Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First keeps the margin, and so it was Stone-First who saw them come.

Some tellings after, a long way up the dark, the light that moves came through the squeeze. Stone-First had never seen it on the deep side before. It came through the way the youngest had said the up-people came through everything, loud, all three of them, and then it stopped, at the line, where their own humming stone stood on its end in the silt with its face toward them.

They stood there a long time. Stone-First could not see them, only the light, but the light did not move the way it usually did, from one small glowing thing to another. It stayed. It stayed on the humming stone, and on the floor round the humming stone, and on the marks in the silt, and then it went down, and stayed on the floor a long while, on the line.

And then it lifted, slowly, and came across the floor toward the dark.

It came the way a person looks. Not the way a light swings. Slowly, from the line, along the silt, up the margin, into the deep, as far into the dark as a light like that can reach, which is not far. It stopped at the edge of where it could reach. It stayed there. Stone-First, a long way down, in the dark, past where any light could come, did not move, and was not seen, and was, for the first time since the up-people came below the roof, quite sure of being looked for.

Then the light went back to the humming stone, and one of them picked it up, and they went back through the squeeze, and did not come past the line again. Stone-First waited a number of tellings to be sure of that, and it stayed true.

The youngest asked, of course. The youngest asked whether it had worked.

"They heard it," said Stone-First. "They have not asked. Those are two different things."

"Will they?"

"I do not know. Nobody has ever been where we are, and so nobody knows. But we know how to wait for it now, because now there is a thing to wait for. Before there was not."

Stone-First went back to the margin. Below, in the warm, the people were telling it again, to the small ones who had been asleep the first time, and the small ones were learning the name of the one who had done it, so that they would be able to say it when they were old, to small ones of their own who had not been there.

It was not a telling. Stone-First knew that. A stone is not a telling. It is only the beginning of one.

But every telling begins with one.