Dream d3091-s: Fingers Twice the Height

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the altar slab was colder than the night air around it, and when I pressed my palm flat against it the cold came through at once, not gradually. I had set the lantern at the far edge and was ruling lines with a worn bone rule, measuring each row carefully before touching ink to page. The hieroglyphs were not language exactly. They were measurements. Depth marks, stratum readings, fingers twice the height of a man rendered in a shorthand that predated the census.

Lano sat at the base of the slab and watched my hand move. Her ears were up. When I shifted to reach a new section she turned her head to follow.

Rurik was somewhere above us, on the ledge where the masonry bent inward. I could hear him settle, then nothing.

The Relic-Watcher had found an iron armature in the lower field and was back now, saying nothing about it, only writing. The Anomaly-Hand had marked four emission seams in the rock face to the west, the cyan barely visible unless you stood at the right angle. The Tally-Reader kept count aloud, not for ceremony, just to hold the number. Fifty-six walked. Seventy-three not yet. The unreckoned territory begins where the old census sheet ends in a rough edge, torn rather than bounded.

I copied the hieroglyphs. The hand in them was larger than any ordinary hand. The scale implied it was recording something that could not be seen from a normal vantage, something that required standing further back, or deeper in. I ruled the next line. I copied the next symbol.

At some point Lano stood, nosed the base of the slab once, and lay back down.

The lantern held.

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