Dream d3089-s: What the Stone Would Not Hold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Tally-Reader held the torch close to the fitted slate, counting the seams by hand. Four across, nine down, and again, seventeen tablets making up the north wall alone. She did not round the count.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum was the first to notice the silence in the relay stone. Each barrow in the stratum carried one - a flat piece of shale set in a bronze ring, tuned to carry signal from the tower at the sheet's edge to the relay at the valley's mouth. This one had gone irregular. The pattern that should have come every fourth heartbeat came now in stutters, then a long gap, then three pulses where one should have been.

The Anomaly-Hand pressed her palm to the wall and said nothing for a moment. The pale cyan seams she had been tracking all week ran directly through the relay mounting. She turned to the Warden and showed him her logbook. He read the entry and his expression did not change, but he did not dismiss it either.

Lano, who had been sitting at the chamber entrance with her muzzle toward the passage, rose suddenly. Her ears went flat against her skull and she placed herself between the party and the inner wall, body low, a single sharp bark that the slate absorbed before it could reach the ceiling. Then she stood still, watching something none of us could see.

The Relic-Watcher looked up from the iron armature she had been recording - a bracket sunk into the floor in a configuration that matched no known mounting type. She looked at Lano, then at the relay stone, and wrote a note without speaking.

The Horizon-Surveyor pulled his measuring cord from his pack and walked to the far wall. He was not measuring anything. He was checking whether the cord's fibers showed any change in tension - an old method for sensing when underground pressure shifts. He coiled it back slowly. The look he gave the Warden was not alarm, but it was not ease either.

The Bedrock-Reader knelt beside the mounting ring and put his ear to the bronze. He stayed there for a long time. When he stood, he said: the strata here are older than the census, older than the relay's own installation records. The corruption may not be coming from above.

Outside the barrow, at the edge of the surveyed sheet, the tower beacon would be showing light. We had not seen it yet tonight. The Tally-Reader wrote the count: relay irregular, onset unknown, cause unresolved. She did not write a cause. She had no cause to write.

Rurik had taken the highest ledge he could reach, a narrow shelf where two tablets met unevenly and left a horizontal gap. He sat there, amber eyes open, watching the relay stone with the particular stillness that meant he had no intention of coming down.

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