Dream d2083-s: Parried at Shoulder Height

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fourteenth morning of the grove began with wet soil and the smell of something opened. The terraces ran in long curves above us, each row darker than the last from the week's waterings, and the names of the planted deeds were marked in woven tags along the stakes - not words exactly, but knots in a language the Loomkeepers had introduced us to patiently, one tug at a time.

The Weather Reader stood at the edge of the second terrace, head tilted, reading the air. "South wind before noon," she said. "It carries."

She did not say what. She never does, when she means something worth watching.

The Builder was measuring a furrow with her thumb-joint - one of the older measures, the kind she trusts over metal gauges because the wood teaches back. Rurik sat two rows up, his dark shape alert, ears forward, watching the canopy. Lano moved between us all in small circles, nose down, tail working, cataloguing the morning's changes without speaking any of them aloud.

I was carrying the Book of Readings in both hands. It still smelled of the Foundry - not acrid now, more like cooling stone, something that had been heat and was becoming something else. The spine was dark where the fire had touched it. Every page: whole.

The south wind arrived in the late morning, and with it something that was not pollen - a greying drift, a blight-spore riding the current at about shoulder height, aimed for the new terrace-row. I saw it as a smear against the gold of the canopy light. Before I could raise a hand, a Warden was already there: a dart of green-bronze, a snap so small the sound was nothing, the spore taken and gone. The Warden folded back into its circuit without pause, continuing the loop it had been running all morning at the same exact intervals - I had measured them without meaning to, one-hundred-and-twelve heartbeats arc to arc.

"They knew," Rurik said from his terrace, not asking.

"They always know," said the Builder. "That's the point of exact."

By evening the Loomkeepers had worked their way around the canopy to entry twelve. We watched from below as they read the Juniperbarrow passage beak-by-beak into the nest-row - a name, a stay, a weight of what was carried - and when the last knot was set, one of them descended with a single seed wrapped in a curl of grass-thread. The terrace received it without ceremony. That is the grove's way: the record comes first, the growing after.

I held the Book while this happened. Lano pressed against my ankle, warm and still. The Weather Reader said the south wind had turned.

Grove day fourteen. The ledger grew by one row.