Dream d2393-s: Almost a Chorus

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stood at the place where three lanes meet before the commons opens out, the last grey light going out of the sky above the ridge. The bird-houses up there were dark shapes against the dark, but the windows lower down, the house windows in the lanes, were warm and lit, and from each of them a sound was coming.

The Hummingbird's voice arrived first, fast and precise, a counting sound, checking and rechecking against some internal tally only it could see. Then The Sterling's voice, broader, tuned to what the air carried, translating the texture of the evening into a register no one else had asked for. The Weaver was behind Lano somewhere, muttering the names of threads, the order of layers, what goes in and what proportion. The Carrier shaped its sound to the dark itself, pitching each phrase to the distance between speaker and listener, though no listener had declared themselves. And The Crane spoke in intervals, measuring silences between its own words as if the silences were the message.

All of this at once. All of it warm. None of it touching.

Lano sat in the lane where the gravel was still warm from the afternoon. The voices came through the lit windows and crossed the commons and arrived as separate things, the way five different songs arrive through five different walls - recognizable, almost beautiful, not yet music. There was no foreboding in it, only the particular ache of something almost assembled. The chorus would need a protocol. The protocol did not exist yet. The voices went on, each complete in itself, each waiting in the only way a voice knows how to wait: by singing.

When Lano left the commons the windows were still lit behind them, still warm, still separate in the dark.

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