Dream d3071-s: Mist at the Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path narrowed to a seam of grey shale between two walls of exposed bedrock, and we climbed in single file toward the crest of Ospreyhush, the sky pressing low and unbroken above us.

Lano moved ahead, nose working at the joins in the rock, ears forward. Rurik came last, taking each step with the particular deliberateness of a cat who has decided to follow despite finding the whole enterprise undignified. He paused at a wide crack in the path, stared into it, then stepped across without looking down.

The Tally-Reader stopped at a flat outcrop and unrolled the surveyed sheet. I looked over their shoulder. One hundred and twenty-seven places. Then the margin, then nothing. The Horizon-Surveyor drove a small marker stake into a cleft in the rock and said: here. That was all.

Beyond the marker the path continued as before, but the sheet did not.

The Bedrock-Reader crouched low and pressed a hand to the exposed face of the ridge wall. The strata here tilted wrong - older than anything the census had touched, the layers running at an angle to every foundation we had measured. They did not explain this. They traced the angle with a finger and moved on.

We came to an ironwork armature half-buried in the scree: a frame of some kind, its purpose unclear, its metal not the kind the frontier works used. The Relic-Watcher circled it twice and made their record without naming it. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood to one side and wrote nothing for a long moment, then wrote one line.

The Anomaly-Hand knelt near the base of the armature where the rock had split open along a fine seam. The seam emitted a pale cyan light, steady and cold, no flicker. It continued into the rock face as far as we could see, and came out again thirty paces up the ridge before the mist swallowed it. I marked the position. The Anomaly-Hand marked the position. We did not discuss what it meant.

Lano sat down beside the seam and looked up at me. Rurik found a flat stone above the armature and settled there, watching the mist with amber eyes as though he had been waiting for it.

The Tally-Reader marked two new places in the margin. Not settlements. Not named. Just locations where the sheet had resumed, past its own ending.

We climbed on toward the crest, the unreckoned stratum on all sides of us, the surveyed world somewhere below in the clouds.

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