Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

They stood on the line, the two of them, Went-Round in the place and Stone-First beside it, which was the wrong way round, and neither of them said so.

"A small one saw me where I was not," said Stone-First.

"A small one saw the place. The place is yours. You made it, standing in it, for a whole life. Anything standing in it is going to look like you to anyone who looks, until it does what you do."

"And it did not."

"No."

"Then I am going to go on standing here," said Stone-First, "and it is going to go on being where I stand, and if a thing stands in it again when I am not in it, a small one is going to see me again. And I will be in the warm. And there is nothing I can do about that."

"Nothing," said Went-Round. "That is what you do. You are the best at it below the roof."

Stone-First made the small sound, which Went-Round had never once heard Stone-First make, and Went-Round stepped out of the place, and Stone-First stepped into it, and it was the right way round again.

Went-Round went down, afterwards, and lay on the far side of the amber, and went round it, and it had no other side.

Three tellings now, below the roof, with no middle in them. A shape with no warmth at the bottom of the warm. A stone moved by nobody at the top of it. And now a shape in the one place where the people cannot feel who is there and have only ever needed to look, because for a whole life the answer had been the same. The people's way of knowing a thing, which is to be there and to tell it and to be heard, had gone round all three, and found no other side to any of them.

Went-Round had thought that was the thing to be afraid of, a little, the small way.

Standing in Stone-First's place, Went-Round had thought of something else. A place can hold a person's shape when they are not in it. The people had never needed to know that, because nobody below the roof had ever stood anywhere long enough to make a place that did. Stone-First had. It was Stone-First's whole life, and the whole of the people knew it, and now something had stood in it and been taken for the one whose it was, by a small one who had never once been wrong about where anybody was.

Went-Round did not know whether the shape had chosen the place, or the place had made the shape look like somebody. Went-Round went round that too, lying in the amber, and it had no other side, and the small one's telling went by, going round the warm, shorter each time and getting true, and it was a telling about a place, so it gave the small one no name, and the small one did not seem to mind.