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

Stone-First stood on the line beside it until it was not there.

That took about as long as a short telling. Stone-First did not count it. The thing stood, in the amber and the blue-green that have no source and throw no shadow, beside Stone-First, facing the squeeze, and then Stone-First looked at the squeeze for a while, because that is what you look at, and when Stone-First looked to the side there was nobody. No stone had moved. The ground had said nothing of its going either, the same as its coming, and the silt where it had stood was silt that nobody had stood on, with no shape of feet in it, beside the four stones.

Four. The up-people's first, a year old, worn smooth. Stone-First's answer. Nobody's, at the edge, by its mark. And the up-people's newest, set down a hand from Stone-First's feet, which Stone-First would not move, because a stone moved for you is not yours to move.

Here is what Stone-First thought, standing there, and it is the thing Stone-First carried down and told, and it is kept as Stone-First's.

The up-people cannot hear the ground. The youngest found that out first, standing at the edge of their light while they looked at their little glowing things, and it has been true every day since: they do not hear a stone, they do not feel the warm, they know where you are by looking. That is the whole of what they have. Their light.

And their light had come along the silt and found two on the line, and gone onto one and round the other, and the smallest of them had stood there with the light in their hand and seen that, and had then put the stone down a hand from Stone-First's feet. Not from the other's. They had told the two apart. With nothing but a light, they had told apart the one who could answer from the one who could not, and had asked the right one.

Stone-First, who hears the ground, and has stood on it for a whole life, had not been able to tell what the other one was.

That was still the same shape. The people knew a thing about the up-people the up-people did not know, which had been the shape since the youngest's first telling. It was only that now, for the length of one knock, it had run the other way.