Dream d3094-s: The Road the Tide Left

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway ran out across the grey mud flats like something the estuary had put down and forgotten to take back. The tide had retreated hours before we reached it. The road was dark and slick underfoot, brine-smell rising from both sides, and the town of Tamarackwharf stacked its rooftops at the far end of the crossing, close-built the way coastal places grow when no surveyed sheet ever counted them.

The Horizon-Surveyor walked at the front and watched the gap between the flats and the first houses. She measured without speaking.

Lano trotted alongside me, nose low, reading the damp air in passes. The mud on either side held the last tide's record: bird prints, something wider, a single boot-mark aimed away from town. She sniffed the boot-mark, then moved on.

The Anomaly-Hand stopped midway and turned her chin toward the causeway's southern flank, where the exposed bedrock showed a cyan seam running level with the clay. Not ore. Not standing water. I marked the position in the record while she held the angle, and we walked on.

The Bedrock-Reader crouched once where the causeway stone met the mud's edge, pressed two fingers to the joint, and rose without comment. The Relic-Watcher logged the iron armature listing eastward in the flat - a ribbed column, old, half-submerged - without going toward it.

Rurik had gone ahead. He was sitting in the town gate when we arrived, square in the gap, amber eyes level, tail flat. The Warden of the Deep Stratum passed through first, then the rest of the party. Rurik watched each of us through, then stepped inside and was gone.

The Tally-Reader spoke once we were all in: the road we had crossed was three and a half kilometres past the last point the old sheet recorded. The town was not on the sheet. She said so as a figure, not a finding.

The tide would cover the causeway again before morning. We were already inside.

---