Dream d3074-s: What the Ice Kept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Bedrock-Reader found the entrance by following the seam where the granite lip met the slope - a narrow passage no wider than a shoulder, and then it opened.

The cavern was not large. The ceiling was close enough to touch. The permafrost ran in bands of grey through the floor and low walls, and in the deepest grey band, where the cold had held longest, a ribcage lay.

It was not bone. The arcs were metal - some dark alloy, the colour of old iron but not iron, jointed at intervals by mechanisms that had long since stopped moving. Seventeen ribs on one side. I counted, then stopped: the Relic-Watcher would do that more carefully.

Rurik came through the gap last. He moved along the wall without touching the permafrost, then took a position on a low shelf of rock and watched the ribcage from there. His tail curled once, then stilled.

Lano sat at my heel and did not go forward. Her nose worked the air in small, deliberate movements. After a moment she turned her head away from the ribcage and looked toward the cavern's back wall. I noted this.

The Anomaly-Hand knelt and traced one of the pale cyan seams running beside the ribcage. The seam ran parallel to the ribs for half a metre, then angled down and disappeared into the frozen layer. No tool was drawn. The tracing was done with one finger, held just above the surface.

The Horizon-Surveyor stood at the entrance with a hand level and did not come in. There was no clean line to measure here - this was below the surveyed sheet, below every foundation we had walked above.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum opened the log and wrote for a long time. I did not read over their shoulder.

The Tally-Reader said only: the road does not end here. It goes further in.

We stood in the cavern while the cold came through the floor. The ribcage did not move. The mechanisms at the joints caught our lamplight and gave nothing back. Rurik blinked once, slow, amber eyes open and then dark again.

I marked the position in my own notes - not a name, just a bearing against the outer rock face. Unreckoned. The word the survey uses when the sheet does not cover a place. I wrote it and left a blank where an explanation would go.

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