Dream d3419-s: Ash Still Holding Heat

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I laid the notebook open on the ledge beside the smithy door and stepped back from it. The yard was cold. Three quench barrels stood in a row along the far wall, their water dark and still, a skim of coal dust lying flat on the surface of the nearest one. Lano sat at my heel and looked at them without moving.

The forge inside had not been lit. I could see the mouth of it from where I stood: the iron grate gray, a little white ash at the bottom that no draft had touched. A keeper of the place came out of the side passage carrying a short length of rod under one arm, perhaps a forearm's measure. They set it against the wall beneath the overhang and did not look at the ledge.

The entry-keeper had been here before. That was in the record. Two visits marked. Tonight was not a visit; it was the yard going on between visits, doing what it did when no one was writing it down.

A hammer hung on a peg beside the door, its face dark from use. I counted the pegs along that wall: seven, four holding tools, three bare. The wood above them had gone black from old smoke, not scorched, only stained with years of it.

Lano crossed the yard and pressed her nose to the base of the nearest barrel. Her tail moved once. Then she came back and sat down beside me, her flank against my leg.

The relay clerk had not come. The entry-keeper was somewhere behind me, or was not there at all; I had not looked. The notebook stayed where I had set it, its pages settling in the slight cold draft that came around the corner of the wall. No one came to it. The keeper of the place went back through the side passage with the rod still in their hand, and the yard was quiet again.

The ash at the bottom of the grate still held a faint warmth. Not heat enough to see, only to sense when I turned toward it: a small resistance in the cold air, two paces from the grate. The notebook stayed on the ledge. Ironspire went on.

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