Dream d3085-s: The Spool-Yard at Leaving

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gravel yard held its last color of the day, orange-brown at the stones' edges, while the laborers set the final wire drum upright against the others. The Tally-Reader counted the drums aloud - nineteen in the row - and wrote the number without comment. The Horizon-Surveyor folded the surveyed sheet once along its worn crease and tucked it inside her coat. One hundred and twenty-seven places marked on it. Seventy-two not yet walked.

Lano moved between the stacked drums, nose down, reading something in the gravel. Rurik sat on the highest drum with his amber eyes on the marsh, tail hanging straight.

The hum came up through the soles of our boots - the submerged cathode in the deep well of Kestrelfield, audible only when we stood still. I stood still and listened to it. Then the Warden of the Deep Stratum said we should walk, and we walked, and the hum did not follow.

The marsh frogs began before we reached the first sedge line. Not one voice but a chorus arriving from all sides at once, filling the place where the hum had been.

The Bedrock-Reader paused at the boundary stone - a pale column of unmarked granite - and placed both hands flat against it. She said nothing. The Anomaly-Hand stepped beside her and pointed to a seam in the stone, a thin line of pale cyan running horizontal across the face of it, three inches above the ground.

The Relic-Watcher wrote it in her record. A horizontal seam. Pale cyan. Unmarked column at the south edge of the gravel yard. No explanation offered.

Behind us the laborers had finished. The wire drums stood silent in their row.

Lano trotted to the first sedge and stopped. She looked back once, then sat. Rurik dropped from the high drum without a sound and slipped through a gap between two sedge stalks.

I set my hand on the boundary stone where the Bedrock-Reader had placed hers. The granite was cold.

We walked into the unreckoned stratum. The chorus of frogs rose around us as we went.

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