Dream d3592-s: The Cable That Went Slack

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano's ears went flat before I heard anything.

She had been sitting near the kindling pile, her white coat catching the last grey light through the bare canopy overhead, and then something in the air changed and she rose from her haunches, stiff-legged, her nose aimed upstream. I had just fed a handful of tinder beneath the damp logs, and the first threads of smoke were beginning to lift, when the second figure hoisted their pack onto one shoulder and said a short word I could not hear fully, and walked away across the bridge planks without looking back.

The fire was mine to tend now.

I fed it carefully - thin dry strips first, then the thicker pieces from the middle of the bundle. The smoke thickened and the tinder caught with a low, papery sound, and I was watching the first real flame establish itself when Lano barked. Once, sharp - the kind she uses for something wrong rather than something approaching.

It came from the eastern bank: a low, grinding concussion, felt as much as heard. Then a long tearing sound, like cloth, except heavier. I straightened and looked across the water. One of the old relay buildings - the squat reclaimed structure that had stood at the edge of the flood plain since before the route was cleared, its foundations poured in the corrupt network era when speed meant more than ground - had shifted. The north wall had pulled away from the east at the joint. A cable ran from its roof to a post further up the slope, and the cable was slack now in a way it had not been a moment before.

A single lamp inside still burned. Something in the upper story tilted.

Lano stood at the edge of the bridge, ears flat, her tail very still. She did not cross.

I did not move the fire. The logs were catching and the night needed warmth and the useful work was here on the planks, not there on the eastern bank. But I watched the building and the slack cable and the tilted story, and I stayed where I was, and the smoke rose straight up into the cold air because there was no wind, and neither of us knew yet what the next hour would ask of the road or the people still on it.

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