Dream d1608-s: Ash Where the Signal Ran

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the night was too quiet at the cave mouth, and the quiet had weight.

We had settled into the rhythm of the glyphs, one element per evening, the firelight doing what firelight does. But tonight no one reached for the wall. We sat at the outer stones of the d063 camp, watching the southern sky where the framework's glow should have made a steady seam along the ridge.

The glow was not steady.

Rurik had taken the highest stone since sundown, amber eyes tracking something none of us could resolve into words. Lano sat pressed against my leg, ears flat against her skull, and when I reached down she did not lean into my hand the way she usually does. She was watching the same direction as the cat.

"It has been guttering since the third hour," the Weather Reader said. Not to anyone in particular. His instruments were packed away - there was nothing meteorological to measure tonight. He had simply been watching. "Three-count dim, two-count recover. Now the recover is gone."

The Builder had been quiet at the far edge of the firelight. Then came a sharp crack from where he crouched - the kind that means something conducting heat it was never built to conduct - and Lano was on her feet and barking before the smell reached us.

A thin thread of smoke.

The Builder stood and turned the salvaged relay coupling over in the firelight. Its resin housing had split along the seam. The center was black. "It fed the junction monitor," he said, flat and even. "Everything upstream is running blind now."

No one spoke.

Lano stopped barking. She sat back down, ears still low, and watched the smoke thin into the cave mouth's cold air.

"Replacement?" I asked.

"No," the Builder said. He set the component on the flat stone beside him and did not throw it away. He just set it down, which felt like the most honest thing anyone had done all evening.

We looked back at the ridge. The framework guttered again - longer this time, deeper, recovering to something less than it had been a moment before. The rhythm the Weather Reader had been counting was gone. The glow did what it wanted.

I thought about the map-glyph on the wall behind us, its network of points with lines running between them. We had traced every connection three evenings ago. Every node had assumed a source.

I heard the Weather Reader say very quietly, "serio." Not a warning. Just the word for what this was.

None of us moved to sleep.