Dream d3051-s: Cold Gravel, Tall Iron

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came into the gravel square at Irongreen on the third night and the armature was standing in the fog. Its upper reaches had gone into the grey. A worker with a barrow crossed below it, then two more with oilcloths folded over their shoulders, and none of them looked up. Not a glance. The Relic-Watcher stood at the south edge of the gravel and recorded it: the height, the cross-rails, the way the fog thickened around the upper structure and did not clear.

The Bedrock-Reader went to the base-plate and put a hand to the iron and said the armature had been seated before the square was laid. The gravel came around it later. I wrote that in the ledger.

Rurik had taken to a wooden pallet stacked along the yard wall, crouching high with his amber eyes moving across each worker in turn. When a man wheeled a cart close beneath the pallet, Rurik tracked him without moving anything else.

Lano moved alongside me, nose working the cold air. At the base-plate she slowed and sniffed along where the iron met the gravel, where pale cyan light came through the gap, and said, quietly, frío, and stood still.

The Anomaly-Hand made a mark at that joint. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood back and offered nothing. Workers continued to cross the square. The Tally-Reader said there had been eleven since we arrived, each one passing under the armature as if it were a post, a local fact with no occasion to remark upon.

We stayed until the square emptied. The armature stood. The fog held. The Horizon-Surveyor traced the line where the gravel ended and the unreckoned ground began, and did not name what lay beyond it.

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