Dream d3087-s: The Unreckoned Teeth

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the megaliths rose from the heather in a circle so wide I had to turn my head to hold its full extent, each shaft of rock leaning at an angle no foundation-stone would accept. The Tally-Reader stopped at the outer edge of the ring and said only: not in the count.

Lano moved ahead of me, nose to the ground, threading the gaps between the nearest pair of shafts. Her tail was low and slow. She stopped at the base of one and sat.

The Horizon-Surveyor had already walked the perimeter and returned. The line ends at the ridge crest, she said. What lies inside the ring is not on the sheet. The Bedrock-Reader pressed a palm flat against the nearest face and stayed that way, reading something I could not read.

The Anomaly-Hand moved without speaking. I watched her trace a seam running diagonally across the second shaft from the south - a thin line of pale cyan that gave off no heat when I held a hand near it. She marked the position in her log. She did not name it.

Rurik had come up from the heather on his own, some minutes behind us. He chose the tallest shaft at the ring's north - a mass nearly three times my height, broad at the base and split horizontally by a crack that made a ledge. He settled there, amber eyes level, watching the interior of the ring.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood at the center and recorded. There was no instrument at the center, no altar, no fallen piece. There was only the compression of the place - the way the heather did not grow in a rough oval at the exact center, the way the air held still while it moved through the gaps everywhere else.

The Relic-Watcher said: the armature on the northern approach is newer than the shafts by several hundred years, perhaps more. She meant a rusted frame half-buried in the heather twenty meters back, its purpose unresolved. Newer by several hundred years was still a long time.

I set my hand against the shaft Lano was sitting beside. It was very cold - not the cold of a night ridge, but something underneath that: the cold of a material that has never held the sun's fraction.

We did not explain the ring. We recorded what was in it and what was not. Lano eventually stood and led me toward the gap between two southern shafts, and I stepped through onto the unreckoned ground and wrote in my log: past the survey line, no count begun.

---