Dream d3163-s: One Tread Above the Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grass at Nettlefield grew shorter than I remembered it. The Tally-Reader walked ahead of me along the same line we had measured before, and I noticed the way the stalks bent toward the east now, as if something warm had come through and stayed.

The posts were still standing. Two of them, unpainted, set roughly parallel at maybe four meters apart. Between them, the stair had come back. Or had not left. I could not say which from looking at it.

It was translucent, like thick glass that had been given a slight blue tint by the cold. The treads were visible through each other when I stood to the side. Eight steps, I counted, going up from somewhere above the knee to a height where nothing was waiting at the top. The bottom tread ended above the ground by the length of one step. That gap had not been there in the first visit, or I had not noticed it then. The Anomaly-Hand crouched below it, pressing her palm flat near the grass without touching the lowest edge. She withdrew her hand. She did not speak.

The Relic-Watcher moved around the left post slowly, keeping the same distance throughout. He was recording in his notebook. I did not look at what he wrote.

Lano came up behind me and sat. Her nose lifted once toward the stair, then she lay down with her chin on her paws, watching.

Rurik had gotten there first, as he usually did. He sat on the ground between the two posts, directly under the lowest tread, his amber eyes on the stair above him. He did not move when the Bedrock-Reader walked past.

The Bedrock-Reader pressed a rod into the soft ground near the right post and read the resistance. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood at the edge of the measurement, logging nothing audible, only watching the way the post sat in the earth.

The Horizon-Surveyor had gone to the field's edge and was sighting back toward us. From that distance I imagined we looked small beside the stair, which was itself not large, only strange in the way it hung there, patient, as if it was still deciding where it intended to put its last step.

I walked to where the bottom tread ended and looked down at the gap. The grass below it was unchanged. No compression, no heat, nothing to say the stair had any weight at all.

Rurik blinked once, slow, without moving his head. Lano made a small sound, quiet, and settled lower. I stepped back.

The warmth in the field was the same warmth as before. That was what I carried from the first visit into this one: the warmth had not moved.

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