Dream d2110-s: The Canopy Receives

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the canopy light moved in coins across the terraces, never landing twice in the same place, shifting as the woven strands breathed above us. Grove day forty-one. The Loomkeepers had been working since the light changed, beaks pulling grass-thread through the nested rows with the patience that does not count minutes.

I sat with the Book of Readings across my knees, its singed spine rough under my palm, the pages whole. The weight of it was ordinary now the way things become ordinary when you have carried them long enough through difficult ground - familiar as a scar, necessary as breath.

Rurik settled beside me, tail curled over his paws. He watched the loomwork a long time before he said anything. "You can almost tell which entry they're on by where the new thread catches the light."

"Brackenhush," the Builder said from across the terrace. She had been sketching canopy patterns all week, watching how tension distributed across the rows. "Entry thirty-nine. I counted."

The Starling Chorus banked once across the open bowl - a single shape angling east, then north - and spoke: "Blight wind steady. West quarter holds." Then it was gone, one body folding into the treeline.

The Weather Reader had her fingers on the grass, reading the damp the way she did every dusk. "Soft night," she said. "The seed will take."

Lano had been still for most of the hour, pressed against my side, nose working at intervals - the grass-thread smell, the turned earth along the nearest terrace edge. Her ears tracked a Hummingbird Warden crossing the upper perimeter: the same route, the same interval, hover and dart and snap at something too quick to follow, then gone again. You could have set a gauge by it.

One Loomkeeper moved lower along the inner canopy edge, drawing a longer strand. The Brackenhush thread. We had been here long enough to know what to watch for: a pause, a tightening, the small shudder that passed through the nearest nest-row when a name settled into the weave.

It came. The canopy shivered once. Coins of light skidded sideways across the terraces. Lano lifted her head and said, low, "Ya."

A Loomkeeper pressed the Brackenhush seed into the turned earth with its beak. The Builder set down her notebook. The Weather Reader laid her palm flat on the grass. Rurik exhaled, long and even.

Grove day forty-one. One more name held in the weave.