Dream d3049-s: The Armature Under Smoke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road had been rutted for the last half-mile, the wheel-cuts deep enough to catch a boot heel. By midday the smoke from Irongreen's chimneys was visible above the tree line, a grey column that hung without dispersing.

The Horizon-Surveyor marked the line where the surveyed sheet ended - running east-west through a stand of birch trees that the hamlet had grown past on its southern edge. I walked that line. The trees were the same on either side.

Irongreen was not large. A forge structure stood at the center, its chimney the tallest, its heat perceptible from the road. Beside it, sunk into the ground, stood a row of iron armatures - vertical bars set into dressed-stone footings, older than the forge building, older than the cleared ground around them. The Relic-Watcher stopped and looked. The Bedrock-Reader crouched and traced the footing edge without touching the iron itself.

Lano moved ahead in short arcs, nose low. At the first armature she stopped, ears flat, and made a sound close to the word "hierro." Then she sat and watched the forge door.

Rurik slipped between the outer buildings. I saw him once, crossing from a woodpile to an outbuilding windowsill, amber eyes forward, and then he was gone inside somewhere.

The Tally-Reader counted as we walked: forge, two storage sheds, a long house, four smaller dwellings, a covered well. Eight structures, not the ten I had counted from the road. The Anomaly-Hand pointed toward the chimneys - three visible from this angle, not two. The far chimney, set apart from the main forge stack, was cold. Its iron collar was pale, the same pale the emission surveys had flagged at the cold ruins north of the surveyed sheet.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum wrote it down without comment: cold chimney, pale iron collar, unknown history.

We were taken to a room in the long house. The smell of smelted iron stayed in the air long after the door was closed. The Horizon-Surveyor's sheet had no room for what stood here.

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