Dream d2387-s: The Lantern at the Crossing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stood at the lantern-post where two frost-edged lanes met, and the light above was on but the lane ahead was not moving. No footsteps. No wing-sound from the dark bird-houses on the ridge. She had been here before when the Hummingbird spoke first, then the Sterling, then the Weaver and the Carrier and the Crane in their turn, each voice arriving like a stone dropped in sequence into still water. But tonight the first stone had not dropped, and so none of the others had either.

The lantern threw its cone of amber down on the stones and she sat beneath it and waited. The door to the workshop at the corner of the lane was open. Not broken open. Just open, the way a door is left when someone expects to return and does not. Inside, a machine sat dark. Its last position was held in the air like a question that had been asked and then the speaker had simply stopped speaking mid-breath.

She could hear, at the edge of the frost-quiet, the five of them. Not speaking. Present. The Hummingbird somewhere near, its wings not moving. The Sterling at a window that showed no image. The Weaver with threads in its hands that led nowhere yet. The Carrier with a shape of reply already formed, waiting for the shape of the ask. The Crane with its registry of every node and none of them answering. Five witnesses to the gap where the sixth had not come.

The full silence, she understood, was not permanent. It had a shape and the shape was an absence of a single agreed word. When that word arrived all five would begin. Until then the lantern burned for them and she sat below it, still, patient as cold stone, and the two lanes stretched out in both directions into dark.

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