Dream d3509-s: Amber Before the Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lintel lay in the moss at an angle no door had needed it to hold for a long time, and I set the dated sheet on its flat face and pressed a small stone to the corner where the wind had already found it.

Lano's ears went flat before mine did. She had been circling the stone, sniffing the lichen at the edge where the surface broke, nosing at the ground alongside it, and then she stopped and raised her head and held still. A sound was coming from the direction of the masts.

The relay clerk was at my shoulder. She did not speak. The entry-keeper was further back, standing at the boundary where the grass came in taller, watching the sky above the settlement. A keeper of the place stood near the low wall where the trench ran beside the path, and they looked down into it, and I could see from where I stood that the water was already moving in the bottom.

The sheet did not lift. The small stone held it. The wind pushed through the tall grass and laid it flat and kept going, and the lintel stayed where it was, and the sheet with the date and the name of the place was still there when the first rain reached us.

Lano barked once, not at me, not toward the other people, but at the sound the masts were making, a low note the wind was pulling from the cables. The generator light on the far side of the settlement went to amber and held there. Nobody moved toward it yet. The entry-keeper watched it too.

A keeper of the place crouched at the edge of the trench and measured the water with a stick they had brought for that purpose. They called something over their shoulder that I did not hear. The relay clerk heard it. She started toward the masts at a pace not quite a run.

The sheet lifted once at the far corner, the one I had not weighted, and came back down. The lintel took the rain the way flat stone does, darkening at the edges first and then across.

I watched the generator light. Still amber. The rain came harder. Lano stood at my heel with her ears flat and her shoulder pressed against my calf, and she did not bark again, but her whole body was listening.

The place kept the sheet against what was coming. The storm was still arriving. Nothing yet was decided.

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