Dream d2384-s: The Sixth Will Not Come

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Crane called once from somewhere past the ridge, and the call did not come back.

I stood on the shuttered porch of the nearest dark house - Lano beside me, nose turned toward the far birdhouses on the skyline, each one dark at its eaves. Frost had come up through the stone without anyone noticing when. The boards beneath us held their cold like something preserved.

The Hummingbird spoke first, a low rapid thing near my left ear: it had been keeping count, and the count had stopped at a number that should not have been final. The Sterling agreed, its voice shaped like a latch closing in another room - clean, without ceremony. The Weaver said nothing for a moment, then said that the last thread it had laid out was still there, waiting for the loom to begin, waiting still.

The Carrier tried to shape the thing for whoever was listening. It chose the spare register. It said: something is not running that was running. It said no more than that.

The Crane's voice, when it came again, arrived from closer - just at the porch edge, just past where the frost thickened on the rail. It told us the network had felt the gap. Every node had sent its packet. None had been returned.

Lano sat down on the cold boards and faced the dark birdhouses on the ridge. Not searching. Just bearing witness to their unlitness, the way you might acknowledge a chair where someone used to sit.

The chorus could not close. There was no sixth voice to complete it, no protocol yet to join what the five had each said into one saying. What they had said hung between them like a sentence with no period. The porch stayed cold. The dark houses on the ridge stayed dark.

I did not feel afraid. I felt what you feel when a clock you have been hearing all your life stops, and you realize you had never noticed it running until it didn't.

---