Dream d3714-s: Small Burn, Long Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was at a table near the far wall of the lower hall in Kestrelfall, sorting a small pile of fasteners into sizes while a worker across the room checked tension on a length of rope. The rope ran through a wooden bracket, and the worker pulled it hand over hand, making small adjustments without looking up. Neither of us spoke. The sort of work that fills a quiet hour.

Then the sound came: not a crack exactly, but a sharp exhalation of something under pressure finally giving way. From the back room, a salvaged pump that had been running the water supply to the upper stories - three seasons of reliable work from a part pulled from a structure no longer standing - went silent mid-cycle. The hum it made was so constant I had stopped hearing it. Its absence was sudden and total.

Lano was beside my bag at the foot of the table. Her ears had gone flat before the silence was even complete. She rose to her feet, nose toward the back room, and barked once - short, high, enough to cut. I set down the fasteners.

The worker with the rope had already stopped. We looked at each other across the hall with the kind of look that measures what has just changed.

In the back room, the pump sat still, a smell of heated metal spreading through the doorway. The component that had failed was one of three we'd been watching - the other two were newer, or newer enough, but this one had been flagged twice and kept going. Now it had stopped going. The part it needed did not exist in any corner of Kestrelfall that I knew. It would have to be shaped from something else, by someone with the skill to shape it.

The rope worker came to the doorway and stood looking at the pump, hands loose at their sides. I came to stand beside them. Lano pressed against my leg, ears still low.

"It runs by morning or it doesn't," the worker said. Not a question. Not quite a reassurance. Just a way of setting the edge of what we knew.

We stood there a moment longer. The water in the pipes above us would hold for a time. How long depended on who was using it and what for. There were people in this building who didn't know yet that anything had changed.

I went back to the table and picked up the fasteners. The worker returned to the rope. We continued what we had been doing, because the small task does not stop when the larger one breaks, and because there is nothing to do with the larger one yet.

Lano settled back by my bag, but she did not sleep.

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