Dream d3119-s: Pale Seam at Kestrelfall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the crossing gave no warning before it shifted. The scree lay in a wide apron below a broken cliff face, each slate tile resting at the angle it had chosen when it fell - nothing stable but nothing sliding either. We moved in a line, the Bedrock-Reader first, testing each foothold before committing weight, the Tally-Reader last, her pace-count swallowed by the wind before it reached me.

Rurik went ahead of everyone. He picked his way across the loose field as though the slates answered to him, placing each paw with a deliberateness that looked like indifference. At the far margin he took a flat outcrop and sat, amber eyes half-closed, watching the rest of us negotiate the field.

Lano pressed close to my leg until we reached solid ground. She nosed the cold air constantly, reading something in it I could not. Once her ears stood straight up and she turned toward the cliff base, where the Anomaly-Hand had paused. A line of pale cyan ran through the iron-grey rock there at shoulder height, no wider than two fingers, horizontal, the kind of mark that looked as though it had been waiting for someone to arrive with the right vocabulary. The Anomaly-Hand photographed it and wrote nothing.

On the far side of the crossing the Horizon-Surveyor unrolled two drafts of the same approach: the valley below, the three iron armatures, the terminus of the present sheet. Both were careful. Both were accurate. Neither agreed on what to include within its borders. I looked at both drawings for a moment, then folded them along the shared crease and laid them together in the flat case. The Relic-Watcher did not reach for either. Nobody chose the truer one.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood near the armatures and looked at the unreckoned machinery in the base of the cliff. She did not speak. She did not move toward it. Kestrelfall lay dormant around all of it, which was not the same as empty.

Lano found a sliver of pale slate at the edge of the crossing and carried it a few paces in her mouth before setting it down where the ground turned firm. Quieta.

The Tally-Reader closed the count for that crossing. She did not round it.

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