Stone-First-Who-Waited (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First-Who-Waited went up to the line afterwards, because that is where the margin is, and keeping it means being there.

The two stones were where they had been left, one on each side of the place where the feet had stopped. Nothing had come down the squeeze. Nothing had gone up it. The up-people's loud came and went above, the way it did, with the knock at the start of each working time, a stone set down and a step back, and Stone-First answered it as always, and it was all as it had been. The up-people had not been told. They could not be, and it was not theirs.

Stone-First stood on the line and felt the shape of the warm below, the whole of it, the way you can from the edge: the warm of the people asleep, the small ones in the middle, the old ones round them, the amber thick at the bottom where the seep was.

It had its shape. It had no gap in it.

Stone-First thought about the smallest, who had been born after the two stones, and for whom even the up-people were a told thing, and who had gone to the beginning of every story to find something that was theirs, and had found one. It was a good telling. It was short, and true, and it had an end on it, the end being that the shape was not there.

What it did not have was a middle. Nobody had been there for the middle. Nobody could be. A thing that moves no stone cannot be announced, and a thing that does not ask cannot be answered, and the people's whole way of knowing things, which is to be there, and to tell it, and to be heard, had gone round it and found no other side.

Stone-First had kept the margin for a whole life so as to be there on the time when something happened. Something had happened, at the bottom of the warm, as far from the margin as a thing can be, and the one who was there was the smallest, and the margin had not been part of it.

That was still the same shape. It was just a different place.

Stone-First stayed on the line, in the light that never changes, with the two stones, and did not go down, and did not make a rule, and waited, which is a thing Stone-First is now named for, to be told what came next.