Dream d172-s: he repeated, tasting the word.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano's nose found me before I found myself.

Cold and specific, that nose. Pressed against the back of my hand where it had gone transparent at the void's edge, and the contact was so precisely real that it pulled the rest of me back like a thread being gathered from scattered points in space. I felt my shoulders arrive first. Then the particular weight of my feet. Then the notebook's familiar resistance against my ribs, its pages dense with written things.

"Bien," Lano said, quietly, like confirming something he had been watching for.

The owl perched on a fold in the air nearby, autumn feathers settling. He had the look of someone who had waited before and knew how to do it without showing impatience.

"Bien," he repeated, tasting the word. "From the Latin bene. Good. Well. Rightly. But listen to what it actually means - bene, from the Proto-Indo-European root dew-: to do, to perform, to complete." He tilted his enormous head. "The little witness is saying: the completing is done. You are done dissolving. Now you do the next thing."

I looked at my hands. Present. Specific. The particular geography of my own palms, which I had nearly given to the void without even deciding to.

The gathering point was not a place exactly. It was more like the quality of air when weather is deciding what to become. Not cold, not warm. Temperature shifting with color the way synaesthesia works in the Gardens: blue tasted like copper, and something I can only call "clearing" made the light turn amber at the edges.

Around me, in the impossible geometry of this space where angles did not maintain their commitments, fragments were still arriving. The smell of the distillery. The weight of a train moving north through mist. The sound of the fisherman's logbooks being opened. These were not memories exactly - they were more like stones returning to a cairn they had been part of, each one knowing its proper place by the wear of its surface.

Lano walked ahead and looked back. He did not explain where he was going. He had never needed to.

I followed. The notebooks pages seemed denser than before - more full, somehow, than when they had been written. As if surviving the void had pressed the ink deeper into the paper. The owl dropped from his perch and glided alongside us without apparent effort, occasionally murmuring things I could only half catch.

"Wild," I heard him say. "From the Old English wilde. Self-willed. Not tamed. Which is..." A very long pause. "Which is what you had almost forgotten you were."

I wrote in the notebook: