Dream d2120-s: Cinderwharf, Woven Slow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the work stopped and nobody argued about it.

We sat on the low terrace nearest the reading-loom, backs to the grass-stepped wall, the Book of Readings laid flat across the Builder's knees with nothing asked of it. The spine was singed brown at one corner, soft as old bark now, and the pages held together the way things hold that have been tested and passed. The Builder kept one hand on the cover without pressing it - less a grip than a reminder that it was there.

Lano had found a patch of sun that fell between two canopy panels and settled into it with her nose on her paws, twitching once at something only she could smell. The Weather Reader sat beside her, checking the sky through the woven gaps above.

"Cloud is moving north," the Weather Reader said. "Nothing behind it."

That was all the forecast the day needed.

A Hummingbird Warden crossed the lower terrace on its patrol arc, precise as a ruled line, and snapped at the air just above the seedbed railing. No spark, no spore - but it had seen something we had not, and it did not slow to explain. It continued the circuit. Rurik watched it go with the patient attention he gives things that do not need him.

Somewhere above us a Loomkeeper was reseating a knot. I heard it before I saw it: a small slippage, the catch-and-correct, the new loop settling in without complaint. It took as long as it needed to take. That was the sound the grove made all day - not the roar we had carried out of the Foundry, not the pressure-and-heat report of metal folding under weight, but this: a thread finding where it belonged, then holding.

The Foundry made things by force. I heard the difference now, sitting still enough to hear it.

Evening came gold through the canopy. The Loomkeepers gathered at the reading-frame - three of them, beaks full of grass-thread - and the Starling Chorus wheeled once overhead and settled its shape against the ridge-line. It said nothing yet; it was listening too.

The Loomkeepers began with Cinderwharf: entry forty-nine of the circuit, a stopping-place on the road that had fed us in the early cold. One keeper read the thread-marks while the others knotted them into a new row, beak-precise, no hurry. A fourth Loomkeeper was at the seedbed below with the Cinderwharf seed, and it went into the terrace without ceremony, because ceremony was the weaving, and the weaving was already done.

This was grove day fifty-one. Rurik did not say anything. Lano's tail moved once, slowly.

I counted the rows above us. Every knot a place we had been. The Book sat quiet on the Builder's knees, singed and whole.