For a full minute after opening his eyes in the grey pre-dawn stillness of the eleventh morning, Seyun lay flat on his back under the wool blanket and listened to the lingering echo of the dream inside his chest.
On the winter morning when he walked down the rainy burial road from Ash Reed’s outer gate with his torn sleeping mat on his shoulder and Joren’s false breakthrough burning in his memory, a dream in which the entire check hall vanished before anyone pronounced his name would have woken him in a cold sweat of terror.
Back then, even in his anger at Senior Elder Tor Ves and Elder Hesh, his imagination had still been tethered to their dais. He first found Master Uren’s skeleton and the tablet of the Answering Spirit vein beneath the Monastery of the Last Question. Then, a quiet, hungry part of him had pictured the day he would walk back into Ash Reed’s courtyard at Bronze or Jade and force the elders to write down the truth they had refused to see. Even vindication, when you’re twenty-two and freshly expelled, wears the clothes of a check score.
Now, lying in the quiet shepherd hospice with Senn snoring softly three bunks away and the cold grey light of Dawn 11 seeping around the edges of the barred iron shutters, Seyun examined the empty stone of his dream. And found that its emptiness didn’t frighten him at all.
