Dream d3056-s: The Drowned Sheet's Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fen path lost its dry footing an hour before we reached Harrowhush, and the standing black water came in from both sides until the track was only a suggestion under our boots. The Horizon-Surveyor stopped and read the waterline against a half-submerged post. The surveyed sheet ends here, she said. Everything ahead is unreckoned.

The ruins came out of the mist in pieces: a lintel sitting flat in the water, then a course of dressed stone rising at an angle that made no sense with the ground beneath it. The Bedrock-Reader crouched at the edge of the track and pressed her palm to the submerged foundation. She said nothing. The Relic-Watcher opened her logbook and wrote down the angle.

Lano trotted ahead, nose low, and stopped at the lintel. She sniffed along its edge, tail moving slowly, then sat back on her haunches and watched the water. A ring of pale cyan stained the stone just above the waterline. The Anomaly-Hand took a reading by eye and marked it in the margin of the tally, but she did not attempt an explanation. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood beside her and they both looked at it for a long time without speaking.

Rurik had crossed the lintel before any of us reached it. He was already perched on a block of masonry three metres into the water, sitting upright, amber eyes turned toward the mist. His tail curled once and was still.

The Tally-Reader counted the courses of stone visible above the waterline: seven, then a gap, then four more at a different alignment. She wrote the numbers as two separate entries and did not connect them.

We made camp on a raised strip of ground that turned out to be the crest of a buried wall. The Bedrock-Reader said the strata here predate every settlement foundation she had recorded. Not older than the oldest, she said. Older than the count of them. Lano circled three times on the moss and lay down with her chin on her forepaws, watching the water. Rurik descended from his block and pressed once against the Warden's knee, then took the warm spot between two of us and did not move again.

The fen was quiet. The mist held.

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