Dream d3118-s: The Rim and Its Double

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the descent into Kestrelfall basin took most of the morning. The walls tapered as we came below the survey line, and the Horizon-Surveyor paused twice at the narrowing to take a reading against the far rim, which by then lay behind us and could only be inferred from its recorded angle.

At the basin floor the dark bowl was already there. What I had taken on the first visit to be standing water was simply the stone, polished flat by old pressure until it held light like a pool. The Bedrock-Reader crouched at its nearer edge. Lano trotted ahead and stopped at the rim of the reflection, nose working the still air above that dark surface, ears forward. She did not touch it.

Both rims showed in the black gloss: the one we had descended and the one opposite, which we had not yet crossed. They lay together in the basin floor, equidistant, as though the ground were reasoning about its own perimeter. The Relic-Watcher noted the iron armatures at the eastern exposure without approaching them. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood back from the central depression and wrote in the margin of the record without reading it aloud.

Rurik had gone ahead at the last fork. He sat now on a flat outcrop at the basin's far edge, watching the reflection from above. His amber eyes did not move when the Anomaly-Hand crossed below him to mark the pale cyan seam running east from the armature base.

The Tally-Reader read the count aloud: six visits to this place, this the sixth. The first had come when the far rim was in sun. Now both rims were the same grey and the reflection showed them equal, neither nearer.

Lano pressed against my knee. A small sound came from her, low in the throat, something shaped almost like dormido.

I did not move. The Horizon-Surveyor completed the far-rim measurement and wrote the figure. The basin stayed as it had been on arrival. No explanation came. The reflection held both rims together in the dark bowl and did not offer them separately.

I recorded: both rims present, floor unbroken, sixth visit complete, condition dormant.

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