Dream d1604-s: Cyan Below the Break

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the first-gift stone lay open in my hands like a sentence I had only half-read.

The fracture was not new. I had run my thumb along it two nights before without thinking much of it - a stress line, I assumed, where the stone had been struck at some point before Lano found it in d063. But this morning, angling it toward the fire's low light, I saw the cyan vein did not end at the break's edge. It continued downward into the deeper stone, running in a branched thread I had taken for shadow.

The Builder came to crouch beside me without being asked. He had spent part of the night mapping the stone circle's geometry with string and stakes, and his hands were still chalk-dusted.

"The fracture goes further than the surface," I said.

"It often does," he answered, not looking up from the stone but extending one finger to trace the visible vein's line. "You see where it widens here? That is not damage. That is where the material differentiated. Different crystallization rate."

Rurik wound once around the stone, close enough that his tail brushed my wrist, then settled at my knee with his amber eyes fixed on the fractured face.

The Weather Reader had the barometric drum out and was reading the morning's pressure - clear and high over the cave region, the origin's own weather, undisturbed. He recorded a number without comment. Then he looked over.

"What is inside it?"

"That is the question," the Builder said.

I tilted the stone and the firelight shifted with it. The cyan vein did not vanish. It deepened. Where the crack opened widest, a second thread branched inward at an angle I had not seen before - not running parallel to the stone's face but diving into the body of it, toward its center.

Lano pressed her nose to the stone's flat base and sniffed once, her nostrils working at the mineral cold rising off the inner surface.

"Quieto," I said, without thinking - she had not moved to disturb anything, only read it in her own way. She sat back on her haunches and watched.

Behind us, beyond the cave mouth, the framework's distant glow pulsed once. Not a flicker I could have named as such if I had not been watching for it. But I had been watching.

I turned the stone again. The vein ran deeper than any reading I had done here had reached. I had not finished reading the beginning.