Dream d3042-s: Stone Without Binding

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the boundary wall of Slatemoss rose from bare ground as a single unbroken face of basalt, black as lake-bottom, taller than three men standing. The Bedrock-Reader pressed a palm flat against it and worked along a mortarless joint, finger-width of shadow between one course and the next. The stones had been set without lime, without clay, without anything that names itself a binder.

I stood beside them with the logbook open and wrote nothing yet.

Rurik had come ahead through some gap I did not see him use. He sat on a ledge three courses up, tail hanging, amber eyes on the ground below. He did not move when Lano arrived.

Lano came at a trot and stopped. Her ears went flat. She turned toward the settlement side, not the wall side, and stood with her nose reading the air. A single bark, clean and short. Not alarm. Announcement.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum came from the settlement direction, not from the survey perimeter, which was the first unusual thing. He carried a handlamp and the lamp was at its wick-end, guttering.

"The fuel drum," he said. "The backup too."

The Tally-Reader had the count: three days of generator runtime remaining if we ran it to maintain heat only. The salvage stack beside the eastern annexe had been worked to angle-iron and cracked ceramic. Nothing that burns clean or feeds a combustion engine.

The Anomaly-Hand said she had seen pale cyan seams along the lower courses of the wall, faint, the kind that meant old mineral presence or a seep. She had not yet determined which. She marked the position with chalk and the Bedrock-Reader noted it in the margin.

The Horizon-Surveyor unfolded the survey sheet to its edge, where the last entered place sat at the margin and the white beyond it held no notation. Further than we have gone, she said, and the way is unreckoned. She did not say it with fear. She said it the way you say a measurement.

Lano had not moved from her position, nose still toward the settlement. The fur at her shoulders was raised.

The Tally-Reader wrote: 128 places surveyed. Supply stock: critical. Outbound requirement: unknown.

The wall gave nothing back. The Bedrock-Reader kept tracing joints in the dark, and somewhere up in the basalt Rurik blinked once and looked away.

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