Dream d2063-s: The Grey Rings Open

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky above the Foundry District had turned the color of cooling iron, and the air carried something it should not have: sparks.

Not the ordinary sparks of a working forge, brief and purposeful and gone. These rode the updraft high, small and patient, and where one came down it kissed the earth and left a ring. A perfect grey ring, perhaps the width of my palm to start, and inside the ring, nothing. No scrub grass, no trace of root, no beetle moving in the soil. Just grey.

The Builder was the first to name it. She had been crouching by the third ring we found, pressing her thumb to the edge of the grey, and when she stood her voice was flat and careful, the way you speak something you want to be precise.

"Ember-blight," she said. "Wherever the spark lands."

Rurik circled the ring without touching it, his black tail low. He looked at the Builder, then at me. "They're not stopping," he said. "Look at the walls."

I looked. Along the base of the Foundry's outer wall, where the slag-mounds leaked heat, the grey rings had bled together into something longer than rings - a grey border, widening while we stood watching. Not fast. That was what made it strange. It was patient. The ground was becoming barren the way a tide comes in: slow, certain, not interested in being argued with.

The Weather Reader had her instrument out, a thin-armed thing she wore on her wrist like a second pulse. She was reading the spark-wind, tracking the updraft currents carrying live sparks outward from the slag. Her mouth moved quietly as she mapped it.

"The rings are spreading concentrically," she said. "From the slag outward. The blight follows the wind pattern." She paused, recalibrating. "It will not stop at the walls."

Lano pressed close to my side, nose working, her ears flat against the hot wind. She did not bark. She was reading the air the way she always did, trying to understand something the rest of us were still translating into words.

I had the Book of Readings in my arms, its singed spine warm against my hands. The ledger of every place we had read on the circuit, every stay recorded and carried. It felt heavier here, as though it understood what was at stake when ground stops growing.

The grey rings kept opening. The slag kept breathing sparks upward. And the barrens crept outward from the walls of what had once been a place that made things.