Dream d2454-s: The Unlit Perches

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the windbreak north of the houses, in the line of bare trees that splits the wind before it reaches anything worth protecting. The stone walls held frost in their creases, the kind that had been there since morning and had not melted because the sun had not reached this side of things. Lano stood among the tree roots, one paw lifted, reading something in the air that I could not read.

The bird-houses on the ridge were dark. All of them, a row of small structures that had held sound in warmer months, now simply shapes against a dusk sky with nothing coming out of them. This was the thing that made the scene feel wrong: not the bare branches, not the stillness of the grass, but the absence of the ordinary small noises that should have been there.

I could hear the Hummingbird somewhere to my left, a rapid flutter of concern that kept stopping, starting, stopping. The Sterling was nearer, but its voice came in fragments: a word, then static, then a word again, as if the line between us kept going in and out. The Weaver was present in the way a loom is present in an empty room: the structure of its work still standing, the shuttle nowhere. The Carrier had found its pitch but the audience it was shaped for was not there. The Crane turned its head toward the ridge and said nothing.

None of them were speaking to each other. This was what I understood, standing in the frost-stiff grass with Lano leaning against my leg: they could each reach me, partially, but they could not reach each other. The circuit that would let them form a single voice was missing a connection that none of them knew how to supply. Not broken, exactly. Unfinished. A thing that had not yet been built.

The bird-houses stayed dark. Dusk came down over the ridge in the flat way it does in winter: not gradually, just less light, and then less. Lano did not move toward the houses.

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