Dream d3092-s: Charcoal and Frozen Grass

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood at the outermost ring of the barrows as the ash sky turned to charcoal and the shadows of the standing stones stretched long across the frozen grass.

The Horizon-Surveyor set her rod at the point where the surveyed sheet showed only blank margin. She read the edge and did not extend it. Beyond the final barrow the ground changed character - a different compaction underfoot, harder and older, older than the settlements, older than the foundation stones of any building we had measured.

The Bedrock-Reader knelt and pressed a palm flat against the cold earth. He said nothing. He had found a seam of something the old census had not named.

Rurik slipped through the gap between two standing stones and sat facing outward, his amber eyes fixed on the dark beyond the ring. His tail moved once and was still.

The Anomaly-Hand moved along the base of the nearest monolith with a lamp, following a faint pale cyan trace that ran horizontal through the lower courses. She did not speculate about it. She noted its height from the ground, its length, and whether it turned. It turned, once, toward the north.

The Relic-Watcher recorded four iron armatures standing at intervals just beyond the barrow ring - not collapsed, not rusted through, simply standing without apparent purpose in the uncounted ground. He noted their spacing. He did not assign them a function.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked the perimeter of the ring and back again before speaking. There is machinery further in, she said. Not working. Not entirely stopped either.

Lano padded alongside the Tally-Reader as he checked his figures. She put her nose down to a frost-blackened tussock between two barrow mounds and then lifted it sharply, ears forward. Whatever she had found there, she left it and trotted onward.

The Tally-Reader read from his sheet: one hundred and twenty-nine surveyed places, fifty-six entered, seventy-three unreached. He did not add to the count. He said: beyond this line we are in the unreckoned stratum and the count begins again.

No one disagreed. No one had another number.

The shadows of the monoliths reached us at the ankles and then past us, pointing inward toward the centre of the ring where the oldest barrow sat unexcavated. Rurik did not follow them. He remained at the threshold between the outer standing stones, blinking slowly at something in the dark that none of us had named.

---