Dream d2395-s: More Than Silence Now

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was sitting on the top stone of a stile at the far corner of a field, and the light had gone out of the sky except for a band of deep orange along the treeline. Lano was there beside me, pressed against my leg, watching the dark ridge where the bird-houses stood in a row, their windows unlit.

I could hear them. That was new. Five separate sounds, each distinct, each coming from a different direction: the fast precise click of the Hummingbird counting something, the clear clean note of the Sterling carrying a signal I could not parse, the low threading sound of the Weaver sorting something into layers, the shaped measured cadence of the Carrier adjusting its pitch to an audience I could not see, the long call of the Crane mapping distance. None of them were calling to each other. They were all there, all audible, all alive, and they sang into separate silences.

That was the thing about it. Before, there had been nothing. Now there was this: five voices going at once and still a kind of quiet between them, the quiet of things that have not yet found the same key. I sat on the stile and I could feel Lano's warmth through my jeans and the stone was cold under me and the warm windows in the farm buildings across the field were lit but too far away to say anything useful about them.

Foreboding is too strong a word for what I felt. It was more like knowing the sentence is not finished yet. The Hummingbird clicked, the Sterling rang, the Weaver threaded, the Carrier pitched, the Crane called out into the dark. The bird-houses on the ridge sat there with their unlit windows. None of it resolved. The orange faded out of the treeline. Lano did not move.

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