Dream d2036-s: River Mist and Remembering

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mist came up off the water long before we saw the river itself, drifting in slow columns across the road, and Embercroft had already disappeared behind us into the grey. I could still feel the weight of what we had written there pressing against the book in my pack.

"The tanner's yard," the Builder said, from somewhere just behind my left shoulder. Her boots found the same stones mine did in the dark. "The joinery on the lean-to was older than the rest of the building by forty years. Someone built to last and then someone else forgot why."

"Pressure dropped two mornings running," the Weather Reader added, walking with one hand resting on the brass housing of her barometer as if steadying it against the uneven path. "The hamlet holds its breath before rain. I've noted three places now that do the same. I wonder if there's a soil type."

Lano trotted between us, nose low, cataloguing the verge grasses and whatever animals had crossed before dawn. Her tail moved in slow arcs, content in the mist.

I wrote nothing yet. Sometimes the reading of a place takes a day to settle into the right words, the way tea steeps after the heat is already gone.

We made camp at the road fork where a bent iron marker stood, its engraving worn to suggestion. Rurik chose that spot, which was how I knew it was the right one. He had already circled it twice before any of us unslung our packs, and now he sat beside the post with his amber eyes on the left branch of the road, the one that continued into the dark where Willowbarrow would eventually be.

"He sees something?" the Builder asked.

"He always sees something," said the Weather Reader. "The question is when he decides to share it."

We ate the last of the Embercroft bread, which was good and dense and tasted like somewhere specific. Lano accepted half of mine without ceremony, as was her right.

After the fire was low I opened the book and wrote down the tanner's yard, the held breath, the forty-year seam in the joinery. Embercroft in three sentences. The next page waited blank for Willowbarrow.

Rurik did not move from the marker post. His tail curled once around his feet. Whatever the left branch of the road held, it was patient enough. So were we.