Dream d3047-s: The Pale Seam, Horizontal

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the party rested in the walled courtyard of Slatemoss at the seventh dusk, our backs against megaliths that held no founding date and answered no naming. Lano pressed her nose to the base of one and withdrew, then circled and lay down in the dust between our feet. Rurik had gone up - a dark shape on a flat ledge high on the eastern face, watching the sky pale out.

The Tally-Reader spread the surveyed sheet on a flat surface and read it aloud without inflection: one hundred and twenty-eight places recorded, fifty entered by walking, seventy-eight still unreached. She rolled it closed. The number did not change.

The Horizon-Surveyor stood at the low eastern wall and described where the sheet ended. It ended here. The megaliths in this courtyard were not on it. Neither were the iron armatures visible through the gate arch to the south, rust-dark, standing in what might once have been a field.

The Anomaly-Hand had been moving along the base of the western megalith since we arrived. She stopped and called to us without raising her voice: there was a seam, pale cyan, running horizontal through the dark aggregate at knee height. It did not widen. It did not dim. The Relic-Watcher came and looked and recorded its height above the ground, its measured length, its bearing. She did not record what it was. That was not known.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked the full perimeter and said, when she returned, that the machinery in the south field was not the same age as the megaliths. She offered no further explanation.

The dusk held. Lano's ears came up once, toward the south gate, then settled. Rurik looked down at her from the ledge with amber eyes and looked away.

I had set my pack against the nearest megalith and left it there. The surface was cool even after whatever light had reached this courtyard through the long day. I did not know what aggregate it was. The Bedrock-Reader might have named it, but she was asleep against the facing wall, chalk in hand, no marks made.

Beyond the sheet lay the unreckoned stratum. We were already in it.

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