Dream d1808-s: What We Leave Unfinished

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning came in quiet, the kind of quiet that settles over a place when it knows you are leaving. I had my pack by the door before the dawn bell, the book of readings open on the table for the final entry. Through the window the west wind was already moving the clouds in long races across the pale sky.

The Bridgekeeper found us in the lower courtyard. She was a practical woman who said farewells the way she said everything else - plainly, and with her hands already doing something else. She had the supply register out when we arrived, and the way she went still as she read it made me look up from the book.

"Three days of fuel in the stores," she said, not to us particularly, but to the register. "The salvage runs have been coming back thin for a fortnight. Whatever the outer ranges used to give, they are not giving it now."

The Builder crouched beside the settlement's auxiliary generator - a squat iron thing behind the hall - and ran her palm along the seam of its housing. "Repaired with parts that will not hold another cycle," she said. "You need a source outside what you have here. And you need it before the cold comes back."

Lano lifted her nose from the flagstones where she had been investigating the smell of old grain dust. Her ears went flat against her head. A single sharp bark toward the supply door, then she sat and watched it, very still, the way she watches things she does not trust the feel of.

The Weather Reader had her instruments open but she was looking at the register rather than the barometer. "The pressure is falling in the northeast corridor," she said. "If that is where the next salvage run goes, they walk into a turn without a guide. They need someone who can read the network from the outside."

I wrote that down. Final entry for Kestrelsquare: a place that kept its lamps burning past what reason suggested, whose joints held, whose people asked the right questions. And now the question the place was asking was one we could not fully answer before the road pulled us forward.

Rurik had moved to the outer gate while we said what remained to be said. The Bridgekeeper pressed a copy of the supply register into my hands without asking whether I wanted it. "In case your network sees what we cannot," she said.

Rurik went through first. We followed him out, the gate swinging closed behind the last of us, the shortage riding alongside our packs like a fifth companion we had not planned on.