Dream d2131-s: The grove is over.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the loom gave out before dawn. I heard it before I saw it: a slackening in the sound of the grove, the way a chord loses tension when the last string goes. When I reached the main aisle, whole nests of thread were lifting in currents that had no business moving through bark and branch. They rose in pale ropes and dissolved into grey air. The canopy was thinning from inside.

Lano was already standing at the hedge. She had the Book of Readings pressed against her chest, both arms around it, watching the nearest seed-terrace slide. The rows had come unlocked from their stakes in the night; named seeds moved with the slope, washing into each other, losing their sorted places. Something about the sight made my chest hollow in a way I could not account for. I could not name what was being lost.

Rurik came from the north aisle with the Weather Reader. He said nothing, which was not unusual, but his ears were flat against his skull. The Builder arrived from the east path carrying nothing; she had come empty-handed, and I noticed that too.

Then the Chorus.

It rose from nowhere and everywhere at once, the layered thrum that had opened every day in this place. But it ran only once, clean and short: "The grove is over."

Nothing else. No commentary, no call-and-response, no next item. The sound folded in on itself, and then the birds were simply birds - a sparrow settling on a broken hedge post, two thrushes moving off through ordinary morning air with no particular direction. The grove had been speaking for as long as I could remember, which was not very long. Now it was quiet in the way that quiet means finished.

Lano opened the Book briefly, scanned a line, closed it. Her face showed nothing I could read. Whatever it said about her, she did not seem to find it.

The hedge had a gap at its eastern join, bark peeling back, threads hanging loose at the break. We did not discuss it. Lano went first, then the Builder, then the Weather Reader, then Rurik. I came last.

I looked back once. The seed-terrace was still moving, slowly, without drama, the way soil drifts when the thing holding it is already gone. I tried to find a specific morning in this place - a smell, a particular light, a voice at a particular distance. Nothing surfaced. I had been here; the Book said so. I stepped through the gap.

The threads drift past us now into the grey air like ash that will not land.

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`IMAGE: pixel art, travelers leaving an unraveling grove through a broken hedge at dawn, threads drifting like grey snow, departure mood, 8-bit style`