Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

This is told the way things are told below the roof: by someone who was there, to someone who was not, until the one who was not can tell it too. The one who was there is the smallest. The one who was not is Went-Round, who heard it first, which is why it is Went-Round's to tell you now.

The smallest was born after the two stones.

That matters, so it is said first. Everyone older than the smallest can remember a time when the up-people were news. The smallest cannot. For the smallest, the up-people are a told thing, like the first warm seep and the long dark before the fungus came: true, and old, and somebody else's. The smallest has never been up the squeeze and does not want to go. The two stones on the line are just where the line is.

So when the smallest wanted to be somewhere first, the smallest did not go up. The smallest went down, and in, to the place every telling begins.

The first warm seep is a real place. People forget that, because the story of it is so old. But it is there, at the bottom of the warm, where the amber is thickest: a place in the rock where the warmth comes up out of the ground on its own, and has done since before anybody's telling, and will do after. The people do not live right at it. It is too warm, and it is the beginning of things, and you do not sleep on a beginning. But anyone may go to it. The smallest went, before the telling, which is the wrong time to be awake.

The smallest moved a stone first. Say that too. The smallest had been told the manners by Stone-First-Who-Waited, the same as everyone, and did them properly, at the top of the last passage, so the ground would say someone is coming to whoever was at the seep.

Nobody was at the seep. Nobody ever is.

There was a shape there.