Dream d3111-s: The Cliff Withholds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came to Kestrelfall along a white gravel approach and the stones were trembling beneath our feet before we reached the base of the cliff.

The Tally-Reader stopped first and counted paces from the last iron marker. The Horizon-Surveyor looked up toward the ridgeline, then back at the sheet in her hands. The line of the approach ran true. What it ran toward was harder to say.

Lano moved ahead of us, nose working the cold air, paws finding purchase on gravel that shifted without sliding. She paused where the approach narrowed, ears lifted, then dropped a small piece of white stone from her mouth at the foot of the cliff face. The Bedrock-Reader crouched at the cliff face and read the stratum exposed in the cut: iron-veined slate, unworked, older than the approach.

The Relic-Watcher walked the face of the cliff from one end of the approach to the other and recorded the monoliths standing back in the scree, three of them or possibly four, because the Anomaly-Hand counted the pale cyan seam that ran between two and could not say whether it constituted a boundary or a joining. I noted the seam in the account without resolving it.

Rurik came last, slipping through a gap in the scree we had not seen from below. He found a flat ledge halfway up the cliff face and sat there watching us, amber eyes half-lidded, tail wrapped around his feet. He did not descend.

The gravel trembled. It had been trembling since we arrived and nothing fell. The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked the perimeter twice and logged the unreckoned iron armatures set into the gravel at the cliff's base, their function not settled, their age not settled. The trembling did not vary when she passed over them.

The Tally-Reader closed the outgoing count at this place and opened the inward count for the residency.

We marked Kestrelfall present.

Lano sat beside me on the approach, watching the cliff face, tail still. The Horizon-Surveyor measured the line where the surveyed sheet ended: three paces beyond the last monolith, at the edge of unrecorded ground.

We did not explain the trembling. We did not start anything. We set the account beside the earlier one and let the white gravel hold.

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