Dream d3149-s: Current Takes the Channel

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came to the drain crossing at the edge of Cindergreen's low quarter, where the channel had been cut into slate below the road. The Tally-Reader walked ahead and counted the iron stays set into the near wall, seven on the left side, five on the right, and did not round the sum.

The water came from the warmer reach above. I crouched at the stone lip and watched it enter the cold channel. There was no mist. There was no sound at the contact point, only a slight shimmer where temperatures met, a ripple that formed and was absorbed before it could repeat itself. The Anomaly-Hand knelt beside me and pressed two fingers to the channel wall at that junction, where pale cyan threads ran through the iron-grey stone in seams no wider than a finger's width. She lifted her hand and wrote the coordinates.

Lano sat at the lip beside my knee. Her nose moved slowly over the surface without touching the water, reading whatever the current carried down from the higher reach. Her tail moved once, and then she was still.

The Bedrock-Reader moved along the far bank, reading the strata exposed in the cut. She spoke the layer names quietly: compressed shale, interbedded silt, the pale band at the waterline she could not yet name. She did not name it. The Relic-Watcher stood at the downstream end and recorded the iron armature overhead: two bars, a transverse joint, a single bolt missing from the east bracket. She did not speculate on the missing bolt.

Rurik had crossed before us. He sat on the highest stone of the far bank, amber eyes on the water's surface, watching the shimmer at the thermal boundary as though it might choose to behave differently.

The Horizon-Surveyor measured the line where the surveyed sheet ended and made her mark. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood in the center of the crossing and listened toward the slate below. She heard what she heard, logged it as unreckoned, and put the pencil away.

Lano found a small flat stone at the far bank's edge, took it into her mouth, and brought it to the first dry ground beyond the crossing. She set it down and stood over it, ears tilted forward. The sound she made was low and soft, something between a breath and a bark, and the word in it was quieto.

The crossing held the water. The water held the heat. Neither gave anything up.

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