Dream d3160-s: The Wet Stone Turns Alone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came down the mill road at the end of the day's carry, the last of it: sacks shouldered by the Tally-Reader and two unnamed others, their feet finding the ruts without looking. The wheel above the sluice continued its turning. It had not stopped for the grain and would not stop for its absence.

Vespermill sat quiet at the road's lower end. The Bedrock-Reader moved along the foundation stones at the building's east face, crouching to press a palm flat against the base course where an older structure had been settled underneath. She said nothing. The strata were legible in the color change alone - grey above, ochre below, and a faint band of something between them that she traced with two fingers and then stood.

Lano came ahead on the road, her paws light in the dust, nose working at the edge of a grain spill near the threshold. She sniffed along it to the wall, sat, and watched the Relic-Watcher cross the yard.

The Relic-Watcher stopped at the armature set into the millstone housing - a curved piece, part of something older than the current mechanism, its purpose no longer attached to the surrounding machinery. She made her notes without touching it.

Rurik had taken a position on the capstone above the sluice gate. He sat with his back to the wheel, facing the road, his amber eyes tracking the sacks being set down. He did not look at the wheel. It turned without his attention.

The Anomaly-Hand found what she had been looking for at the cold stone of the mill's lower wall: a seam running at knee height, pale cyan where the rest was dark. She marked its extent in the register. The Warden of the Deep Stratum read the entry over her shoulder and wrote nothing additional. The machinery under the floor ran at its own rate, unlogged. The Warden recorded only that it ran.

The Horizon-Surveyor stood at the road's end where the surveyed sheet terminated - the mill just inside the boundary, the fields beyond it belonging to a different count. She measured the distance to the last mark and entered it. Nothing beyond the sheet's edge required her today.

Evening came in from the east while the wheel kept its motion, its sound a steady percussion over the water it lifted and dropped. The grain was off the road. The residency was the same as we had found it, dormant, the stone cool, the record a little longer.

Lano trotted back to where I stood. She dropped a small flat stone near my foot - carried from somewhere on the road - and looked up.

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