Dream d3129-s: Dew in the Dry Ring

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Tally-Reader was already counting before full light reached the crossing. I stood behind her at the place where the reeds thin and the ground changes to pale clay, and Lano pressed against my calf, nose working at something I couldn't smell.

The circle had been dry for three visits. The Anomaly-Hand had noted its boundaries each time, pale chalk-coloured clay inside a ring of darker sedge, and written nothing about it because there was nothing yet to write. This morning the clay inside held dew in a thin skin, continuous across the enclosed ground, while everything outside the ring was dry.

Rurik reached the circle first. He had come ahead at the reed-stand, slipping between the stalks without bending them, and now he sat at the boundary and stared inward with his amber eyes half-closed. He did not cross the line. Lano found the edge a moment later, circled it slowly, ears forward.

The Bedrock-Reader crouched and looked at the dew from the side, watching the angle of it in the early light. The Horizon-Surveyor walked the perimeter at measured pace, counting steps, not commenting. The Relic-Watcher stood back and looked at the surrounding armatures, the iron shapes that rise from the sedge at this crossing, which are the same this morning as they were before.

I recorded the temperature of the air with two fingers held level, which is not precise, but it is what I have at a crossing without instruments. The dew inside the circle was not frost. The outside clay was merely dry. The Warden of the Deep Stratum looked at the stratum exposed at the crossing's edge, where the clay is cut away, and wrote a line.

Lano sat down at the eastern edge of the circle, tail still, nose lifted.

"Agua," she said, which surprised no one.

The Anomaly-Hand marked the circle's boundary with a pressed line of reed against clay, so we would know it again. She made no note about why.

Rurik remained at his position. At the moment when full sunrise crossed the reed-tips, he blinked once, stood, and moved into the sedge without looking back.

I noted the time in the margin. Vespermoss at second light: the circle holds dew. The circle held nothing before. The Tally-Reader read the count of the road aloud, which had not shortened.

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