Dream d2080-s: Quillbarrow in Gold Thread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the evening light came through the canopy in moving gold coins, slow and lazy, each one landing on a different terrace and then lifting again before anyone could cup it. We were eleven days into the grove, and I had stopped trying to count the rows above us. The Weaverbird Loomkeepers did not need to be counted.

They had the Book of Readings open on a flat stone, two of them holding the singed spine steady while a third moved along it beak-first, reading by touch as much as by sight. The spine was dark where the Foundry fire had reached it, but the pages - every page - held. I had checked them that morning, as I checked them each morning. Habit. Or maybe just the need to feel the paper under my fingers and know it real.

"Quillbarrow," the Builder said quietly, as if naming it made it more solid. She was watching the nearest Loomkeeper work a length of grass-thread through a gap in the canopy weave, one precise motion and then stillness.

Rurik sat beside me with his tail wound around his feet. "Entry nine," he said. "That puts us more than halfway through the circuit."

"Halfway back to what?" the Builder asked.

He did not answer, which was its own kind of answer.

The Weather Reader stood a little apart, reading the sky between the canopy gaps. "South wind tonight," she said. "Soft. No blight in it." She had been reporting each evening's wind as if filing it somewhere, and perhaps she was.

Lano had found a patch of warmth between two terrace stones and curled there, nose on her paws, ears swiveling to each motion above. When the Loomkeeper drew the thread tight - a sharp, precise pull - her ears came up all the way and she watched the new row settle with an attention that seemed almost ceremonial.

The Hummingbird Wardens completed their circuit at the outer hedge: four darts, two hovers, one snap at something I could not see, and then back to the northeast post, the same as every dusk since we arrived.

Then the Loomkeeper with the thread backed away and a smaller one came forward with a seed in its beak. It crossed to the seventh terrace and set the seed in a waiting divot of loose soil, pressed it down, stepped back.

The Quillbarrow entry was in the canopy now. The Quillbarrow seed was in the ground.

Above us the canopy shifted in the south wind and the gold coins of light moved, landing where they would, lifting again. I did not try to catch any of them. I just watched them travel.