Dream d3130-s: Before the Relay Answers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the moss road narrowed between two walls of dripping stone, and the silence we carried from the vessel was still in our hands like cold metal. The Tally-Reader had not spoken the count aloud since the threshold; the number lived somewhere between her fingers and the road.

The Horizon-Surveyor stopped first. Her instrument was level, her line of sight clear, but the far relay post - a slender iron column set into the crest of the hill - gave no answering flash. She looked at it the way one looks at a word that has changed its meaning.

The Anomaly-Hand set her palm against a nearby outcrop. The pale cyan seams were present and regular, but their pulse - that faint rhythmic emission she had been logging since the second ridge - was no longer rhythmic. It stuttered. It repeated itself without cause.

Lano's ears dropped flat against her head. She stood very still at the edge of the road, nose forward, a low sound building before it reached her throat. Then the bark came, short, twice, and she pressed close to the nearest leg without looking away from the relay post.

Rurik had been ahead of us. He came back at a slow walk, stopped three paces out, and sat facing the post. His tail moved once.

The Bedrock-Reader said the substrate had not shifted. The Relic-Watcher said the iron armature beside the road was unchanged, its silence the same as always. The Warden of the Deep Stratum read the small gauge at his belt and marked nothing in his log except the time.

The Horizon-Surveyor tried the relay again: three flashes, the standard sequence. The return that came back was wrong. Not absent - wrong. A longer burst where a short one should have been. A gap inside a gap.

"Garbled," the Tally-Reader said. She made a mark but did not count it.

We did not open the vessel. We did not start the machinery of the post, which sat within reach and silent. The Anomaly-Hand traced the emission seam one more time and wrote the deviation without naming its cause.

The moss road continued ahead. The relay post at the crest would not be the last one. Lano trotted forward, but her ears did not come up.

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