Dream d1869-s: The Glow We Walked Toward

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the worst of it was finally behind us.

The last great dune of slag had crested and dropped, and the party stood on its far lip, breathing the chemical haze that tasted of copper and old heat. Rurik sat on a spur of dead conduit and licked his paw once, dignified, as though the whole crossing had been nothing. Lano stood a few steps ahead of us all, nose working, ears up, reading something in the air the rest of us could not catch. She did not bark. She did not retreat. Her tail moved once, a slow half-wag, and that was the verdict.

"She's saying it's safe," the Scavenger said. He had the salvaged piece tucked under his arm, wrapped in a strip of cloth he had pulled from somewhere in his coat. He said it the way he said most things, flat and dry, but there was no edge in it now. He was talking to the Builder, not past her.

The Builder glanced at him sideways. "You've been watching her long enough to read her."

"I've been watching her long enough to know she's better at this than I am," he said, and left it there.

That was new. The Weather Reader caught my eye and said nothing, which was its own kind of annotation.

She had been reading the sky for the last hour, a running low murmur to herself, calling the shift of a dry wind out of the northeast, a pressure drop that meant the haze would thin by evening. It was thinning now. Through it, the red glow ahead had resolved into something real - a roar we could feel at the bottom of our ribs, and above the next ridge, light that pulsed orange and steady and deep.

The forge-District. The Foundry district beyond the waste.

I looked at Lano's paw, the one she had singed on the slag two nights back. She was favoring it less. The Builder had made a small compress from something she carried and the Weather Reader had known the right way to bind it, and between them the wound was closing. It would close the rest of the way in warmth, once we were out of the cold haze.

The salvaged piece the Scavenger carried - a coupling joint, bent but not cracked, the right alloy for something none of us could yet name - felt more significant the closer we got. As though the Foundry had thrown it away ahead of itself, knowing it would be needed again.

We came down off the dune. The glow grew warmer. Lano trotted ahead, steady, unhurried, already pointing us toward whatever the bench would show us when we arrived.