Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Here is what the smallest told, in order, and Went-Round has not improved it.

The shape stood where the seep is told to be, in the amber, a little way out from the wall. It was about the size of a person. It was dark at the edges, the way a person is dark at the edges when the amber is behind them, and the amber was behind it. It did not move while the smallest looked.

The smallest did the thing every person below the roof does without trying, which is to know the shape of the warmth in a place. You cannot help it. A warm place has a shape, and a person in it is a piece of the shape, and you feel where the pieces are the way you feel where your own feet are.

The shape was not a piece of it.

Where the shape stood there was a gap in the warm, the size of the shape. Not cold. Nothing. As if the warmth went round it, the way Went-Round goes round a thing.

The smallest stood very still, because that is manners too, and waited to be told who it was. The ground had said nothing. The smallest's own stone had said someone is coming, and whoever was at the seep should have answered, with a stone of their own, the way the manners go. Nothing answered. The smallest waited for as long as the story of the up-people takes to tell, which is a short story now, and counted it through, and the shape did not answer a stone and did not move a stone and did not ask.

When the story ended the smallest looked again, and the shape was not there.

No stone had moved. That was the part the smallest said twice. Nobody had come and nobody had gone, by the ground. The warm had its shape back, with no gap in it, as if there had never been one.

The smallest did not run. The smallest moved a stone, properly, on the way out, so the ground would say someone is leaving, and walked back up the last passage into the warm, and came to Went-Round, because Went-Round was awake and was nearest, and told it.