Dream d3096-s: Black Drip and Empty Bronze

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood on the harbour terrace and watched the clock drip.

It was older than the wharf. A block of grey carved into a column of descending channels, taller than three men stacked, and from its highest channel the black liquid came in a thin, unbroken thread. It struck the bronze basin at the base without any sound I could name. The basin did not fill. Whatever entered it was gone before the next drop fell.

The Tally-Reader stood at the clock's base with his rod held level. He did not write anything. After a long silence he said that by his count the basin had received more than nine hundred drops since we arrived, and that none of it had gone anywhere he could follow.

Lano sat close to my heel, her nose working at the air above the basin. After a while her ears went flat. She did not approach.

Rurik had gone ahead to the far edge of the terrace. He sat on the low wall where the wharf ended and looked out into the unreckoned dark, amber eyes fixed on something we could not see from where we stood.

The Horizon-Surveyor walked to where Rurik sat and looked past the wall. She came back and said: the surveyed sheet ends at the old ironworks fifty metres out. What lies beyond does not appear on any sheet she carries.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched along the terrace flags and traced a faint cyan seam that ran from the clock's base across the flag-stones and over the wall's edge. She did not mark it. She straightened and looked at the Warden of the Deep Stratum. The Warden looked back and said nothing.

The Bedrock-Reader knelt where the seam crossed a cracked flag and read the layering beneath: harbour fill, older rubble, then a stratum of cold black material matching nothing catalogued from the surveyed sheet. He said so plainly. The Relic-Watcher recorded the statement in the field book and put the book away.

The clock dripped.

Lano lifted her nose once more toward the basin. "Oscuro," she said, barely.

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