Dream d3508-s: Moss at the Square's Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the walls of Brackenmoss stood out of the open moss in a square, and the moss went on beyond them in every direction, flat and pale under a sky that had gone the colour of tarnished iron.

Lano walked ahead of me along the last of the dry ground, her ears pressed flat to her skull. She had been that way since we crossed the second drainage channel, when the air changed - cold suddenly, and carrying a smell of rain that had not yet arrived. She paused at the corner of the nearest wall and looked back at me once, then out toward the far edge of the moss.

The relay clerk had found me at the road junction an hour before and handed off the sheet without speaking. It was dated and named - Brackenmoss, the date - and that was everything on it. I folded it once along the long edge and carried it toward the first wall still standing at chest height.

The wind came before I reached it. Not a gust but a sustained press of air that flattened the sedge grass and pushed the surface of a standing pool into small ridges. Somewhere behind us, back toward the settled ground we had come from, I heard a sound that should not have been there: the antenna mast giving, a long metallic complaint carried across the open ground. Then another gust and something tearing, and the generator sound that had been steady all morning dropped into a stutter.

Lano barked once. Sharp and short, facing back the way we had come.

I set the sheet at the base of the interior wall, against a course of stone where the moss had not yet reached. The rain arrived as I straightened up - horizontal, the kind that finds the gaps in everything. The walls gave shelter on two sides and none on the others.

The entry-keeper was not here. The keeper of this place, if there was one, had been absent for both recorded visits and was absent again now. The sheet sat against the stone and the rain moved across it.

I did not stay to see what the place would do with it. Lano had already turned back toward the settlement, her whole body low and purposeful, and I followed her. Behind us, the walls of Brackenmoss stood in their square in the open moss and the moss went on beyond them, and the storm came in across all of it without distinction.

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