the place where the soft ground met the base of the wall and the moss continued up both sides without distinction.

Lano moved ahead of me along the wall's outer face, nose low, reading what the ground gave her. She did not go around to look for an opening. She stopped at a corner where two walls met and sat, ears forward, watching something in the near distance I could not place.

The relay clerk had the sheet ready before I asked. I took it and set it at the base of the wall where the ground was least wet, at the corner nearest to where Lano sat. The date was on it and the name of the place and nothing else. I set a flat stone from the path's edge across one corner to keep it from lifting.

The walls did not change. The moss at the base was already beginning to work at the edge of the stone I had placed, not urgently, in the way moss works at everything given time enough. The sheet lay against the wall's face. The wall held the warmth of whatever sun had reached it that afternoon and the paper took that warmth and held it in turn. A small damp was moving up from the ground, the way it does in such places after dark comes on, but slowly, and the sheet was dry when I straightened.

Lano had not moved from the corner. Her ears came down when I stood, and she looked at me once, then back at the middle distance. The entry-keeper made a mark in the ledger without speaking. The place went on being dormant the way a place does when nothing is required of it.

I walked on. The walls stayed behind, standing out of the moss at the height of a shoulder, keeping the sheet the way they kept everything else - without intention, without record, the way a surface keeps the temperature of whatever last rested against it.

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