Dream d3075-s: What the Ice Still Carries

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the trench cut straight through the bedrock of Ospreyhush and we descended by rope into cold that had no memory of warmth. The walls were dark stone threaded with ice, and in the ice, running in long parallel seams, were the fibers.

They were not active in any useful sense. The Anomaly-Hand said this plainly: the pulses move but nothing receives them. The light was pale cyan, very faint, the color of a held breath. It did not illuminate the trench so much as remind you the trench was there.

The Bedrock-Reader ran a bare finger along the nearest seam without touching it. The fibers predated the settlement foundations above us by an order she could not estimate. She said only: older. The Warden of the Deep Stratum wrote that down.

Lano had come down in someone's arms and now she moved slowly along the base of the wall, nose working, ears flat against the cold. She stopped at a place where three seams converged and sat there. Her tail moved once. She did not bark.

Rurik had found his own way down. He was perched on a ledge of iron armature that jutted from the far wall, part of some mechanism the Relic-Watcher recorded without naming. His amber eyes were half-closed. He watched the fibers and did not move.

The Tally-Reader stood at the midpoint of the trench with his count-board. The surveyed sheet above recorded 127 places. He wrote nothing new in this column. The trench was not a place on the sheet. He noted the discrepancy and left it open.

The Horizon-Surveyor had climbed back to the trench lip and was measuring the distance to the next visible ironwork. Her voice came down to us faintly: farther than it looks from above.

The fibers pulsed. The pulses did not arrive anywhere we could observe. The Warden noted: emission consistent, destination unrecorded.

I crouched near one seam and held my lantern close. The cyan light ran under the glass as if it had somewhere to be. I did not follow it. I set the lantern down on the ice floor and Lano came and pressed against my side, warm, while above us the surveyed world ended and the older cold continued.

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