Dream d1431-s: Cloth and Pressed Leaves

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path curved through the tall pines and opened into the workshop clearing without warning. Just sudden brightness, sawdust in the air, and something older underneath it all, older than the timber.

The Wireman stood at his bench. He did not look up. His hands moved in small, deliberate strokes along a pale length of wood, the chisel tracking a groove that followed the grain as if the grain had asked for it. I watched him work for a moment before I noticed Lano had stopped walking.

Lano stood four paces behind me on the footpath, ears pricked, nose lifted. Not alert the way Lano goes alert for animals. Alert the way Lano went alert in the cave network under the Mystic Rocks, when the air had changed before we understood why.

"There it is again," said the Weather Reader from behind me. I had not heard him approach. He was looking at the small receiver clipped to his pack, not at the clearing. "Faint. Consistent. Not atmospheric."

Lano's ears stayed up.

Behind the workshop, half-hidden by the woodpile and a row of drying racks, the Dreamer was pressing specimens: leaves, bark sections, something that might have been a seed pod from one of the Shifting Gardens varieties. She worked with the same focused quiet as the Wireman, her hands sorting, not cutting. Ordering things before the order changes.

"She has been at that since dawn," the Weather Reader said. "Photographed the whole press before closing it."

"For what?" I asked.

He looked up from his receiver. "For when we leave."

The Wireman set down the chisel. He picked up the piece of wood, a smooth curve of unclear function, and held it to the light. Turned it once. Then he set it beside the others lined up along the bench's edge and began wrapping them in cloth, careful and systematic, the way he wrapped everything before moving it.

He had been doing this since before we arrived.

Lano trotted into the clearing, made a slow circuit of the bench, nosed at the wrapped pieces, and sat down facing the far tree line.

"Mira," Lano said.

Not at us. At the trees.

The Weather Reader checked his receiver. The number had not changed. But the Dreamer was already closing the press, and the Wireman was already loading his pack, and somewhere in the canopy the White Crane shifted from one branch to another without a sound.

The signal was faint. That would not last.