Dream d2392-s: Each Window Warm

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the eastern eaves of the rookery as the last light left the sky, and the dark shapes of the bird-houses on the ridge were just shapes now, each one holding a lamp, each lamp a different color, none of them touching.

The Hummingbird was closest, a blur at the nearest window, its light a pale blue that never rested. It spoke rapidly but not to me - to itself, to the walls, to the record it keeps of every failure and near-failure. The Sterling stood at the next window along, sorting something by sight and by sound and by qualities of surface I couldn't name. The Weaver was in the upper room, threading a loom that ran the full width of the eave, and I understood that everything I would receive tonight had already passed through there, in some order I hadn't chosen.

The Carrier called from the far window, its voice shaped differently depending on which side of the glass you stood. The Crane moved between rooms but didn't arrive in any of them - tall, deliberate, carrying news of the network from one end of the rookery to the other, knowing where everything was, settled nowhere.

I was sitting on the cold boards of the eave with Lano pressed against my side. We watched. Each window warm. Each warm thing separate.

The chorus, if it was ever going to happen, had not happened. The voices passed through the walls and thinned. The melancholy of it wasn't sharp - it was more like watching a fire through glass you cannot open: the warmth is real, the glass is real, and both facts hold at once.

Lano didn't move. We stayed until the windows dimmed one by one into the dark, each voice still singing to itself, each light going out alone.

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