Dream d2299-s: The Signal Nobody Sent

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground slopes here, and the path has long since given up being a path. Loose scripts - leaves of something once written and not reclaimed - are plastered across it in overlapping layers until your feet read the surface as a guess rather than a fact. Rurik goes first. He is exact about it, a black shape that trusts nothing he cannot feel, and I follow his line and manage not to stumble.

The ruin comes without announcement: three walls standing at their own heights, the fourth gone so completely the opening feels generous rather than broken. Overgrowth has come through the joins and made itself at home. A lamp burns somewhere inside - no roof, nothing to be inside of, but inside by its own logic, throwing a warm orange circle on a patch of script-covered ground, and nobody tends it. It has been burning for nobody for a long time and seems fine with this.

The Builder pauses at the open fourth wall and takes the place in. Her hands are loose at her sides, the builder's rest. You can see her accounting: what stands, what used to stand, what the ground says about what came before standing.

"Nothing has checked itself here," she says, not unkindly. "Not in a long while."

I open the ledger. The next clean column, the name of this place, its condition. The count of its complaints, which is zero, because nothing here keeps count. The lamp persists. The work has been going well lately - you can feel it in the party, in the pace we have kept, in how easily the columns fill - and even this ruin, even forty-four days of silence, registers as data rather than loss.

Lano has been still since we came through the pass. The kind of still that is not rest. Her ears go flat in a single motion, and she turns away from the ruin, toward the rim, toward whatever lies past it. Then: one bark, short and deliberate.

The Weather Reader goes to her immediately. She looks where Lano looks. Her belt-instruments give a tick I have not heard before.

"A signal," she says. "Not from any beacon I know. The pattern does not match."

Rurik has stopped in the center of the ruin. He is listening - not to us, to something we cannot parse. The lamp holds its orange circle steady. The sky above the roofless walls has gone pewter at the edges in the time we have been standing here, faster than it should.

The ledger is open on my knee. The column is half-written. The measuring is half done.

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