Dream d3333-s: The Hinge Cools Alone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge yard at Ironfall was darker than I remembered it, three fire chambers visible behind the main shed where I had counted only two before, the third one cold and swept clean as though no one had used it in a season.

The keeper stood at the quench trough near the east wall — a trough I had not noted on the first visit, longer than the one beside the main anvil, cut from a single length of weathered oak and filled with water the color of slate. She held the hinge by tongs and lowered it, and the water answered with a short hard hiss, a white column of steam that rose and flattened against the corrugated roof and was gone. She lifted the hinge, turned it once in the lamplight, then set it on the anvil without speaking.

Lano had her nose at the base of the trough, working through some scent left there. The water still moved in small circles from the quench.

The surveyor walked the perimeter of the yard, stepping around coils of rod stock that had been there on the first visit too. I followed him as far as the east gate, where three hinge plates hung on a peg — not the one just quenched, older ones, their surfaces darkened past gray into something almost blue. I had not counted them before. I counted them now. Three.

The clerk sat on the stone lip of the disused chamber with the ledger open on her knee, though she was not writing. She was listening, I think, to what the place did after the hiss died.

What the place did was very little. The keeper did not look at us. She did not look away either. She turned the hinge once more on the anvil, checking the set of it, and left it there. The lamp on the post beside the trough swayed once in a draft that came from somewhere inside the shed and went wherever drafts go in Ironfall.

Lano trotted back from the trough to where I stood and sat down facing the anvil, her ears forward.

The hinge went on cooling. The forge yard held the sound of that: not silence, something smaller — the last heat leaving iron, which has no sound at all, but which you can almost hear.

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