Dream d3332-s: Fire Behind the Latch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge gate at Ironfall was shut against us, the bar dropped into its bracket and the chain looped twice through the ring. Lano pressed her nose to the gap at the base and held it there, reading whatever heat carries. She did not whimper. She sat back on her haunches and watched the gate with the patient attention she gives to things she has already decided.

The surveyor stood a little apart and said nothing. The relay clerk had the ledger open to a page already marked from the first visit, and I could see the entry in the lamp's thrown light: a single line of observation, a date, the condition noted as dormant. She did not add to it yet. The keeper had not come out, but the glow through the slats was proof that someone still fed the fire. It moved, that light - not a remnant ember but a living variation, red deepening to gold and pulling back again.

I put my palm flat against one of the slats. The wood was warm and dry. The smell coming through was iron-scale and old char and something else beneath those, something faintly green, which was unexpected and which I wrote down without explaining.

The account had already gone where it was going. Nothing traveled back from it; Ironfall did not receive a reply and had not expected one. The place went on in the way that places do when observation has passed through them and moved elsewhere. Whatever had been sent was now in other hands, being read in another light, and the gate knew nothing of that reading.

Lano walked the full width of the gate once, slowly, then came back to the center and lay down with her chin on the sill of the gap. The glow touched the white of her coat. She exhaled.

The surveyor recorded the width of the gate and the height of the bar bracket. The relay clerk noted the time. I noted the warmth of the wood, the smell, and the quality of the light, which was not diminishing. Whatever burned inside Ironfall was not burning out. The first visit had found it dormant. The fire here made no argument against that word and offered no revision. It simply burned, behind the latch, through the slats, into the dark outside where we stood and measured and said nothing that the place needed to hear.

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