Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

On the line, alone again, Stone-First heard the warm settle a long way below, the way you can, and stood.

The count went up by one. It would go up by one every working time, and Stone-First would be there for each of them, and would not answer, and had told a small one why, and the small one had told the warm, and now the whole of the people knew what the waiting was and what it was for. That had not been true before. Before, the people had known that Stone-First was on the line. Now they knew what Stone-First was doing there. It is not the same thing, and the second is the one that becomes a telling.

Here is what Stone-First had worked out about waiting, on the line, one asking at a time.

There are two kinds below the roof. There is waiting to be told, which the Told have done since before the tellings begin, and are good at, and can move a stone for. And there is waiting to be asked, which nobody had ever done before, because nobody had ever come. Stone-First had thought, going up to the line the first time, that the second kind would be a different shape from the first, and had been ready for that.

It was not. It was the same shape. You go to the place where the deep stops, and you are there, on all the times when nothing happens, and the ground will tell you the moment something does. Stone-First had done it for a whole life.

The only difference was the stone. In the first kind, the stone is yours to move. In the second, it is theirs. And the Told had never once in all the tellings waited for somebody else to move a stone, and did not know how long that took, and were finding out.

Every telling begins with one. Stone-First stood on the line and waited for theirs.