Dream d3116-s: The Undrawn Position

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the stone bench at Kestrelfall held two drawings when we arrived: charcoal pressed into a flat piece of pale slate, each showing the same iron wheel at rest, but each at a different angle. In the first sketch the highest spoke angled toward the residency wall. In the second, that same spoke pointed outward, toward the unmapped ground. Who had made them was not our question.

The Tally-Reader counted the sketches. She said the number aloud once and made her mark.

Lano moved ahead along the cold path, her white coat catching the flat light. She reached the bench first, nose working across the slate's surface, and then sat back and watched the rest of us arrive.

The Bedrock-Reader crouched at the bench's south face and pressed one hand to the foundation seam: layers of darker and paler stone, continuous, telling something about what the bench was set into rather than what had been set upon it.

Rurik came last through the gap in the residency wall. He leapt to the bench, passed between the two sketches without disturbing them, and settled near the nearer drawing. Amber eyes half-open. He washed one paw and did not move again.

The Anomaly-Hand found her cyan seam along the eastern face - a pale line following the join of two stone courses. She crouched in silence. The Warden of the Deep Stratum moved to the iron armature near the wall and stopped before it, recording nothing aloud. The Relic-Watcher stood at the armature's edge but faced the sketches instead.

I studied the space around each drawing. Both showed where the wheel had been; neither showed where a person would have stood to hold it at that angle. The blank ground in each sketch was the part the drawings withheld.

Lano lifted her nose toward the eastern seam. "Quieto," she said, softly.

The Horizon-Surveyor moved to the edge of the surveyed sheet, measuring the line where the mapped ground ended. Kestrelfall watched from its dormant windows. The road ran beyond the count the Tally-Reader held.

We had been here before. This visit and the last were not the same visit. Both remained on the account.

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