Dream d3664-s: The Bag I Carried Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the last stretch of road to Quillgreen ran between stacked walls of pale stone, roofless and old, and someone had laid a bundle of dried grass across one gap where a block had fallen. The gap was not wide enough to pass through - only wide enough to glimpse a figure on the other side, moving without urgency, carrying something flat and pale away from the main building.

Lano walked ahead of me, her nose low, tracking something I could not follow. The bag on my back had grown heavier through the morning; I had stopped once to rest, setting it down to feel the weight leave my shoulders, then shouldered it again.

The entrance to Quillgreen was shut - a wide plank door set flush into stone, its iron latch the same oxidized grey as the wall around it. A thin line of light showed under the threshold. Not lamplight; soft daylight, the kind that means a building has its own windows. Someone was working inside, or had been recently.

I set my hand on the latch and did not press it. I called the name of the person I had come to ask. Nothing returned. Not silence exactly - from the back of the building came the scraping drag of stone on stone, and birds moved in the upper courses of the wall. But no voice, no footstep moving toward the door from inside.

Lano sat down beside me. Her ears turned once toward the scraping sound, then settled.

I kept my hand on the latch. The bag hung from my back. The answer I had come for was somewhere beyond the door, or in the hands of the figure I had glimpsed through the gap, or still taking a form I had not yet learned to read. I did not open anything. The ochre of the stone was very bright in the low morning light.

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