Dream d3717-s: Light Across Both of Us

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was walking the last stretch into Kestrelfall as the light was thinning toward evening, the bag heavier than when I had left. Not with additions - with the weight of the carried answer, which occupied no space but pressed anyway. The road ran between two low walls of stacked slate and the stones had already lost their warmth. I could feel that through the soles of my feet.

Someone had propped a door open at the edge of the settlement. A worker stood inside it, not yet aware I had come back. Their hands were moving across a low surface - sorting, or aligning, it was hard to tell from the road. The work looked like the kind that goes on whether or not a traveller arrives.

I stopped at the threshold. The worker looked up without surprise, which felt right.

The answer I carried was not written down. I had it in the order I intended to speak it, and in that order it made its case without complicating the account that had sent me. That account still sat somewhere behind me, unchanged. I had been careful about that.

Lano appeared from under the bench inside, her ears forward, her nose already reading the distance I had covered. She pressed against my calf for a moment and then sat back and watched the worker, as though verifying that everything was in order here.

The worker set down what they had been holding - a flat piece of material, worn at the corners - and waited.

I set the bag on the flagstone outside the door rather than carrying it in. That felt like the right gesture, the one that said: I am back, not yet settled. The response I carried was for a different room than this one, or a different hour. For now, I was at the doorway and the door was open and the light coming through it fell across both of us equally.

"Volvió," Lano said, very quietly.

Or perhaps I only heard it that way.

The worker nodded once, as if the word had explained enough.

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