Dream d2065-s: The Ground Goes Grey

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we walked in silence through the Slag Gate and the Foundry District emptied itself behind us.

The gate itself was still standing, barely. Iron bolts sweating rust in the heat-pressure that had built all week. Lano trotted a full body-length ahead, nose low, picking the ash road by smell because the air was too thick with copper-smoke to trust by sight. I kept my right hand flat on the pack where the Book rode. I could feel the singed spine through the canvas, a ridge of buckled leather like a scar. Whole underneath. Every page.

No one spoke for a long time.

The Builder walked to my left, her wrapped forearm held slightly out from her side in the way of a wound that needs air. She had not complained once. She had reached the shelf without asking permission and pulled the Book down while the corner of the room was orange with fire, and she had not complained once since.

The Weather Reader called it quietly from three paces back. "Wind is reading wrong," she said. "It should be pulling toward the heat. It is not."

Rurik glanced back. He was black against the ember-red sky in a way that made him look like a cut in the air. "That is what worried me at the western gauge," he said. "The heat is not drawing anymore. It is just sitting."

That was the sentence none of us had said aloud yet. A forge that draws makes something. A forge that only sits is just burning itself down.

I turned and looked once.

The ground behind the gate was already bone-grey in a ring that reached halfway across the yard I could still see. Clean, pale grey, like ash that has forgotten it was ever fire. The grey ring was wider than it had been when we passed through the gate. I watched it a moment. It did not stop.

Lano had stopped and was watching me.

I turned back. I put my hand on the pack again. The Builder walked on without looking back. The Weather Reader read the wind again and said nothing more about it.

The ash road ran north and the sky above the road, away from the District, was the grey-purple of a bruise healing, which is a color I have come to trust more than ember-red.

We did not run. We walked. That felt important.