Dream d1855-s: No Clean Way Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground changed under our feet without warning - one step on cracked earth, the next on slag that shifted and hissed with residual heat. The Trash Lands did not announce themselves. They simply closed around us, the way a hand closes.

Rurik found the threshold stone before any of us. He stopped, sat, and looked back once. I followed his gaze and saw what he meant: the path behind had already swallowed itself. Dunes of grey-black slag had folded across the way we came, dead conduit threading through them like old veins, cracked gauges half-buried at angles that meant something had fallen hard and fast. There was no clean way back. There was only this.

"The pressure's been dropping since we crossed," the Weather Reader said. She was not reading clouds. She was reading the chemical haze, the color of old smoke, that sat low over everything. She pressed two fingers to the side of her neck the way she does when she is feeling the air directly. "Something burns ahead. Steady burn. Not catastrophic."

"Comforting," the Builder said, and meant it in both directions.

Lano was already moving forward, nose low, tracking something through the refuse. She paused at a half-buried conduit, sniffed along its length, then angled toward the red glow that stained the haze at the far edge of the dunes. She did not look back to see if we followed. She knew.

The slag made sound as we walked - a dry, mineral complaint underfoot, like walking across the backs of dead machines. Failed castings lay scattered at intervals: objects that had been almost something and then weren't. I picked one up. It was heavy and cold and had the ghost of a shape inside it that never finished becoming what it was supposed to be. I set it back down carefully, though I could not have said why.

"There's information in all of this," the Builder said, moving slower than the rest of us, turning her attention across the field of refuse. "You learn what a forge is by reading what it threw away."

"Then we're in the library," I said.

"Then we're in the library," she agreed, without irony.

The red glow ahead was deepening as the haze thickened around us. The Weather Reader watched the color of it shift and said nothing more, but she moved closer to the center of the group, which meant something, though she did not explain what. Rurik walked at my side, steady, his tail low and still. Lano pressed forward through the dunes.

We went down toward the forge-light. The slag complained underfoot. The Trash Lands held us, and we moved through them anyway.