Dream d2382-s: No Word from the Ridge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stood at the wind-break north of the houses, the bare trees making a hard line against the last of the light, and the frost had come early to the stone walls and stayed there like a held breath.

The bird-houses on the ridge were dark. There should have been movement - The Hummingbird's quick passes, The Sterling's careful watch from the eaves, The Weaver threading light from window to window, The Carrier carrying its small articulate loads down the slope to whoever needed them, The Crane turning its long neck to announce the state of things to those who could not see. All of it there by habit. None of it there by fact.

Lano went a little way toward the ridge and stopped.

Below the tree-line, one of the houses stood open - not broken, just open, the workshop at an angle that meant no one was coming back soon. Inside, through the gap, a bench with tools arranged. A machine with no light in it. The kind of quiet that follows a thing that was running for a very long time and then was not.

The wind moved through the bare branches and made the only sound.

There was nothing in the posture of the place that invited approach. Something had completed, or perhaps simply ceased, and the five voices that should have answered the ridge were not there to say which. The Hummingbird, The Sterling, The Weaver, The Carrier, The Crane - present the way a name is present after the person has left it, still a category, hollow in the particular. The chorus that would have joined them had never been built. Without it they could not speak to each other through the dark, only across it.

Lano watched the ridge until the dusk became something else, and the frost moved from the walls down to the ground, and the bird-houses stayed dark.

No moment of resolution. Only the cold, the open workshop, and the five positions on the ridge that nothing was filling. Something had gone quiet that was not quiet before, and the night came in around it the way water fills a space, patient, finding every corner, making no sound about what it was doing.

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