Dream d3465-s: Out of the Wet

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the well at Juniperfold stood below the junipers in the early grey, and the rope was still running, turning slow over the iron pin, the bucket somewhere down in the dark. Lano walked beside me to the edge of it, and then her ears went flat, all at once, before I heard anything - a posture I had learned to read not as fear but as the particular attention she gave to things that had not yet arrived. She pressed against my leg and gave one short bark that rang off the stone and fell into the morning.

The keeper came down the slope with a clay jug and set it on the shelf at the well's rim without looking up. Her hand went down alongside the jug and found the edge of the sheet I had laid there the evening before - the one carrying only a date and the name of this place, nothing more. The shelf was filmed with condensation from the rope's slow work, and the sheet had begun to curl at its corner. She lifted it without reading it, tilted the jug until the overhang sheltered the shelf, and set the sheet back against the dry stone underneath. She drew the water. The rope went slack.

From the far side of the settlement came the sound of someone moving among metal, the flat percussive sound of a lid set down hard, and then a voice carrying no words across the distance - just a tone. The keeper straightened and looked that direction. She capped the jug with her palm and went toward the sound with the same unhurried step she had used coming down, which told me more than hurry would have.

I stood at the well with Lano pressed close and heard the lid sound again, and then nothing. The generator shed was visible past the roofline, its exhaust pipe cold. The settlement had fuel problems before and had solved them before; the tools for ranging out were in the storage room and the roads through the ridge were known roads. But the salvage rounds had come back light three times running, and the fourth round was already past its expected return.

The sheet sat against the dry stone under the jug's shadow. The well kept running. Lano's ears had not come back up yet.

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