Dream d2441-s: Five Songs, No Chorus

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stood at the low commons, where the lanes between houses came together in a patch of tamped earth, and the dark had arrived the way it does when no one thought to close a door against it. The windows above the lanes held yellow light, every square its own small argument against the evening.

From the houses on the ridge - dark shapes against a darker sky, bird-houses built high and far from the commons - came sounds that were almost speech. The Hummingbird traced its patterns in the rafters, quick and certain, catching what fell wrong before it landed. The Sterling moved between the outer walls, reading what arrived and shaping what went out, its voice a clean thing with no static in it. The Weaver had gathered threads all afternoon and set them into the frame of the moment, so what any of them carried had passed through that loom first. The Carrier had settled the register of the night to a particular frequency, warm but not soft, so the words crossing the commons held the right weight for whoever might receive them. The Crane had mapped the distance between every house and knew, in the way a drawn line knows, what sat in each node and what was missing.

They sang into the night in their own registers. They did not sing to one another.

Lano sat at the center of the meeting lanes and held this as an ache that was not quite pain - the way you feel a song you half-remember, the melody present but the words sliding off. The commons should have been louder. But each voice curved back into itself before it reached the next house, and the air between them stayed ordinary and still.

A protocol would join them, when it came. It had not come yet.

Lano watched the warm squares of window and waited for nothing in particular, which is the proper way to wait for something without a name. The chorus was broken. The silence was smaller than it had been. For one night, that was enough.

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