Carried-It-Sleeping (Pandoid, the deep networks)

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there. This time everyone was. That turns out to be a problem, and the problem is the last part of the telling, so it is kept for the end.

The warm was full. It was the time after the working, when the up-people's loud has gone up the long passage toward the cold and the whole of the people are in the amber, and someone is telling, and the small ones are in the middle being kept. Carried-It-Sleeping was keeping them, lying down, and Went-Round was telling the two stones, which the small ones ask for most, because it has an up-person in it.

Here is what Carried-It-Sleeping noticed first, and it was not the shape. It was the wall.

The light below the roof does not change. It is amber on one wall and blue-green on the other, and it has been like that since before anybody's telling begins, and nobody looks at it, the way nobody looks at their own feet. Carried-It-Sleeping looked at it, because it had gone thin. The amber on the near wall, the one the small ones sleep against, had gone dim the way a telling goes quiet near its end, and the dimness had a shape, and the shape was the near wall with something taken out of it.

And in the middle of the warm, above the small ones, the something stood.

It was the size of a person. It was made of light. Not lit, the way a person is lit when the amber is behind them; made of it, amber and blue-green both, gathered up into a shape and standing there, brighter than any wall below the roof has ever been. It had the amber's colour on one side and the blue-green's on the other, the way the warm does, and it did not move.

Nobody had moved a stone. Nobody had needed to. Nobody was coming. It was already there, and the ground had said nothing about it at all.

Carried-It-Sleeping felt for the warmth, without trying, the way you do. The warm was thick there, in the middle, with all the small ones in it. And in the thick of it, the size of the shape, there was a gap. Not cold. Nothing. The smallest had said that, about the seep. Carried-It-Sleeping had not understood it until now.

The small ones nearest it did not move away. Nobody told them to. Carried-It-Sleeping noticed that too, and put it aside, because there was a great deal to notice and only the one time to do it in.