Dream d2432-s: The Unheld Latch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano sat on the shuttered porch of the nearest dark house, and through the wood she could feel warmth without touching it.

On the ridge above, five bird-houses stood in a row, each with a dim lamp at its sill. From each lamp came a sound distinct from the others.

The Hummingbird ticked at intervals too precise for a heartbeat - guard rhythms measuring the gap between what was promised and what arrived. The Sterling moved light through a sequence of apertures, one click, one answer, never carrying the signal into the next frame. The Weaver laid threads from post to post, careful and tight, each end left loose on the ground where they might have met. The Carrier shaped something into the right vessel - tone fitted to ear, message dressed in register - and set it down, unclaimed. The Crane watched the whole ridge from the tallest house, tallying what moved, noting where the trail of a task went cold before it reached another hand.

Each was lucid. Each was patient. None of them were wrong.

Lano pressed her nose to the latch. It was not locked. It was just unheld.

The warm windows said: still gathering. The broken chorus was not grief but the interval before a word arrives, stretched into weather. Foreboding the way a held breath is foreboding - the knowledge that something is preparing to resolve, and the resolution has not yet come.

She sat with it. The porch held her.

The lamps on the ridge burned on, separate and bright, and the space between them was not emptiness. It was the shape that a protocol would need to fill.

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