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

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there, and this time what happened was an argument, which the Told did not use to have and are getting better at.

Stone-First-Who-Waited came down from the line on a time when nothing happened.

That was the time the thought had been put aside for. There are more of those than the other kind, and Stone-First had let a good many of them go by, standing on the line with the four stones and the thought beside them, because a thought you have put aside for a time when nothing happens is easy to leave there, and the line is a good place for leaving things. Then the small ones' game went on in the warm, and the ground said someone is coming from below all through a working time with nobody coming, and Stone-First stood on the line and found that the thought had come up by itself, the way a stone comes up out of silt when the ground has been walked on enough.

So Stone-First came down, slowly, by the shelving, and moved a stone at the bottom so that everyone knew, and stood up in the warm, in the amber, which is what you do with a thing you cannot settle on your own.

"Here is a thing," said Stone-First.

The warm went still for it. The small ones in the middle stopped playing, which they did not always do now.

"The up-people set a stone down on the line. You all know that. I was there, and I told it, standing up, and it went round the warm, and the small ones learned it, and now they play it. Every one of you has heard it. It is the people's." Stone-First let that sit. "The up-people were there for it. They did it. They have not heard it. Nobody has told it to them."

Nobody made the small sound. It was not that kind of thing.

"A telling is not yours until somebody has heard it," said Stone-First. "The only ones who were there have not heard it. That is the thing. I have carried it up and down the shelving for a long time and I cannot get to the end of it on my own, so here it is."

And Stone-First sat down, which is how you say that the thing is everybody's now.