SSCS 03: Installment 5 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 5 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
I finally got my mouth shut and my eyes turned away from staring, but by then the old woman was long gone.
And I had less than no idea of what to do.
A fish.
I blinked and rubbed at my face. Coherent thought was apparently not a possibility either.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 5: 19.0413
I’d turned and was staring resignedly at the thing the old woman had called a sand-table, trying to work up the will to push past the confused dread filling me up and investigate the tools she’d mentioned, when a hand landed on my shoulder and I about jumped out of my skin.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you heard me come up. I’m Lily.”
The woman I saw when I turned was nearly the complete opposite of the old woman who’d just left. Rather than small and hunched and ancient, she was nearly a full head taller than me, slender as a lotus stem, with a long, glossy black braid falling forward over one shoulder and down past her waist. I couldn’t really judge her age, but her face looked fresh as cream, and I felt my heart try to crawl down into the pit of my stomach as I remembered the old woman had mentioned a Lily. I’d been a long time at my last factory, had worked hard there and, I’d thought, done well. And now I was here, starting over clueless as a baby, with a supervisor who looked like she might be younger even than my little sister. The fear of it made me cold, and I know the smile I forced my lips to stretch to must have looked strange and strained. “I’m Jhanni.” I tipped a small bow. I didn’t even know the proper way to greet people at this factory.
But Lily smiled like I’d done everything just right, making me feel even colder. “Elka didn’t really tell you what this project is for, did she?” she said, and her smile turned a little bit shy, like we were sharing a secret. “Not every dreamer needs to know, but you look like you’d like an orientation.” She paused, as though that had been a question. I opened my mouth, but closed it again. I didn’t even know what a dreamer was. Was that what I was here to be? At the last factory, I’d done all my work with my hands, and that work had been clear and hard-edged and real. At last I think my expression was pleading enough that Lily simply nodded and turned to face the massive tablet.
“Right. Here,” she said, “I think today you’ll probably mostly just want to study this anyway.” She gestured at the big, mostly smooth surface. “I tried to get Maia –” she looked back over her shoulder toward me, but down, possibly sadly, “that was the girl just before you – to tell me about what she was dreaming for this, but she talked so little, even before she came to us… She was working on this part, here.” Lily gestured to the lower-right corner. “I’m mostly sure it’s a ship of some kind, or…” she grimaced. “Well, whatever you do, it will have to pull the entire template into a unified whole.” Now she gestured to the other corners. One looked like it held nothing so much as bird-like footprints of some kind. “It’s to be the half-template for the next palace bell, to be cast in bronze, with two sheets, joined and wrapped around,” she cupped her hands in a circle. “The bell will hang just inside a new gate that will face east, and open directly onto the river.”