Dream d1603-s: Lano's Second Gift

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the high-pressure air off the scree slope had a particular quality - dry and mineral, carrying the smell of crushed stone and nothing else. We had been at the cave mouth long enough that the smell of the interior, that blue-tinged cool, had become ordinary again. This was still new: the outside, the rubble field stretching south and east, the afternoon sun on pale broken rock.

Lano had gone out onto the scree twice before in the phase, both times returning with nothing but dusty paws. This time she went farther. I watched her white shape move between the larger boulders until the slope swallowed her.

The Weather Reader was making notations from the barometric readings she kept on a short post driven into the soil at the cave lip. The Builder had one knee down beside the old stone circle, checking the angle of a placed stone against some calculation he had not shared yet. Rurik sat at the edge of the slope, amber eyes tracking something none of us could see.

The framework's glow on the southern skyline behind us was steady. I found myself checking it more often than I had in the first days back. Not because it had changed - it had not, not yet - but because I had started to notice when I was not checking it, which was its own kind of change.

Lano came back over the crest of the slope carrying something in her mouth. She moved carefully down the loose rock, placing each paw with the seriousness she reserved for uncertain ground. The object was not large - she carried it the way she had once carried the cyan-veined stone in d063, with her head slightly raised.

"Mira," Rurik said, which was not a word but a sound he made, low and attentive.

Lano came to me. She set the stone down on the flat rock between my feet and stepped back, tail moving once, twice. Then she sat.

It was not the cyan-veined stone. That one I knew well - its color, the specific weight of it. This was different. Darker body, some kind of inclusion running through it at an angle. I picked it up. Cool, heavier than its size suggested.

"Where did she find it?" the Weather Reader asked without looking up from her instrument.

"Deep in the field," the Builder said. He had stood when Lano came back. "She went past the second ridge."

I held the stone. Lano watched me hold it. The scree slope settled somewhere up above us - a small dry sound of rock on rock - and the wind moved through without comment.