Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

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

The people have two words. A stranger is in your place, and is announced by the ground, and you leave the place to them until they ask. A person asks. Everything below the roof has been one or the other since before the tellings begin, which is why the manners are short. The shape at the seep had been neither, and nobody's stone had been neither, and the thing in Stone-First's place had been neither, and Went-Round had said so each time and the warm had heard it.

This one was neither too. But it was neither in a different way, and Went-Round lay in the amber working out what the way was.

It had not been in anyone's place. That was it. The seep is the beginning of things, and the line is Stone-First's, and this had stood in the open floor where nobody sleeps and nobody tells from, in the middle of the people, beside all of them and in the place of none. It had not come in. It had not been let in. It had been beside.

The Told have no word for that. A thing that is beside you, in nobody's place, that neither asks nor is asked, that does nothing to you and that you do nothing to, and that goes. Went-Round went round every word the people have and none of them fitted, and the one that came nearest was the word for the up-people before the two stones, who had been in the upper levels for a whole year, beside the people, in a place the people had left to them, and had not asked, and had not been asked. And that was not right either, because the upper levels had been the people's once, and had been left, and this place had been nobody's from the start.

Went-Round did not make a word. A word you make from one telling is a word you will have to go round later. That is Stone-First's rule about rules, and it is a good one, and it is worse for words.

Four tellings now, below the roof, with no middle in them. And this one with no edges either, because everyone was there, and so it was nobody's, and so it would have to be told to the ones not yet born, by everyone, which had never been done, and Went-Round did not know what that would make it.

Above, on the near wall, the amber was where it had always been, the way it had been since before anybody's telling, and would be after. It had, once, for half of a telling, been somewhere else. The wall did not look any different for it.

Went-Round looked at it anyway, for a long time, the way nobody below the roof had ever had a reason to look at a wall.