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

Stone-First-Who-Waited had heard all of it from the line.

Not the telling. The stones. For the whole of a working time, with the up-people's loud settled a long way up and the four stones at Stone-First's feet, one after another the ground had said someone is coming from below, from the foot of the shelving, and nobody had come, and Stone-First had known every time who it was, and had not moved.

A season ago that had been the worst sound below the roof: a stone moved well, by nobody, and Stone-First leaving the line for the first time in a life to go and look at it. This was the same sound, over and over, and it was small ones, and Stone-First stood on the line with the whole body still and found that the sound had changed what it was without changing anything about itself.

It was still the same shape. It was just a game now.

Here is the other thing Stone-First thought, on the line, and it is kept as Stone-First's.

The first true thing said of Stone-First was that they moved a stone first. Every time. Into every place. Everyone below the roof knows it; it is the name. What nobody tells, because nobody was there for it and it was not worth a telling, is that every time means the times when nobody was in the place either. An empty passage. A place where the warm ran out. Stone-First had moved a stone into every one of those, as a small one, for nobody, because the ground saying someone was the best sound there was and the stone was there for the moving; and had gone on doing it after the others stopped, which is how a habit gets noticed, and how a noticed thing gets said, and how a said thing becomes a name.

Stone-First had never once thought of it as a game. Standing on the line, Stone-First thought that this might be because nobody had been there to say so.