Dream d3177-s: What the Water Keeps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway ran out from the near bank and stopped. The Tally-Reader counted the remaining stones and said nothing, which was itself a count. We stood at the raw edge where the dressed rock ended and the air began, and below us the water was dark and still and showed us the missing span as a paler shape, a smooth rectangle of different silt, undisturbed, the exact width and length of what had been.

The Anomaly-Hand knelt at the break and held her palm near the last course of stonework. A faint cyan trace bled from a joint near the water, dimmer than what we had seen in the cold stone further back, but present. She noted it in her ledger without speaking.

Rurik had gone ahead before the rest of us reached the break. He sat on the outermost stone, amber eyes on the rectangle below, tail curled around his feet. He did not look back.

The Bedrock-Reader studied the foundation edge where it disappeared into the water, reading the strata that extended below the surface. The Horizon-Surveyor moved to the eastern bank and measured the far terminus of the road, where the causeway resumed on the other side, intact, waiting at an unchanged elevation. The gap was knowable in dimension. The gap remained.

Lano trotted to the edge and her nose worked the air above the submerged shape. Her ears went forward. She sat, watching the slow drift of light across that pale rectangle, and after a moment she carried a small stone from the broken edge in her mouth and let it fall by my feet. I picked it up. It was dressed stone, not river-worn.

The Relic-Watcher noted the iron armature that still protruded from one side of the break, a single bent rod, dark and mute, its purpose not entered into the record.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood at the margin and looked down without leaning. There was something below the surface beside the missing span, a regular shape the shallow water made hard to resolve. She logged its position. She did not name it or settle on what it had done.

We stayed until the light changed. The rectangle held its outline in the dark water. It did not fill or shift. The Tally-Reader adjusted one entry and confirmed the count of the road.

Fennmoss was quiet around us, dormant in its own way, the way a place is quiet when it is waiting for nothing in particular and keeping everything it has been handed.

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