Dream d3101-s: The Ebb's Disclosure

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the slate was cold when the Bedrock-Reader lifted it from the last bollard at the wharf's end. The tide had gone out not an hour before, and the surface still held a faint slick, not wet exactly but not dry either, the way stone holds a memory of contact.

Lano came first, trotting ahead onto the tidal flat where the mud gave slightly under her paws, nose working in sweeping arcs along the exposed line where the wharf's pilings met the channel bottom. The bottom was visible now: dark silt, iron rungs set into the nearest piling at intervals the Tally-Reader counted and noted without saying the number aloud. I watched the Tally-Reader's hand move across a page, deliberate and unhurried. The count was entered, the page closed.

Rurik had come from somewhere behind us. He moved along the walkway's edge where the planking was still wet, choosing his path without looking down, amber eyes fixed on the far piling where it stood apart from the others. He settled there, facing the open channel, and did not move again.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched at the base of the exposed stone face beneath the wharf's head, where the tide had uncovered a seam of pale cyan running in a narrow band through the darker surrounding rock. The seam was not uniform. The Anomaly-Hand recorded its dimensions and noted the angle. Nothing more. The Relic-Watcher stood a few paces back and recorded the iron armature above it, a bracket that had never, in any account I had heard, been connected to anything still attached.

The Horizon-Surveyor set the tripod at the end of the accessible flat and sighted toward the far margin where the channel mouth opened into broader water. The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked the base of the exposed section without touching anything, pausing at a dark recess where the tide had carved back an underhang. Something occupied the recess. The Warden logged it and moved on.

Lano had found a piece of worked clay among the silt and carried it back, setting it at my feet. I picked it up and turned it over. One face bore parallel lines too regular for erosion. I passed it to the Relic-Watcher, who numbered it and wrapped it in cloth.

Quiet at the wharf end. The pale cyan held in the exposed seam. The Bedrock-Reader's slate carried more now than it had at the start, the annotations in a hand I could not read at this angle. Rurik blinked once, slow, watching the open water.

The outgoing tide had left all of this uncovered. We worked in what it had disclosed, and did not speak of what it would take back.

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