Dream d3058-s: The Pillars Kept No Count

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway ran flat between two rows of obsidian pillars, each one wider than a door and taller than any building I could name from the surveyed sheet. The canal beside us carried no current. The Tally-Reader walked with one hand trailing along the base of a pillar, counting the paces between them aloud to herself, though she said afterward the count gave no whole number she trusted.

Lano padded ahead of the party, nose low to the stone, occasionally lifting her head when the canal's flat surface threw back a sound none of us had made. Rurik had slipped through a gap between two pillars and now walked the narrow margin between stone and water, amber eyes fixed on something we could not locate.

The Bedrock-Reader crouched where the causeway surface had buckled slightly. She ran a finger along the split, pressed her palm flat, and held it there. She said nothing.

Farther down, the Horizon-Surveyor stopped at the point where the last measured settlement marker stood. Beyond it the pillars continued - same spacing, same height - but the stone changed colour where pale cyan emission ran through the rock in thin horizontal bands. The Anomaly-Hand marked the height of each band in her ledger. Four bands. Then five. The fifth she marked with a bracket and wrote only a question beside it.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum had walked ahead without stopping at any of this. She was already past the surveyed range before the rest of us noticed, and we moved to follow.

The Relic-Watcher recorded what appeared beyond the marker's line: not pillars but something older, rougher, with iron armatures bolted to them at irregular heights by builders whose purpose none of us named aloud. She made drawings in her ledger. She did not label them.

The water in the canal held no sky. I looked for the obsidian pillars in it and found nothing reflected there, only depth that the eye could not settle.

Rurik sat down at the point where the armature-bearing stones began and stared past them into the dark. He did not move when we passed him. He was still sitting there when I looked back.

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