Dream d3587-s: What the Fire Lacks

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the alder trees leaned over the bridge like figures bending to hear something low and difficult. Rainwater gathered in the hollows of the planks. At each step my weight tilted a small bright pool toward the railing, where it broke into drops and fell.

The watch fire on the far side burned poorly. I could see it from the bridge - the orange bruised with smoke, the flame pressing sideways as though ashamed of itself. Someone had built it from what was near, and what was near was damp. The wood had been collected in haste or in darkness, and it showed in every reluctant tongue of flame that rose and collapsed.

I noticed the bundle of dry kindling before I saw who would carry it.

It was stacked against the nearer railing, away from where the alder dripped. Pale and split and light, bound with a strip of bark - someone had read the fire's need and acted on it before arriving. The bundle sat there with the quiet confidence of a prepared thing, waiting for whoever would lift it.

Lano stood at the gap where the planking creaked. Her ears went flat. It wasn't the fire that made her still - it was something else, something I felt a half-second after she showed it to me. A wrong sound in the air.

The relay post at the far end of the bridge carried its small beacon, the kind that flickers through a colored lens to pass signals across the dark. I had barely glanced at it before. Now it was wrong. The pattern it threw on the water beneath was scrambling - repeating a half-beat, stuttering, then producing a long run of pulses that matched nothing I recognized. Someone had designed that pattern to mean something precise, and whatever it was saying now was not what it had said before.

Lano gave one short bark. Not alarm, not yet - a question. She pressed against my leg and held.

From somewhere farther down the settlement, another relay answered. The response came back garbled. Two voices in a language I knew but could no longer parse.

I picked up the bundle of kindling and walked toward the fire. It was the only thing to do with my hands while the signals unraveled. The wood was lighter than it looked. The bark strip held.

The flames caught quickly when I fed the dry splits in from the bottom. The smoke thinned. The watch fire straightened.

At my heel, Lano sat very still, watching the stuttering light over the water. Her ears had not lifted. The signals kept scrambling, and nobody yet had come to explain them.

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