Dream d2061-s: Before the Water Lands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Foundry gates were open and wrong.

Not wrong the way a door hangs off a hinge - wrong the way a face is wrong when someone has stopped sleeping. The slag-heaps at the walls were glowing from inside, a deep amber pulse with no rhythm, and the sparks they shed were traveling upwind. I noticed that first: sparks moving against the wind, riding heat columns from below, as if the ground had a heartbeat and was running a fever.

They waved us in without a word. Not a greeting - a wave like one hand is pulling another hand from drowning water. Three forge-hands came past at a run with a wooden sled holding a barrel, and the water in that barrel was already sheeting steam before the wheels had stopped. I watched it evaporate. A full barrel, gone to hot air, and the forge-hands looked at each other and turned back for another.

The Builder said quietly that she had seen this from a distance before, on the circuit. "Not this close," she added.

Rurik dropped low along the gate wall the moment we were through. He moved the way he always moves in difficult country: silent, close to stone, reading the gaps between forge-hands without touching any of them. The Weather Reader had her hand out, palm up, reading the air as she walked. "The heat has no direction anymore," she said. "Walls, floor, sky. There is no front to it."

I carried the Book of Readings across my shoulders. The spine had picked up something from the gate-heat - not scorched, not yet, but present in a way leather is not usually present. Lano padded close at my heel. She was not shaking, which surprised me. Her small head was up, ears canted forward, reading all of it. Atenta, I thought.

"They know us," the Builder said. She was watching a forge-hand who had glanced at our party and moved on without slowing, the way you pass family in a burning house.

"This isn't a bad day," the Weather Reader said. She turned in a slow circle, her instrument held loose. "This is what happens when you run a fire for a hundred seasons and never once listen to what the ground says back."

The ground near the inner wall had gone grey. Not ash-grey. Barren-grey. The kind of grey that means nothing left.

Above us a flight of Hummingbird Wardens ran their circuit through the smoke, dipping and snapping at ember-blight sparks before they could seed. They did not break formation. They did not look at us. Rurik came alongside me and sat, just a moment, his shoulder against my ankle.

We were inside. Every hand was needed, and none of it was enough.