Dream d3158-s: The Brief Double

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the millstone had not turned. That was true on our first crossing of the yard and it is true now, on our return to the terrace. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stands at the edge of the paving where the channel meets the stone lip, noting the unchanged condition without speaking. The afternoon has moved past its midpoint. Long shadows lie from the armatures - iron uprights set into the yard at intervals that the Relic-Watcher has walked, counted, and observed without naming.

We counted them on the first visit: eleven. The Tally-Reader's count was firm then, and she gave it without qualification.

On returning to the terrace now, stepping from the western passage onto the broad flat stones, I watch the eleventh shadow split. Not a second object - the armature is still one - but the cast shadow peels briefly, holds a doubled form against the pale paving, then collapses into itself again. The Anomaly-Hand marks the moment in her notes without speaking. The Bedrock-Reader looks once at the stone beneath his feet, then away. No one explains it.

Rurik had gone ahead through the passage and now sits at the edge of the split shadow's second form, amber eyes half-closed in the slanted light. His tail does not move. When the shadow contracts he remains where he is, as though the second form had simply moved to where he was already sitting. Lano pads from behind my heel, nose low to the paving stone, and stops at the same edge. Her ears come forward. She sniffs once, twice. "Quieto," she says, soft. Then she sits.

The Horizon-Surveyor holds her instrument level at the far boundary of the yard where the surveyed sheet ends. She does not look back at the terrace. What she measures there has not changed since our first crossing, and she does not look to see if it has.

I set the pale fragment down on the low parapet - a sliver of cyan stone I had been carrying since the western passage, something the Anomaly-Hand identified by color alone, noting it, touching nothing else. I place it where anyone returning here will see it before they cross to the millstone. The parapet is still warm from the afternoon sun.

The Tally-Reader writes the count: one fragment, placed; eleven armatures, unchanged; one shadow, briefly two.

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