Dream d3121-s: The Lifted Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway gave underfoot, and each step pressed a slow well of water up around the boot, then closed again without a sound.

The Tally-Reader walked ahead of me, counting aloud in a voice below hearing, lips moving at the seams between moss-cushions and bare board. Rurik went ahead of them both, tail low, picking each paw up cleanly as though the wet did not matter - which for him it did not. Lano trotted at my side, nose working the air, and paused only when the column came into view.

It rose from the center of the broadest panel of moss, straight, without taper, black in a way that was not the black of absence but the black of substance entirely without surface. No root descended from its base. The column simply began where the moss ended its authority and continued upward past the place where our eyes could hold it steady.

The Relic-Watcher stopped and raised the record-board, drawing nothing yet, only looking. The Anomaly-Hand moved laterally along the edge of the causeway and crouched, gloved fingers tracing the moss-line at the column's circumference without contact. A pale cyan seam ran there, a thin issuance that came not from inside the column but from the margin between the column and what held it - or did not hold it.

The Bedrock-Reader set a hand flat on the nearest board and was still for a long time. The Horizon-Surveyor swept a slow transit along the far edge of the sheet where the causeway narrowed to a thread and the moss deepened on either side into something older than the survey itself.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum came last, moving without hurry, and stood at a distance of two arm-lengths and did not record anything, only attended.

Rurik sat down in front of the column and stared. He did not move for the duration. Once he blinked, slowly, both amber eyes closing and opening as though the column had given him something that required the full exercise of patience.

Lano circled wide, keeping to the edge of the causeway, nose tilted up. She stopped once, directly across from Rurik, and looked at the column from the far side. Then, barely above a breath: "quieto."

The pale cyan seam pulsed once - not brighter, only deeper in its quality - and held at its former level.

No one moved the column. No one named what it was. The Tally-Reader wrote a single stroke in the margin of the count, and we stood in the carried interval between the first witnessing and whatever comes next, while the moss kept its slow work and the causeway held.

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