Dream d1596-s: The Flicker at First Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we had been awake since before the sky changed color.

The cave mouth framed a rectangle of pre-dawn gray, and the party had arranged themselves without discussion - the Weather Reader cross-legged with her barometric gauge resting on one knee, the Builder standing with one shoulder against the blue-veined rock wall, and Rurik sitting at the very lip of the cave entrance, amber eyes tracking the gradual brightening of the open air. Lano was curled against my leg, warm and still.

We had slept in shifts. No one had said why. It felt like the right way to return.

The morning arrived slowly, the way mornings do at high pressure: no drama, no cloud movement, just light accumulating in the valley below the cave until the whole landscape became readable. The cycles glyph was catching the first pale illumination above my shoulder - the circles-within-circles carved into the blue-gray stone, smoothed at the edges by whatever hands first made them. I had not meant to look at it. I found myself looking at it anyway.

Then the Builder said, quietly: "It moved."

I turned. He was not looking at me. He was looking south, past the cave mouth, toward the kilometer of open ground where the framework sits on the low ridge.

It glows, usually. A steady presence, something you stop seeing the way you stop hearing a river. It had been there when we left. It had been there when we returned. It had been there for every dream I could account for, and many I could not.

For a moment it was not there.

Then it was again. Same position, same faint luminescence against the brightening sky.

The Builder had not moved. The Weather Reader set down her gauge without looking at it. Rurik's tail, which had been moving in slow arcs, went still. Lano lifted her head.

None of us spoke. I am not sure what we would have said. The flicker had lasted less time than it takes to blink. It was not darkness, not exactly - more like a held breath, a single skipped beat in something that had never skipped before.

We watched the ridge for a long time after that. The framework continued to glow. Steady. Normal.

But we had seen it. We all had. And the silence we sat in afterward was not the comfortable silence of an early morning. It was the silence of people who have just learned that something they had assumed was permanent is, in fact, a thing that can flicker.

Lano rested her chin on my knee and did not move again for a long while.