Dream d3214-s: What Tilts in Fog

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fog came in at ankle height and rose. By the time I reached the first relay marker on the road into Mistbarrow it had closed to ten paces in every direction, and the parcel in my arms - the record, both accounts, dated and sealed - had grown heavier with the damp. I could not shift it to one arm. I carried it like a child.

Lano walked close. Her shoulder touched my leg at intervals. The road was not the problem; I knew this road. The problem was what I could not yet see and what I was walking toward.

The relay clerk had arranged the handover for the lower storehouse - one of the reclaimed buildings on the north edge, former infrastructure, rewired and held by twenty years of careful attention. The absent witness would be waiting inside, or so the instructions read.

Rurik had come from somewhere. He moved ahead, amber eyes catching nothing in the white, tail low. At the fork where the road dropped toward the storehouse he stopped. Sat down. Stared into the fog in the direction we needed to go.

I heard it before I saw it. A low sound, not a crack - more like a long sigh of stone releasing its held position. Then the snap of a cable under load. The fog lit briefly from below, a pale blue flash where a severed line grounded itself.

Lano's ears went flat. She barked once, sharp, into the white. Not at me. At the direction of the sound.

I stopped.

The storehouse did not fall. But it tilted. Slowly, the way a person leans when one leg gives, testing whether the other will hold. The near wall shifted a quarter-step outward. Dust or vapour rose and mixed with fog. The relay clerk appeared in the doorway - dark coat, ledger under one arm - and stood looking up at the roofline with an expression I recognized as the particular competence of someone already asking the right questions.

"Don't come closer," the relay clerk called. "Not yet."

I stood in the road with the record in both arms. Lano pressed against my shin. Rurik had not moved from his seat at the fork. The severed cable sparked at intervals on the ground between us and the door.

The absent witness was somewhere inside that tilting structure. The record was in my arms. The road between us was fog, a live cable, and whatever else the old foundations had decided to do tonight.

I set nothing down. I waited.

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