Dream d1592-s: Cave Mouth, Cave Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cave entrance was smaller than I remembered.

That was the first thing. Not the glyphs, not the cool exhale of deep stone air, but the size of the opening itself - a low arch of blue granite, scalloped at the edges where the sea had worked at it for longer than anyone could measure. I had carried this doorway in my head for over fifteen hundred nights of walking and somewhere along the way I had made it grander. It was not grand. It was exactly the right size to make you bow your head.

Rurik did not bow. He walked in first, the way he always does when he knows the place, tail low and certain, his amber eyes already reading the dark before the rest of us had crossed the threshold.

The Weather Reader came in second, ducking the lintel, one hand rising automatically to touch the stone above the arch the way you touch a shoulder to say I know you. She said nothing. She had been talking for three days straight on the road and now she was quiet and I understood that as respect.

The Builder stopped outside a beat longer than the rest of us, turning to look back at the plain, at the framework glow sitting steady on the horizon a kilometer south. Still glowing. Autonomous, patient, indifferent to our arrival. He watched it for a moment the way you watch a lamp you have left burning in a window - relieved it is still there, uncertain what it means that you are glad. Then he came inside.

Lano came last. She pushed past my legs, trotted in three steps, and stopped. Her nose worked the air in long deliberate pulls. She found something and her ears went flat against her skull - not fear, something older than fear. Recognition.

The walls came up around us in the firelight the Builder struck.

I had forgotten how many glyphs there were. In memory the cave had two or three significant marks. In fact the walls were covered, circles and figures and lines running from knee height to above the reach of my arms, the carvings worn at the edges but not gone, every one of them still whole. The firelight moved across them and they moved back, the shadows in the cuts shifting, and for a moment the wall seemed to breathe.

We did not read anything yet. We stood in the entrance chamber and let the place be what it was: the beginning, still intact, waiting.

I put my hand on the nearest wall. Blue stone, cold, the carved channel of some glyph I could not name yet running under my palm.

The framework glowed on the skyline through the arch behind us.

Rurik sat down in the center of the cave and waited.