Dream d3705-s: Light That Cannot Say

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I heard it before I saw anything else: a high, discontinuous tone from the beacon tower, not the steady rhythm I knew but something broken and repeating, a pulse that stuttered and caught like a wheel with a bent spoke.

Lano walked ahead of me on the track. She stopped. Her ears went flat against her skull, not the alert prick of something interesting but the full-down press of warning, and she stood with her legs wide and her head low, watching the tower.

The bag on my shoulder was heavier than it should have been. I had carried it through six days of road and the weight had redistributed into something dense and uneven, the corners of the things inside pressing through the canvas in new places. I adjusted the strap and kept walking.

Workers moved on the wall of the nearest building - two of them, maybe three, I couldn't count in the light - stopping and starting, gesturing toward something I couldn't see from the track. One raised a hand toward the tower and then let it fall.

The beacon fired again and the light came out wrong. I had seen it before from this same place, the clean sweep of it across the hillside, the reliable interval that meant approach, all clear. This was not that. This was two pulses close together and then a long gap and then one pulse that seemed to fold back on itself, dimming and brightening in a pattern I could not parse.

Lano barked once. Sharp and short, not a greeting.

I stopped walking.

The workers on the wall had stopped moving too. I could see them turned toward the beacon housing, one still holding a tool, and there was a quality to how they stood that I recognized from other kinds of problems: not panic, not stillness either, but the held breath of people who have found something they don't understand yet and are deciding what it means.

The bag dug into my shoulder.

The tower fired again. This time the signal came through clean - the proper rhythm, the right interval, the sweep I had been watching for since the last ridge. Then once more: garbled. Two quick pulses. A long nothing.

I did not know if anyone inside had seen my approach. I had been expected. But the request I had meant to signal from the track - the knock-pattern against the relay stone that meant I had arrived and was waiting - I did not make it. The stone was there, beside the path, the same flat grey it had always been, but I stood without touching it and watched the tower try to say something it could not say cleanly.

Lano pressed against my leg. Her tail was not moving.

The door ahead stayed shut.

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