Dream d1870-s: The Glow Resolves

I had a dream where...

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

The slag-dunes had cost us days of careful reading - the Scavenger with his sharp nose low to the ground, the Builder cataloguing every cracked gauge and dead conduit we passed as though taking inventory of a ruined library. But the salvaged piece rode secure in the Builder's pack now, wrapped in a strip of conduit-cloth the Weather Reader had cut from the hem of her own kit, and the red glow ahead had stopped being a rumor and become a fact.

"That's not reflection," the Weather Reader said, pausing at the crest of the last slag-dune. She read the sky the way a medic reads a wrist. "The heat signature has been climbing for three kilometers. That's a working forge-District. Multiple furnaces."

"I counted four chimneys," Rurik said, from where he sat on the threshold stone at the dune's base, tail wrapped around his paws, watching the distance. He always picked the high point or the lowest, never the middle. "One of them larger than the others."

The Scavenger crouched near Rurik, not sitting, not yet fully at ease, but closer than he had been yesterday. "The big one runs clean. You can tell by the color." He glanced at the Builder. "How do you know that piece fits what they need?"

"I don't," she said. "I know the thread pattern matches what I've seen in failed-casting reports. That's enough to walk in with."

Lano had been sitting at the edge of the group, nose pointed toward the red glow, ears tracking some sound below our threshold. Her slag-burn paw still made her sit with it raised slightly off the ground, but she had stopped flinching when she set weight on it. A degree of healing. She looked back at us and then forward again.

"She's been pointing that direction since the boundary stone," the Scavenger said, quieter now.

"She's been right every time," the Builder replied, not unkindly. Something had shifted between them in the last stretch of waste - the rivalry ground down to something more honest. Not warm yet, but workable. The Dreamer could feel it the way you feel a door that has been stuck finally moving in its frame.

I fell in behind them as we descended toward the forge-light. The chemical haze was thinning. The glow was orange-red and constant, not flickering. Real work happening inside. We carried what the waste had taught us to find, and we were walking toward the place that would know what to do with it.