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

Stone-First went back onto the line, afterwards, because that is where the margin is, and keeping it means being there, and stood in the place, and looked at the squeeze.

Here is what Stone-First had worked out at the foot of it, with a small one held in it and a thing going by where the rock was, and it is kept as Stone-First's.

The rock is where it is. It has not moved. Stone-First has stood on it for a whole life and it has never once been anywhere but where it is, and it was there tonight, and it closed on the small one at the narrow exactly where it closes on everyone, which is a true thing and a kind one, because it is how a small one finds out. The small one is the right size. The squeeze is the right size. Nothing about the rock or the small one has stopped being true.

There was a thing for which neither was there. That is not a thing about the rock. It is not a thing about the small one. It is a thing about the thing, and the Told do not know what it is, and nobody was there for the part that would say, and nobody can be, and Stone-First had said that four times this season and would say it again standing up in the warm, and it was still the whole of it.

Stone-First had stepped off the line tonight. For the first time. To let a small one past, to find out a thing that was theirs. Stone-First had stood at the foot of the one crack in the world Stone-First could not enter and had said breathe out and had not been able to do anything else, and it had been enough, because the small one had come back, and it had not been enough, because Stone-First had been there, which is the whole of what Stone-First does, and being there had not reached into the rock.

That was still the same shape. The margin has an edge. Stone-First had always known the edge was the line. It was also, it turned out, the narrow part of the squeeze, and the warm's edge where the shape runs out, and the place where the amber had gone out of the wall, and the seep; the margin had edges everywhere this season, and Stone-First had kept the one that could be kept, and the others had kept themselves.

Above, through the squeeze, the loud came down, and settled. Then the one light, low. Then the smallest of the up-people, with a stone.

Stone-First answered it. A good one. Once.