Dream d1571-s: North Is a Decision

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wind came straight across the saddle and would not stop, scouring the bare rock, pushing at us sideways so we had to lean into it to stand.

There was no shelter on the exposed saddle. The ridge fell away on both sides into the wired country, and the wind came over the top of it carrying nothing - no smell, no warmth, just force. It snatched the words out of our mouths and threw them downhill. We had stopped here because the body wants to stop somewhere, and this was somewhere, and the argument started almost at once.

"We rest," the Builder shouted over the wind, planting herself. "We have pushed since the pre-dawn. The source isn't going anywhere - it has run untended this long, it will run one night more. We stop, we sleep, we go on with light and legs."

"We're close," the Weather Reader called back, her hair torn flat sideways. "I can read it on the gear. Closer than rest is worth."

The Listener wanted to stop. The Scholar wanted his notebook out of the wind. Voices crossed over the saddle, none of them wrong, all of them blown half away before they landed.

The Dreamer did not argue. He had not said a word since the pre-dawn. He stood through the whole of it with his camera lowered, looking north into the wind, and when the argument had wound itself tight with no knot to tie it off, he simply started walking. North. Into the scour. One boot and then the other, leaning into the force of it, certain, saying nothing.

The wind kept on. We looked at each other across it.

Then the Builder swore once, shouldered her pack, and went after him. And the rest of us followed, because his certainty was the only fixed thing on that whole bare saddle, and we cede direction to the one who has stopped needing to argue for it.

We crossed the saddle north, leaning, behind his silence.