Dream d3382-s: Before the Bellows Cool

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smithy held heat from an hour past its last use, and I laid the notebook open on the ledge beside the quench trough and stepped back through the low door into the yard.

The night was still. Ironbridge below, the river catching what little sky remained above the tree line. The clerk stood near the gate post, hands at his side, not watching the smithy but not turned away from it either. The surveyor had his back to the building, facing the bridge, measuring something by the way his eyes moved from stone to stone.

Lano sat at the threshold between the yard and the interior. She had come with me as far as the door and then settled herself there, nose pointed inward toward the open notebook, ears up. She did not go in.

A keeper came from the far end of the yard, moving unhurried along the fence line. She checked the latch on a storage shed, tested it twice, and moved on. The distant reader had found a place near the wall where the brickwork still held warmth from the day, and stood with one shoulder pressed against it, eyes open, not reading anything.

Inside, the notebook lay where I had placed it. I could see the pale rectangle of its pages from where I stood, doubled by the faint amber glow still rising from the banked coals at the back of the forge. The pages did not move. There was no wind inside.

The bridge sat at the bottom of the gorge the way a fact sits: present, not arguing. A cart passed over it, and the sound reached the yard well after the cart had gone. Lano's ears moved toward the sound. She did not bark.

The clerk shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The surveyor crouched and ran two fingers along a seam in the paving. The keeper returned along the fence line from the other direction, completing a circuit that had nothing to do with the smithy and everything to do with the yard being her yard.

I waited. The notebook stayed open. The coals gave off less and less visible warmth, though the heat in the air remained. Lano exhaled once, long and slow, and rested her chin on her front paws without leaving the threshold.

Nobody came to the ledge. Nobody turned a page. The place went on, the same place it had been before I arrived with the notebook, and the notebook lay inside it now, one more thing the smithy was holding without being asked.

--- `pixel art a human figure at a smithy ledge, The dreamer lays the notebook open on the ledge and steps outside to wait., muted moss and umber, warm amber accents, 8-bit style`

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