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

Stone-First-Who-Waited was on the line when the warm changed shape.

Not a piece going. Stone-First knows that shape; a small one takes a piece with them and the piece comes back. This was the warm going thin in the middle, where it is thickest, as if something had been taken out of it from the inside, and the shape of the thinness was the size of a person, and Stone-First had felt that once before, at the bottom of the warm, in a telling by the smallest.

Stone-First came down the shelving faster than the old ones go.

At the bottom, a stone. A good one. The ground said someone is coming to the whole of the people, and the whole of the people heard it, the way they always do, and not one of them turned.

That was the first thing Stone-First saw, coming into the amber: a people with their backs to a stone. Then the thing they had their backs turned for.

It stood in the middle of the warm. In nobody's place. That was the second thing, and Stone-First looked for it on purpose, because the last one had stood in Stone-First's. This one stood where nobody sleeps and nobody tells from, in the open floor between the small ones' places, and the people had gone back from it without being told, so that there was a ring of open ground round it, the way you leave a place to a stranger until they ask.

It was not a stranger. The ground had not said so. It had not asked.

And nobody was afraid of it.

Stone-First stood at the edge of the amber with the whole body still, so that nothing done while a thing is happening becomes part of the telling by mistake, and watched the people not be afraid, and was more careful than Stone-First had been about the shape at the seep, or nobody's stone, or the thing in Stone-First's own place, because those had been dark, and the people had been wary of dark things that move since the up-people's light first came down the long passage, and this was light, and the people had never once below the roof had a reason to be wary of light.

The small ones nearest it were looking up at it the way they look at a good telling.

Stone-First did not go nearer. Did not move a stone, because there was nobody to move it for. Did not make a rule. Stood, and was there, which is the whole of what Stone-First does, and waited to see what it would do.

It did nothing.