Dream d2089-s: What the Warden Caught

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the terraces smelled of turned earth and the morning's first light came in flat and gold through the woven canopy above.

Grove day twenty. I knew it by the notch the Builder had pressed into the loom-post at the terrace edge each morning since we arrived - twenty small marks in a column, the last one still damp from her thumbnail.

We were planting. The order was careful: each seed had a name, and each name was a deed, and you did not set one carelessly into the soil any more than you would put a wrong word into a sentence. Rurik moved along the upper terrace with the trowel, pausing at each marked spot, waiting for the Weather Reader to call the depth from the gauge she carried on her wrist. She would glance, say a number in a low voice, and Rurik would measure the blade down to that notch before he turned the earth. No waste. No guess.

Lano trotted the length of the lower row, nose skimming the loam, stopping twice to sit with her ears perked at something I could not smell. The second time she sat very still, facing south, and I followed her gaze and saw it: a dark smear in the air, drifting low on the warm current off the hill, too slow for seed and too deliberate for dust.

Blight-spore. I had not seen one before but I recognized it the way you recognize a wrong note.

One of the Hummingbird Wardens came off its circuit before I could raise a hand. The dart was so fast it was only legible in retrospect - a seam through the air, the wet snap of wings closing, and then the spore was gone and the Warden was back on its line, exact to the angle it had left. No hesitation, no deviation, no acknowledgment that anything had happened at all. The circuit continued.

"There," the Builder said quietly. She had seen it too.

Lano sniffed the place where the spore had been, found nothing, and kept walking.

We worked through to the long light of evening. The Weather Reader called the barometric fall that told us rain by morning, so we finished the last row before the warp-bell rang. Then the Warden flights stacked into their dusk formation and we set our tools at the terrace wall and went up under the canopy for the reading.

Entry eighteen. Brackenfall.

The Loomkeepers worked in the gold loom-light, beaks catching the thread, pulling it taut, their movements so practiced they barely paused between knots. The Builder stood with the Book of Readings open in her arms, the singed spine resting on her forearm, and she held it steady while the Loomkeepers read the entry into the canopy above us: a knot per name, a row per stay.

I watched the row appear in the weave and thought: the grove does not change. Only what grows in it.

Rurik sat at my left. Lano pressed warm against my right ankle.

The last knot was set at dark, and then the Brackenfall seed went into its marked spot in the terrace, and we came down.