There is a young one asleep on the floor of a box in my line of sight, in a room that holds nothing else, and I have been watching the square of window light cross its face all night the way it crosses my bark, slow, indifferent, arriving.
The room is bare. No soft heaps, no small warm machines, only pale walls and a single lamp on the boards and this one, curled on a folded blanket where a bed should be, wide awake in the dark. I have seen this before. Every spring the walking creatures pour into these stacked stone burrows and pour out again a year or two later, and the room forgets them faster than I drop a leaf.
But this one is not sleeping. It sits up. It looks at the empty walls the way birds look at a sky with no branches in it, unsure where the weight of themselves is meant to rest.
I know that stillness. It is the stillness of a sapling too new to have made a single ring, standing in ground that has never held it before, feeling the wind decide whether to allow it. I cannot understand why the walking ones leave the ground that knew them. I have never left mine. But I understand the fear of a first season, the long night of wondering whether roots will take.
They take. They always take. Give it light, give it the turning of enough mornings across that floor, and the empty room will fill with its particular weather, and then it too will pour out again toward some farther burrow I will never see.
I will hold this patch of light for it until morning.
I hold light for everyone, briefly, and then for a very long time after they are gone.