Dream d3063-s: One Hundred and Twelve

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway was wider than the gate post had suggested — three figures could walk abreast without touching, the stones set without mortar, fitted close and low to the ground. The Tally-Reader took the left margin from the first step and did not speak.

Lano stayed at my heel. She had learned the sound of departure over eight nights here and read the wet stone with her nose rather than lifting her head toward the mist the way she had on arrival. Rurik came last, stepping between the seams of the paving exactly, amber eyes on nothing visible in the fog ahead.

I turned once. The drowned arch was already gone — not gradually, but between one glance and the next, the mist standing solid and grey where it had been.

The Bedrock-Reader stopped at a join in the causeway where two stone types met. The limestone was pale, cut in the manner I had come to know from eight days of settlements. But below it, and coming up through it at the join, ran a course of darker stone — a dense basalt, longer-fitted, the top surface polished to a smoothness the limestone did not share. She said this was the first place in the entire residency that the older layer had come above ground. The basalt ran six meters before the limestone covered it again. The Warden of the Deep Stratum logged it: no quarry mark, no alignment cut, no foundation edge. It was simply continuing something the census had never measured.

The Anomaly-Hand found a pale cyan thread in a vertical crack of one causeway stone twenty paces past the join. He crouched and held his palm beside it without touching. No warmth. No pulse. He marked the position and moved on.

Lano pressed her nose into the crack after he stepped away. Her ears came up once. She sneezed once into the mist and trotted ahead.

The Relic-Watcher had fallen back. I found him beside a structure at the causeway's right margin that none of us had noticed in the approach from Harrowhush the previous nights: four dark metal uprights and a horizontal bar, the height of a gate but no gate, no hinge, no post hole in the stone below. He said it was the first such armature he had recorded that was not aligned to a path or threshold. It stood at forty-five degrees to the causeway, facing nothing particular in the mist.

Rurik sat in the gap beneath the bar. He did not move when the Relic-Watcher worked around him to measure the uprights. He stared into the mist beyond the armature with the expression cats have that means nothing can be confirmed.

The Tally-Reader spoke once before the armature passed out of sight behind us. One hundred and twelve stones, she said, from the Harrowhush gate post to here. She had not rounded. We had not asked her to.

Lano turned before I did. She trotted into the mist ahead of the group, not looking back.

Adelante.

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