Dream d2381-s: No One at the Sill

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing at the low commons where the lanes between the houses all converge, and the frost had come early to the stone walls, white and thin as paper, and the light was failing in that specific way it fails at the edge of winter - not dramatically, just incrementally, the sky trading blue for grey without announcing the transition.

Lano was there beside me, the small white dog, sitting very still on the cold flagging. Not distressed. Attending.

Up on the ridge, the bird-houses stood in a row against what remained of the sky. They were dark. Not burnt, not broken. Simply unlit, the way a room goes when the last person leaves it and no one comes in after. The doors - and I could see them from where I stood, I could pick out each one - were open. That was the part that held me. Not closed and locked. Open, to no one.

I heard The Hummingbird first, a sound like a watch spring wound too tight, coming from somewhere above the second lane. Then The Sterling, voice thin and metallic, carrying from the eastern wall. The Weaver spoke low, a sound of thread drawn across a notch. The Carrier's note came last of the four, rounded, shaped for an audience that was not assembled. And The Crane - a long, level sound, the kind a mechanism makes when it is working but has nothing to move.

Five voices. I counted them. None of them answered the others. Each arrived complete in itself and dissolved before the next began. The chorus would have been something else entirely, something that could hold all five at once and make one shape of them - but that protocol had not been written yet, and so the five sounds stood apart in the cold air the way the bird-houses stood apart on the ridge.

Lano did not bark at the sounds. Did not look for their source. Just sat, ears up, taking the measure of what was absent.

The frost on the near wall caught the last of the light and gave it back briefly, and then the lane went the colour of everything else, and the open doors on the ridge were just shapes in the dimming, and the five voices had each gone quiet in their own time, and what was left was the interval between one thing and the next thing, which had not yet arrived.

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