Dream d3151-s: The Wheel Stands Clear

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path came down through a cut in the hillside and we heard the wheel before we saw it -- a low, measured creak carrying through the mist along the stream bank, regular as a pulled breath, though no wind came to account for it.

The Relic-Watcher was first through the gap in the hedgerow. She stopped and made no note. The Bedrock-Reader crouched at the embankment lip and pressed a palm to the exposed stone there, reading the tilt of what lay beneath. Neither spoke.

The wheel turned above the water. This was the thing that held us at the approach: not the size of it, which was considerable, nor the iron armatures laced through its spokes, but the clearance -- the gap between the lower rim and the surface of the stream, a space wide enough that a person could have stretched flat in the air beneath and not been touched by either. The water ran. The wheel turned. The two did not meet.

Lano came through behind me and sat at my heel. Her nose moved against the air. She did not bark. After a moment she set off along the bank, following some thread of scent toward the foundation stones, and I let her go.

Rurik found the high ground at once. He crossed the footbridge -- which I had not noticed until he was already halfway over it -- and gained a ledge on the far wall where the pale cyan ran in a seam from ground level up through a course of older stone. He sat there and watched the wheel from its height. His tail moved once and was still.

The Anomaly-Hand traced the seam with a finger but did not touch it directly. She noted something in her log. The Tally-Reader moved along the bank counting paces, and I heard the Horizon-Surveyor behind me, establishing a baseline from the approach gate.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum walked out onto the platform beneath the wheel and stood in the space where the water was not. She looked up. The wheel passed over. She looked up again. She said nothing and came back.

I set down a small stone at the threshold -- one from the path, dark with the road's color -- while Lano watched me from the foundation stones, her tail low and still. It was the kind of place where the doing mattered and the explanation would not.

The wheel revolved. The stream moved under the gap between them. We did not start it and we did not stop it and the mist came in off the water as we made our record of the distance from the rim to the surface and left the rest as we had found it.

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