Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First keeps the margin.

Keeping the margin means being at the place where the deep stops, on all the times when nothing happens, so that you are there on the time when something does. It is not a hard thing to do and it is not an easy thing to keep doing, and Stone-First had been doing it for longer than the youngest's whole telling.

Stone-First had known the youngest was going up. Not by a stone; the youngest had moved none, which Stone-First noticed and put aside to speak about later. By the way the warm changes when a small one leaves it. A warm place has a shape, and a person leaving takes a piece of the shape with them, and anyone who has kept one place long enough feels the piece go.

Stone-First let them go. That was a choice, and Stone-First was aware of making it.

The up-people had been in the upper levels for a long time now. Long enough that the telling of their coming was already told by people who had not been there, which is how you know a thing has stopped being news and become the people's. When they came, the people did the correct thing for a stranger in your place, which is to leave it to them until they ask. That is the whole of the manners for strangers. It is short because it has never needed to be long. Nobody had ever come before.

The trouble was the asking.

The up-people had never asked. Not for the upper levels, which the people had left to them. Not for the runners' ground, which was the runners'. Not for anything. Perhaps they did not know how. Perhaps where they came from, nobody asks; you arrive, and it is the arriving that does the asking, and everyone understands. Stone-First did not know. Stone-First had thought about it on the times when nothing happened, which was most of them, and had not got to the end of the thought, and did not expect to. Some thoughts are for keeping, not for finishing.

What Stone-First knew was this. A people who leave a place to a stranger until the stranger asks, and a stranger who never asks, can go on that way for a very long time. And every day of it the people are being polite to someone who does not know they are there.

Below, a stone shifted. Small, and late, and at the bottom of the squeeze.

Stone-First did not move, and waited to be told.