Dream d3084-s: Before the Beacon Broke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was seated at the wooden desk in the pump station at Kestrelfield, ruling columns into a power ledger under a hanging lamp. The Tally-Reader stood at my shoulder, not speaking, only watching as the numbers came down.

The column for the eastern relay had been wrong for three nights. Not wrong by much - two degrees off the expected draw, a pale anomaly the Anomaly-Hand had marked in cyan at the margin. We had been watching it.

Lano lay on the floor near the door, chin on her paws. Then, between one breath and the next, she was up - ears flat, body low, a single sharp bark that filled the low room.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum looked up from the far wall where he had been reading the gauges. His hand moved toward the relay log.

The lamp flickered. The needle on the main draw meter swung wide - not a surge, something stranger, a kind of shiver - and when I looked at the column I had ruled ten minutes before, the figures no longer summed to what they had summed to. The columns were unchanged. The numbers were unchanged. But the total had changed.

The Horizon-Surveyor came in from outside, rain on her jacket. She had been at the eastern relay house.

"The signal is garbled," she said. "Not down. Garbled. The pattern is present but it has been - moved."

The Relic-Watcher crossed to the window. The Bedrock-Reader did not look up from the lower column, where the unreckoned draw ran its unmarked line - the power that rose from the drowned core beneath the village, the thing nobody built, nobody repairs, nobody has ever needed to explain because it has simply run.

It had always simply run.

Lano stood at the door with her nose to the crack, body taut, tail still. The Warden ruled a line in the relay log, wrote a time, and wrote nothing else.

The relay stations were still transmitting. We did not know yet what they were saying.

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