Dream d2033-s: Hearths at Hard Noon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came over the last rise and Embercroft was below us, smaller than any map would warrant - a scatter of buildings around a central square, smoke from three chimneys, the rest of the roofline cold and still.

Rurik stopped at the crest before any of us did. He sat and read the sight below the way he reads all thresholds: without hurry, amber eyes moving from the gate to the lamp post to the well and back. Then he stood and led us down.

The Weather Reader had her hand on the barometer hung at her belt. "Steady," she said. "No memory of recent weather worth noting. This place has had an ordinary week." She said it the way another person might say the house is empty - not disappointed, just precise.

The gate was open. Not flung wide, not latched back with ceremony - simply open, the way a gate stands when the people inside have stopped thinking about the outside. A short-handled spade leaned against the post. Someone had meant to take it in.

Lano trotted through first, nose low to the packed earth of the lane, tail reading the smells at the hem of the place. Her ears moved between two sources of sound: a hammer striking somewhere to the left, unhurried, and the lower note of someone singing to themselves from a window we couldn't see.

"Three hearths lit at noon," the Builder said. She was looking at the smoke columns, their width, their lean. "That one on the left is a forge. Small. The other two are kitchens, or one kitchen and a room being heated for someone who needs it." She catalogued without judgment, the way she always did - reading load paths the rest of us missed.

I took out the book and wrote: Gate open. Spade left. Smoke from three points. A hammer. A voice. Lano tracking something that interested her along the north wall.

We found an inn of sorts - a wide house with a sign so faded the name was gone, only the shape of a bird remaining. The woman who answered gave us two rooms and asked nothing about where we'd come from, which told me something about how often strangers arrived here.

Rurik went back out to sit at the threshold of the lane. He would stay there until he had satisfied himself about what came and went. That was his part of the reading.

I set the book on the windowsill and watched the square. One of the stray tools left in the lane was a coiled length of rope. The settlement was not untidy exactly - it was mid-thought. Something had been started and not yet finished.

Lano jumped onto the bed and curled up. "Calma," I told her, though she had already closed her eyes.

The reading would begin tomorrow.