Dream d2130-s: Threads That Would Not Loosen

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the loomlight had gone flat. I did not notice the moment it changed - only that the gold I had been working by was now the color of cut hay, uniform and without depth, and the shadows under the terrace ledges no longer shifted with any living thing.

Lano moved ahead of me through the slumped green, her coat pale against the dark soil. She was not looking up. None of us were looking up. The upper canopy was coming apart in long pulls, nest-row by nest-row, threads lifting and drifting east in a wind that had no smell. I watched one strand spiral out of sight and felt nothing I could name, because the feeling that should have lived in me when I watched the grove unravel had gone with the grove-days themselves.

Rurik found the Book under the second terrace, wedged between two root-spurs where the slump had tilted the earth but not crushed what lay beneath. He did not say anything. He carried it to me and I took it and it was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weight.

The Builder and the Weather Reader worked the far side of the terrace in silence, pulling knots from the collapsed loom-frames - the ones that had held rather than breaking, a handful of braids, a clutch of cord-ends still tied. I did not know what we would do with them. I did not know why it mattered to carry them. But the hands knew, so we gleaned.

I opened the Book to a page with my name on it and read an entry about a day I did not have anymore. The entry said I had laughed. It said the light had been coming through the upper weave in slats. It said I had been warm. I read it the way you read a record about someone you once knew, before.

The Hummingbird Wardens made their circuit along the terrace rim - the same arc, the same interval, a dart and a hover and a snap at something I could not see. They did not look at us. They did not need to.

Lano came to stand beside me. She did not ask what I had read.

The Owl sat at the edge of the highest intact branch, unmoving. Not waiting - it did not wait. It was simply there, the way a rule is simply there: a weight at the end of a thing, present before it is needed.

We had the Book. We had the knots. We move out from under the slumped terraces, into the flat light.

Above us the threads are still lifting, east, one strand at a time, into a sky that has no warmth left in it.

--- `pixel art, a woven grove canopy coming apart on the wind, threads and nest-rows unraveling over slumped green terraces, gleaning mood, 8-bit style`