Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

This is told the way things are told below the roof, and this time it is told by the one who was there, because for the whole of it there was only one.

Stone-First was on the line. The count had a number, and the number was not small any more, and Stone-First had stopped thinking about it as a number and begun thinking about it as a place, the way a long passage stops being a length and becomes somewhere you are. On the line, in the open, with the two shapes of feet in the silt and the small one's third shape beside them, on all the times when nothing happens.

The up-people came down, up above, the way they did. Stone-First could not see them and did not need to. You could tell. The loud came down the long passage the way water comes down a passage, all at once and then steadily, and settled at the junction, and became the working.

Then it did not.

Stone-First noticed the not before noticing anything else, because keeping a place is mostly noticing the shape of what is usual. The loud had come down the passage and had not settled. It had come on. Down the third passage, toward the crack, which it had never done at the start of a working time in all the tellings since the humming stone was lifted, and only once ever before that.

The light came into the squeeze.

Stone-First had seen the light on the deep side once, from far down the dark, and it had come through the way the youngest said they came through everything, loud, all three. This was not that. This was one light, low, close to the ground, moving the way a person moves who is trying not to throw anything, and the sound in the crack was one person's, scraping, the way the youngest scraped, the way the small one had.

One of them was coming through.

Stone-First did the thing Stone-First does, which is nothing, with the whole body still, so that nothing done while a thing is happening becomes part of the telling by mistake. And the light came out of the crack onto the silt, held low, and behind it the smallest of the three, the one the youngest had told of, who knelt to the humming stone, and the light lifted a little, and found Stone-First's feet, and went up, slowly, the way a person looks.

It stopped at Stone-First's face, and stayed there.

Stone-First did not move. The up-person did not go back.