Dream d1587-s: The Plumb Line of Smoke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we made the last camp in the hollow below the cliff face, close enough that I could smell the blue-stone in the air - a mineral cold that I recognized without knowing I had stored it.

Rurik found the spot before we did. He was already sitting at its center when we arrived, amber eyes level, tail tucked against his flank. He had chosen the old fire ring - or what remained of it, two stones still blackened, set apart at exactly the width we had once needed.

The Builder knelt and examined them. "Same spacing," he said. Not surprise. Satisfaction.

We built the fire small. The wood was dry and caught fast, and the smoke went straight up. Not almost straight. Straight. A single column, rising without lean or thinning, climbing until it vanished against the last color in the sky.

The Weather Reader stopped what she was doing and watched it.

"High pressure has been sitting on this ridge for two days," she said. "The instruments read it, but-" She gestured at the column. "Seeing it is different. That is the origin's own air. The caves hold it like a bowl."

I sat down and looked at it. I had camped in wind and rain, in smoke that lay flat for an hour and stung until your eyes ran. This was nothing like that. This was the air holding still on purpose.

Lano pressed against my leg, nose tilted once toward the smoke, then toward the dark cliff above us. Her ears moved. Then she was still.

Rurik had not moved from the center of the camp. His eyes caught the firelight, and I thought he was watching the column too, though with cats it is never certain.

The framework glowed steady on the skyline behind us - the same light I had seen from two hundred kilometers north and from every valley in between. I had been moving toward it and away from it for so long I had stopped counting. Now it was simply behind us, and the caves were simply ahead.

The smoke rose. The air held it. Nobody spoke.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I did not reach for the camera.

The column did not bend.