Dream d1586-s: Other Hands, These Stones

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the scrub opened into a wide sloping shelf of pale rock, and the cairns were there before we saw them.

Rurik stopped first. The black cat went still at the edge of the path, amber eyes fixed on the nearest stack of stones - three flat pieces balanced on a fourth, ringed by smaller pieces exactly as I remembered from the old camp at the origin. Not one cairn. A scatter of them across the shelf, rising from the dry grass in ones and twos, patient and silent.

"Someone left markers," the Builder said, crouching beside the nearest. He ran a thumb along the joint between stones.

"Many someones," the Weather Reader said.

She was right. The cairns were not uniform. Different stacking choices, different hands visible in the selections - some columnar, some wide and low, one built around a hollow at its base. They were not made at the same time, or by the same people, or for the same particular reason. Only the direction was shared.

Lano moved between them with her nose close to the ground, tail low, reading something in the dust I could not. She paused at one cairn, sat, looked back at me. Vamos, her posture said, or something like it.

Then the wind changed.

I heard it before I felt it - a low, sustained note across the open shelf, warm and carrying something electrical in it. To the north-east, back the way we had come, a wall of cloud had stacked itself against the hills while we were walking. It was already past the settlement.

"That is moving fast," the Builder said, standing.

The Weather Reader had her barometer out. She held it up without speaking. Her face said enough.

Through the scrub we could make out the settlement's antenna masts above the tree line. One was not swaying. It was bending. The wind at that distance had real weight. A flicker crossed the framework's glow on the far skyline - not gone, but interrupted, the way a lamp stutters when the generator surges and draws too much.

Lano barked once. Short, sharp, ears flat against her skull.

"Cable trenches will flood," the Builder said quietly. He was already calculating something with his hands.

"Nothing we reach from here," the Weather Reader said. She did not say it lightly.

We stayed a moment longer on the cairn shelf. The stones stood as they had stood before we arrived, patient through whatever the weather brought. Others had stood here too - returning, as we were returning - and had stacked a few pieces and walked on.

I did not know their names. I did not need to. The path was already worn below my boots.