Dream d3170-s: The Unwritten Leaf

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road narrowed to a pressed-grass track between fields that still held the morning's wet, and the Tally-Reader walked at the edge of it counting aloud in a whisper too low for me to parse. Lano trotted ahead, nose down, reading something in the verge that none of us could.

We carried the survey sheet folded against the Horizon-Surveyor's chest, and with it the blank page - cut to the same size, stitched with the same thread, bound into the same gathering. The Bedrock-Reader had wrapped it in waxed cloth before we set out. No one explained why we kept it blank. No one needed to.

Nettlefield opened on our left as a long slope of iron-colored grass, and at its edge a pale cyan seam ran in the stone of a low wall, thin as a finger. The Anomaly-Hand crouched at it without speaking. She drew her thumb along the light but did not press. Rurik came close behind her, stared at the seam with his amber eyes for a long moment, then sat down and began washing a paw.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood back from the wall. She logged what she saw - the machinery beneath it, the sound it did not make, the warmth the stone gave off even in the shade - and wrote nothing further. Her pen moved in short lines. The Relic-Watcher watched the armature above the wall's highest course without touching it. An iron rod, tilted. Its purpose no one volunteered.

This was the first visit. I write that down because the return will be its own account.

We ate at the wall's corner where a fieldstone angled into a seat. The blank page rested with the others in the gathering, its edges flush, its surface unmarked and exact. Lano lay down against the Tally-Reader's ankle and was warm.

When we rose to go back the light had shifted. The cyan in the seam was dimmer, or the field's color had moved toward it. The Horizon-Surveyor took a bearing and noted where the sheet ended - the line past which the survey had not yet reached. She did not cross it.

Lano lifted her head and looked once toward the far slope. "Mira," she said.

I wrote down the time and the direction. The blank page came home as it went out - unwritten, bound as carefully as the rest.

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