Dream d3088-s: The Raised Hand, Unrecorded

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood on the broad cyclopean terrace of Brackenbarrow on the third night, and at the center of it, rising from a joint of ancient stone, was the hand.

It was enormous. Severed cleanly at the wrist - no jagged break, no sign of force - as though something very old had simply decided where the arm would end. The palm faced upward, fingers slightly curled, and from the base pale seams ran through the stone at angles that did not match the terrace's own jointing.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched near the base and traced one seam in the air above it without touching the stone. The Bedrock-Reader said the hand was not the same age as the terrace floor. The Tally-Reader wrote that down and did not read it aloud.

The Relic-Watcher circled the hand twice, slowly, and made no notes. The Horizon-Surveyor looked outward, toward the place where the surveyed sheet had ended, and said nothing about where the palm was pointing, because the palm pointed at the sky and the sky was uncounted.

Lano sat at my heel with her ears forward, watching the stone. Rurik had gone ahead of us - already perched on a low wall at the terrace's edge, amber eyes fixed on something past the reach of any lantern, tail motionless.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked the perimeter logging the ironwork frames bolted at each corner - squat dark armatures sunk into the cyclopean stone, belonging to neither the ancient ruin nor the settlement survey. The Warden noted each one and settled nothing about them.

I stayed near the hand's shadow. The palm was open. That was the whole fact of it: open, raised, and belonging to nothing in the survey.

Lano pressed her nose to the base of the stone, pulled back, and looked at me. "Quieta," she said softly. Then she sat again.

We did not measure the height of the hand that night. The Tally-Reader confirmed seven ironwork frames and did not round it up. The Warden's log read: cyclopean terrace, hand feature, unreckoned, no explanation settled.

That was what was true. We left it that way.

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