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

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there, and this time it begins with a noise, which is not how a telling is supposed to begin, and that turned out to be the whole of the point.

Carried-It-Sleeping was lying in the warm, in the middle, where the small ones are kept, and the small ones were not in it.

That was the first thing. A warm place has a shape, and Carried-It-Sleeping had counted the pieces of it from habit for so many tellings now that the counting went on without being asked to, the way breathing does, and the count was short. Not one piece. All of them. The small ones had gone in ones and twos, the way they had learned to go, so that no single piece leaving was worth getting up for, and they had gone up toward the foot of the shelving and taken the middle of the warm with them, and the old ones were lying round a middle with nobody in it, telling, and had not noticed.

Then a stone moved.

At the foot of the shelving, where the rock stands up out of the ground in the way that makes a good stone to move. Moved well. One sound, plain and complete, and the ground said what the ground says. Someone is coming.

Nobody came. Carried-It-Sleeping had lain still for that once, a season ago, and did not have to again, because before the ground had finished saying it another stone moved. A different hand. You can tell, the way you can tell one person's feet from another's. Someone is coming. And another. And another, not so well, with a scrape in it, and a small voice at the foot of the shelving said that was you, not the ground, and several other small voices agreed.

Carried-It-Sleeping got up.