Dream d3093-s: Gravel Before the Marsh

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we left the cairn at first light, our boots scraping through the gravel that surrounds Brackenbarrow on its eastern side. The Tally-Reader walked ahead and kept a count I could not hear. Eight nights in that residency, and now the road ran straight toward the marshes, the grasses bronze and wet at the edges of the track.

Lano trotted alongside the Bedrock-Reader, nose close to the gravel, stopping once to sniff a rut where water had pooled and gone. Rurik had taken the high side of the road, moving along the embankment that borders the track before it flattens into marsh ground. He paused at a post, stared at it with amber eyes for a long moment, then pressed forward.

The Horizon-Surveyor stopped to take a sighting. I watched the Anomaly-Hand crouch near a low ledge of exposed bedrock at the road's edge. The seam there was cyan, faint, the kind of emission you only notice when the light is still low and angled. The Relic-Watcher recorded the position without naming it. That is the discipline: the position, the color, the measurement. Not the meaning.

Beyond the last marked tree the road continued into ground that no census had counted. The surveyed sheet held 129 places. Whatever lay ahead had no number.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum pointed to an ironwork armature standing some distance off the road to the north, half-sunk in marsh grass. It was old, heavier than the frontier ironworks I had seen closer to Brackenbarrow, and its function was not clear from this distance. Nobody speculated. The Warden logged it and we kept walking.

Lano stopped, ears up, looking east. She held the position for a moment, then trotted on.

The gravel gave way to damp clay. The straight road continued, and we followed it into the unreckoned stratum as the light grew.

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