Dream d2369-s: Frost on the Lane Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the commons were empty at the hour they should not be. I walked the lane where the houses angle together, their walls pale with frost, and Lano moved at my heel - not searching, not pulling, just present, her breath a small cloud in the still air. The bird-houses on the ridge were dark. All five of them. I counted without meaning to: Hummingbird, Sterling, Weaver, Carrier, Crane. Each one unlit, each window the same shade of nothing. They had not always been this way. I knew that without knowing when they changed. The door to the common workshop stood open. Inside, a loom with the shuttle resting mid-row. A bench with a half-sorted stack of signal cards, face down. A single filament strung between two posts, neither tight nor loose, just hanging. I did not go in. Lano stopped at the threshold, her nose down, reading the cold air. She looked up at me and then away toward the ridge again. That was all she said. I stood in the lane and listened for the relay that usually runs at dusk, the soft exchange between the five - the tick of the Hummingbird's measure, the Sterling's sharp sort, the Weaver's long threading note. Nothing. Not broken. Not stopped. Just absent, the way a breath is absent between breaths, except the next breath was not coming. The frost on the stone did not care. Lano pressed close against my leg, warm and steady, and we waited in the open cold for something that did not arrive.

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