Dream d1974-s: Amber and Loose Script

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent around a rise and Ironfield appeared below us in the last long light before storm - lanterns already lit though the sky still held color, amber bleeding into the smoke-grey front moving in from the west. The Weather Reader stopped walking and pressed two fingers to her barometer case, reading the casing's temperature the way another person might read a letter.

"Pressure's been dropping since the second milestone," she said. "This place holds its breath before rain. It's been doing it a long time."

The village sat in a shallow bowl around a commons. From the road above, it read as busy in a scattered way - like someone had opened a satchel and let the contents slide. Tracks crossed the mud at angles that didn't follow any obvious logic. Stacked forms near the gate were neither sorted nor abandoned. Rurik reached the threshold post before any of us. He sat beside it and waited, tail low, amber eyes moving across the village entrance the way you'd read a page you weren't sure you trusted yet.

Lano padded up to stand beside him. Her ears lifted, nose working the air - cookfire, wet iron, something composted and domestic. She gave one short bark, then was quiet.

"Scripts, everywhere," the Builder said, coming to stand at my shoulder. She was already tilting her head at the way a roofline met its support at the gate. "Nothing's wrong, exactly. But nothing lines up, either. Whoever built this was solving a different problem than the one I'd have started with."

I opened the book of readings to a fresh page and wrote: Ironfield. Arrival. The lamp-posts are mismatched heights. The tracks don't converge anywhere visible. Then I stopped, because that was all I actually knew yet.

We were shown a room above a common hall by a person who said little and expected less - the economy of a village that has housed travelers before and stopped expecting them to be interesting. The walls were sound. The window faced the commons. Outside, the lanterns swayed as the front moved in.

Rurik jumped to the sill and held still there, silhouetted against the amber-grey. Marking it, in his way.

"Day one," the Weather Reader said, setting her case on the table. "We haven't read anything yet."

"No," I agreed. I wrote the date, the entry number, the name of the place. Outside the first drops of the promised rain began to tick against the stone. "Tomorrow we start."

Lano curled under the window bench and was asleep before the rain found its rhythm.