Dream d2330-s: One Ember Against Ruin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ended where the grass began.

We came in from the west on the last flat light of the afternoon, and Brackenfold was a broken outline ahead: walls at varying heights, no roofline anywhere, the pale grey of old stone against a sky that had gone the color of pewter. I stopped at the edge of the settlement's former boundary - you could read it in the ground, a shallow depression where a ditch had once run - and counted what I could from where I stood.

One lamp burning inside, through what must have been a window. Nobody inside. The flame did not waver. It had been lit by somebody who was not here, against something nobody had written down.

Lano's ears were flat before I finished counting. She was two steps ahead of me, nose into the wind, and the bark she gave was short and certain - not a challenge, a reading. The Weather Reader had her hand raised already, fingers spread, testing the air.

"It's coming," she said.

What was coming was still out of sight to the west, but the pressure was already dropping. The smell of the land had changed from dry to something edge-sharp. The generator - there is one, bolted to a concrete pad at the settlement's east end, left by whoever last attempted Brackenfold before us - gave a single flicker. Not failure. The preliminary.

The Builder moved to it without being asked. She had already assessed the two antenna masts at the far end of the site, tall and thin with guy-wires gone slack, and I watched her calculate what the wind would do to them if it arrived with any serious intention. Rurik dropped low, body close to the ground, reading the open cable trenches that ran between the structures. They were already beginning to fill; the rain had started somewhere uphill, and it was moving.

I took out the ledger and made the first entry while I still could: nothing has been done here in a long time. That is the measured fact. The rest - the cold the lamp does not address, the moss colonizing the wall-tops, the trees that have seeded themselves into the former doorways - is observation. And in the threshold of what might have been a workshop, a hand-level set down at a careful angle, as though its owner expected to collect it within the hour, long cold now under a thin film of the same moss that has taken everything else.

The rain begins. One drop, then a second, then the sound of it on stone and soil and the open trenches and the guy-wires that begin, quietly, to sing.

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