Dream d3043-s: Iron Stands Without Record

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we walked out onto the slate terrace at Slatemoss on the third evening and the Horizon-Surveyor stopped at the last marked coordinate and set her measuring rod down against her boot. This, she said, is where the sheet ends.

Beyond the marked edge the terrace continued in the same cracked slate, but without any of the census markers we had grown accustomed to following. The Bedrock-Reader crouched and pressed a palm flat to the ground. Older, she said, and said nothing more.

Rurik moved ahead of us at the place where the terrace narrowed between two iron armatures. He sat down in the gap, amber eyes fixed on something beyond, and we waited. After a moment he rose and walked on and we followed.

The Anomaly-Hand worked in silence along the base of a monolith that had no foundation plaque. She traced a seam where pale cyan light bled between two slabs - faint and still, no pulse to it. She recorded the extent of it in her ledger and drew no conclusion.

The Relic-Watcher stood before a construction of bent iron that might have been machinery or might have been the armature of a gate. She recorded its dimensions and the degree of its lean and did not name it.

Lano trotted close to the Warden of the Deep Stratum, nose working steadily at the ground. She stopped once and looked back toward the edge of the surveyed sheet, ears up, then forward again, and continued alongside. The Warden logged the machinery with careful notation and left the origin column blank.

The Tally-Reader kept the count as we moved. Seventy-nine unreckoned places, he said at one point, quiet and without ceremony. Not approximately eighty. Not rounded.

The wind crossed the terrace from the northwest and lifted nothing. There was no inhabitant to ask. There was only what we could see, and we saw it carefully, and wrote down what we could name and left blank what we could not.

Somewhere in the iron shadows, Rurik perched on a beam above us and watched the plain below, tail hanging still.

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