Dream d2316-s: A Lamp for Absent Hands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground at the rim gives differently than I expected - harder underfoot, a thin crust over something that does not compact. Cinderhush comes into view before we crest the rise: a low line of walls, the roof gone from most of them, vegetation claiming the gaps with the particular confidence of something that knows it has won. The light is wrong. Not absent - wrong. The sky holds enough dusk to see by, but the quality of it is cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.

Lano stops a half-step before I do. She doesn't say anything. The Builder has her ledger-frame already unslung from her shoulder - a habit, not an instruction - and the Weather Reader stands with her face turned not toward the settlement but toward the sky above it, reading something I cannot.

One lamp is lit inside the nearest wall-gap. It burns steadily, no flicker. Nobody has been here in - I open the survey ledger on my knee, standing still, and count back from the date at the top of the page - one hundred and fifty-four days. The lamp has no oil left to burn. It burns anyway.

Rurik walks ahead of us, low to the ground, his tail held flat. He does not go inside. He circles the outer wall at a distance, reading the perimeter in his own language, and comes back with nothing to report. He sits. He faces the lamp.

The place is mostly orderly. That is what the numbers say and the numbers are right: tools set against walls rather than dropped, surfaces cleared, no sign of a rushed exit. One set of tongs rests on the lip of a cold hearth - resting, not abandoned. The distinction is clear to me even from across the open ground. Whoever set them down expected to pick them up again.

I write: first arrival. No access obstruction. Lamp interior, source unknown. Hands that built: one.

The Builder waits while I write. The Weather Reader has not moved. Lano sits beside me, her warmth against my side, and the pellet-stone in my coat pocket sits heavier than its weight accounts for.

The tongs hold the last position of a hand that is no longer here. The lamp holds light it has no right to. I close the ledger on its page and stand looking at the place while the sky drops another degree of dark, and the lamp inside the roofless wall does not change at all.

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