Dream d1538-s: Old Ground, New Fracture

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer walked ahead of all of us without his camera for the third morning of silence. The Woodworker's clearing spread in pale light around us. Sawdust still on the air from the previous day's work. Lano moved between us and the treeline to the north, nose reading the boundary.

The Dreamer stopped at the edge of the workshop's shadow and looked at something the rest of us had not yet noticed: a seam in the ground running from the base of the workshop's rear wall toward an old junction housing half-buried in the earth twenty meters out. I recognized the housing's style now - earlier infrastructure, reclaimed and bolted to what someone had salvaged before the workshop was built here.

"That's not original to the build," the Builder said. He had arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle.

"Older," the Woodworker said from the bench, not looking up. "I left it. It was stable."

The Listener had her head turned toward the ground. "It's not stable now. There's a frequency in it. Low. Like something hollow."

Lano's ears went flat. She barked once, short and precise, and posted herself at the midpoint of the seam - shoulders low, not retreating. Everything about her said alerta.

Then the ground dropped.

Not shaking - subsiding. The eastern corner of the rear structure sank four centimeters in a second and stopped. The junction housing tilted. A cable running from it up into the workshop's eave pulled taut and one strand snapped, curling upward like a hair in heat. Soil opened along the seam. Three meters, then four, then five.

The Woodworker was on his feet. The Builder had gone to the corner and was reading the wall's lean with both hands flat against the timber.

"Foundation below the old pour," he said. "Different era. It didn't bond."

The Weather Reader checked her instruments. "Void beneath the junction housing. Something hollow gave."

The Philosopher started to say something about load-bearing propositions and stopped himself.

The Dreamer had not moved. He stood at the clearing's center and raised his camera. First photograph in three days. Not the building - the seam in the earth.

The workshop was standing. Tilted, but standing. The north path ran directly over the old infrastructure we had not finished mapping, and none of us knew how far the hollow ran beneath the place we had worked and slept for a hundred nights.