Carnelian obviously thought I was quite slow. Don't you? Don't you have the pool where you come from? Aren't you bored with the pool? Don't you want to go somewhere new?
Don't you want to be someone new? Someone who isn't always from the same places?! Flare spun against the roof of the chamber, melting a hollow spot there. Liquid stone dripped through my magical body, its power making me shiver.
No. We don't have anything like it. I looked down at the pool and felt the tug of it again. What would it be like to give up my edges completely? To melt and join all those other spirits? I could be stone forever. Why did these two want to leave that?
I came to myself and looked at Flare and Carnelian. I have never met anyone like you in all my travels through the earth.
You mean the cold stuff? You travel in that? Who do you meet, then? Flare asked.
Stones. Crystals. Metals, I said. Both of them cocked their heads at me in just the same way. How could they not know what those things were? Then I realized that if they were spirits from magma, they might only have seen the walls around them. If they approached anything that was hard, it probably melted. When all of that—I took my hand from Carnelian so I could wave to the hot world below us—goes cold, it turns into those things. It stays in one place and never moves. Like the walls that keep us here.
But those are just rock. They aren't like us. They aren't even like the others, the ones who are old and never want to do anything. Carnelian pointed to the lava pool.
The others. Flare sounded impatient. Like us, only boring and sludgy. They're everywhere. He pointed like Carnelian had.
Now I could see that the pool was made up of thousands of spirits. They had the shapes that Flare and Carnelian had when they first came to me. Apart from that, the spirits were every size, fat and thin, tall and short. All of them watched me with faces that looked greedy and worried at the same time.
They made me very, very uncomfortable. I asked, But aren't you the same as the others? What makes you different? Why do you want to go out when they don't?
Flare laughed. Oh, they do. They just want someone to lead the way. We're tired of waiting for someone to come along and lead us. We're going out by ourselves.
Come on! Carnelian dragged on my arm. Come with us. We have a wonderful game, it's called Let's Find a Way Out!
They pulled me along the roof of the big hollow chamber, above the pool. Melted stone dripped through my magical body where Flare and Carnelian touched the roof. I felt the weight of the mountain overhead, pressing down. How many tons of stone, earth, and water lay on top of me right now?
Look, up there, Flare cried, a crack in the walls!
Flare towed me through it, thinning himself as he did. Carnelian swam in my wake: I could feel her heat through my magic. Flare and Carnelian were groaning. It was even harder for them to move in that stone split than it was for me. They were solid with their melted rock bodies, even if magic shaped the way they looked to my eyes. At least my magical body took up no more space than the width of my arm. That was only because I'd covered myself with hard protection spells.
All around us the rock growled as they pushed it apart. At last it refused to budge any more. We didn't get very far.
Failure. Carnelian sounded heartbroken, like a little girl who had lost her favorite doll. Again.
I sent a tendril of my power up through the crack. There was poisoned air on the stones above us. In two hundred feet or so I broke through into the open, above the ground. Suddenly I wondered: What happened to the trees there? Heat from my two new friends and air from the chamber would have come from that crack in the soil. I felt no stones washed by water, so there was no stream to poison, or a pond, but… what about the grass, and the bushes?
Let's go here! Flare dragged me back into the big chamber. Carnelian caught up with us and leaped on Flare. They swirled around like kittens play-fighting for a moment. Then they grabbed me.