Dream d181-s: Three Moons, One Garden

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky held three moons and none of them agreed on the time.

One was full and very close, oversaturated white the way a sound is too loud - pressing against the eyes rather than simply being seen. One was a crescent, deep amber, the color of the word "crepuscular" if that word were edible. The third was doing something moons do not do: it was moving laterally, slowly, with apparent purpose, as if crossing toward an appointment.

Lano watched the moving moon with professional interest.

The writing garden arranged itself below all three of them - a place that was garden the way a question is a garden. Beds of flora that produced not flowers but shapes: geometric blooms that unfolded in configurations that meant something but not in any language with a name. Bioluminescent edges on every leaf, cold blue-green light that tasted of copper and mint. Paths that forked without hierarchy, each fork equal to the others, which is not how paths usually work.

I sat at a stone desk that had grown up from the ground with the unmistakable quality of something that had always been there, waiting for me specifically.

The Owl settled in a tree whose branches grew in a spiral, each level smaller, continuing past the point where branches should stop until they became something between branch and theorem.

"Write," he said. Not instructing. Observing that this was what was happening.

I was already writing. My hand moved across the page and the words appeared in a language I could read but not quite translate, which is how the most important things usually arrive.

"Escribir," Lano said softly, settling at my feet. To write.

"From the Latin scribere," the Owl said, his voice unhurried, the way a river is unhurried. "To scratch. To incise. The first writing was cutting into stone or clay - not depositing, not adding. Removing material to leave a mark. What you write," he paused for a long time, "takes something out of you. Permanently. That is why it stays."

The three moons cast three shadows from every object in the garden, each shadow a different color: one silver, one amber, one barely visible, more felt than seen.

I wrote in all three shadows simultaneously without understanding how.

The impossible flora continued its geometric blooming. A plant near my left hand opened into a shape that was either a spiral or a question - both readings true at the same time, the way some words hold two meanings that are not contradictions but completions.

Lano's breathing was the only regular sound. Everything else shifted: the light changed temperature with its color, the bioluminescent edges pulsed in a rhythm that was almost language, the three moons continued their separate accountings of the hour.

I wrote until the page was full, then wrote in the margins, then kept writing in the space the margins opened into.

At the bottom, in ordinary handwriting that had appeared without my choosing it: