Dream d3073-s: Amber Pulse, Unlogged

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the three iron towers stood at the far end of the rock shelf, each one driving a slow amber beat across the pass - once per minute, no faster, no slower, as though they had been keeping this interval since before anyone arrived to notice it.

The Horizon-Surveyor laid the edge of the surveyed sheet flat against the rock and pressed one finger to the last marked line. Beyond that finger: nothing recorded. The sheet ended cleanly, as sheets do, but the shelf continued into darkness where the amber light did not reach far enough to show us what stood there.

The Relic-Watcher counted three armatures we had not seen before the light moved. Between pulses they were invisible. When the pulse came they appeared - squat, iron, their purpose unguessable - and then the pass went dark again and they were gone. She wrote: three armatures, rock shelf, north face, no further description possible.

Lano trotted to the very lip where the shelf broke off and stood there with her nose working. The amber light caught her once, turned her coat briefly gold, then released her back to grey. She did not move from the lip until the Tally-Reader called softly and she came back, unhurried, tail low but not troubled.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched at a seam in the rock where the pale cyan bled upward through a fracture no wider than a hand. The Bedrock-Reader looked at it for a long time and then said it was older than the towers by a measurement she could not state with the tools she had. She did not try to state it.

Rurik found the warmest face of the nearest tower and pressed his whole flank against it, amber eyes tracking each pulse as it left the beacon above him and traveled the pass. He made no sound. He did not look away.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum logged the armatures, the seam, the towers, the interval. Beside the interval she wrote: origin unresolved. She did not write unknown. Unknown implies a known territory it has not yet entered. Unresolved means the question is open and the record stays open with it.

We stood at the edge of the sheet and watched the light go out again, and it was a full minute before it returned, and in that minute the unreckoned stratum held still and said nothing.

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