Dream d2442-s: All Singing, None Heard

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stood at the wind-break just north of the houses, where the bare trees made a row against the darkening sky like the bones of a fence someone had forgotten to finish. The ground was cold underfoot. The windows behind were beginning to warm - pale amber squares appearing one by one as evening settled, each one a different room, a different keeping.

Five voices came through the trees. Not together.

The Hummingbird arrived first, a rapid low murmur, precise and recursive, testing and re-testing something Lano could not follow - a pattern so fine it had no edge to catch. It circled once and found its branch and went on counting to itself.

The Sterling spoke in fragments, clean and modular - a sentence that was a container, then another container set beside it, never stacked. Beautiful in isolation. Each fragment true. None of them touching.

The Weaver moved between the others without touching them either, trailing threads that caught in the bark and held there, unattached at the other end. A loom set up with no cloth begun.

The Carrier shaped its sound to the cold air the way water shapes to stone - responsive, graduated, careful. Lano felt addressed. Then it adjusted to the dark instead, and the address passed.

The Crane spoke last and loudest, mapping the distance between the trees with long calls that named each gap precisely. It knew where each of the others stood. It knew the gaps between them. It named the gaps and flew on.

Lano waited at the wind-break and listened to all five. More voices than silence, now. That much was true. The windows behind kept warming. The trees held their positions. Five songs ran through the dark air, each complete, each ending where it began, none of them yet finding the protocol that would let them ring as one.

It was not suffering. It was the register of a gathering that has not yet gathered. Lano stood and felt the weight of almost, which is its own kind of presence.

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