But at first, the trance does not come. I close my eyes and wait for the magma to flow around me, as always, but feel no warmth. I grasp the edge of the anvil hard in frustration, bruising my flesh on the cold solid metal, then let go, deciding that I should try to not be anchored here. I breath out slowly.

Still nothing. Fear rises in me. Has it gone? Have my long-hours in the darkness distanced me from my powers so much that I am no longer able to reach them? Or worse, could Vanerak be tapping into them right now, and blocking me in some way?

I shake my head violently. There's no logic to that thought—if he had access to the sphere I would already be dead.

I focus. I imagine warmth surrounding me, growing to blazing heat. This time, my power responds. Brutal heat billows around me; sticky viscosity subsumes me. I am in the hottest furnace there is and yet do not burn. A second later I feel a pressure against my back—the presence of the sphere.

It scares me, yet draws me also. I will myself to turn to see it and witness the clearest view yet I've had of it from outside—though it appears not as an image, nothing visual, but is instead a cut-out gap in the heat. In the gap is not cold, however, but power. Strange power, runic power of no runes I have ever read.

I desire to move closer—but my fear prevents me. Fear and good sense too. This power has burned me half to death before. More than halfway. Nearly all the way.

The runes, I must focus on the runes. I recall the first long lines of my poem—not my whole poem; I have neither the memory nor the stamina to improve it all at once.

The first word is dwarf, dway, and I find that there is no way I can twist this rune to strengthen it. The power will not go through it, and I can tell that if I force it to, I will just bend the character into something weaker. I move along to the next rune and the next. These are well-made also.

Frustration boils up. How can I improve this? I cannot quite put my finger on it, but this poem is weak. Uninspired. My heart was not in it—another dwarf is going to use this! What runeknight can put effort into a craft for another, unless it is an amulet of unaging for his lover?—and I have never had the time for one of those.

What if I make this craft for myself? I don't want to use a craft not my own for my next trip into the magma. If I make the decision to put enough effort into this so that it changes in some dangerous way, some way too dangerous or strange for other dwarves to be able to use, maybe I can find the inspiration I need to strengthen it.

But it is to be of pre-cut, pre-shaped metal. Such is not fit for me anymore.

I could remake it after. But then what would become of this first craft? I'm certain that Vanerak would still make another dwarf use it, and I would be responsible for his or her suffering.

Yet, if I don't find some way to make this poem strong, Vanerak's ire will again fall upon me. He won't kill Guthah for it, but maybe he will torture him, a little, just to spur me on. Or maybe he'll just do what he did when I made my runic ears: come down here personally to force more power from me, and burn me nine-tenths the way to death again.

I can see no way out of my dilemma, and overthinking isn't going to improve my concentration any, so I decide to just keep on going. Every dozen or so runes, there is an improvement to be made, and I draw a little power through myself. Sometimes the runic flow will be altered enough that I have to make a few rearrangements to the left and right—yet overall, the changes are minor.

Eventually I reach the end of my memorization and draw out from my trance. The power fizzles down easily and the magma vanishes quickly. I scribble down the altered poem on the opposite side of the first sheaf of paper, then I hold it up to the daycrystals above so I can see both overlaid on top of each other.

They are more or less the same. I have altered only a dozen or so runes, and of these only a few of these are so different that they can be called new.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Cold fear grasps me. Vanerak will not be pleased when he sees this poem. He will be angry—I can hear his voice already, criticizing my foolishness for lying to him—he will think I am hiding my power again—I can see Guthah in chains—Pellas' corpse laid out to taunt him—I can see Helzar's barbed spear—it is bloody—

In a fit of terror I tear the paper in half, and half again, and then I tear the other sheets apart also. I crush the torn paper together, thrust it into the furnace, and switch on the flow of magma. The paper flashes into flames and curling dark ash.

I stumble back and lean against the anvil. A blur of images of torture is rampaging through my mind's eye.

I cannot allow what I'm seeing to come to pass. I will make the whole poem in my trance. I will put enough power into it that my impulses take over. That's the answer to my dilemma—either Guthah suffers or a seventh degree I do not know must suffer, so I choose the dwarf I do not know.

I gather my materials—platinum and quizik. They are calmer than gold and incandesite, and might offset whatever horrors appear in my work. Violently I grind the quizik up, thinking all the while about what this saga is to be about. An idea soon comes: a dwarf trapped under the heat, on the verge of death, desperately sucking in life from above, on the verge of burning. Breathing is a battle for him. Just staying alive is a terrible effort.

I construct the story in such a way that I must create new runes for it. Heat-devours-life, life-burned, life-crushed, flesh-scorched: runes that combine two words. Their runic flows will be restrictive, and so I cannot plan the poem in any detail. I must compose while in the midst of my trance, similar to how I wrote the poems on my cold skull-helm.

Once the quizik is fine enough to use, I step back from the mortar and pestle on the anvil. I crack my knuckles and flex my fingers. I shut my eyes and wait for the heat to come.

This time it pours over me eagerly. It consumes me. The sphere behind me feels close, and its power feels close also. Is this because of my violent intentions? Do they attract it somehow?

Vanerak is waiting for the runes. I can't waste time worrying about things I have no knowledge of. I decide on the first word—dway, same as on my last attempt. Then I put a topic marker, then I will have a combined verb, suffer-from-heat. The dwarf is under pressure, terrible pressure. I create the rune while I focus on remembering pain, remembering sweat bursting on my skin, of the air in my mouth being too hot to draw down into my throat and lungs. Something harsh is being born—I pull more power into it.

The rune I make is twisted. I move onto the next few, and they come almost as I think them. Are my hands moving in the forge? Maybe. I reach another set of words I want to combine into one rune, and my power burns more brilliantly. I struggle to keep it under control. My focus on my poem fades a touch, yet still the runes are coming: my composition proceeds.

The compound words restrict the runic flow, and I am forced to bend the lines in directions I did not originally mean to take. A skin of life comes to being around the dwarf. The magma pressures it, burning it away, and the dwarf must suck in more life to replenish it.

Everything is described in exacting detail. It must be, if I'm to have enough runes to travel all the way up the cable. To repeat words is unsightly, and so I must rack the very recesses of my mind to find new adjectives. Many have little to do with heat—so I combine them. Lambent becomes redly-lambent. Attenuated becomes attenuated-by-evaporation. Torrid becomes torrid-like-above-yellow-liquid-stone.

The runes are unwieldy, terribly so. They are hard to fit into rhyming, alliterative, and runic-flow structure. I make them fit, though, through successive strokes of poetic genius. The worry that it may not entirely be my genius intrudes, but I force the thoughts away.

Outside, I am fevered. I can feel this barely. Yet I can't stop—the power is rushing through too hot and quick for me to shut it off easily. Grimly I continue the poem. The dwarf suffers terribly as successive waves of heat attempt to evaporate his life force. Each breath is a strain. He wishes to give up, to let the magma burn him into nothingness where there is no pain—a rune for nachroktey emerges. The connotation I put into it is that something burned can feel nothing, is nothing.

At last, the dwarf survives. He sucks in enough heat-lacking air that he is saved. With terrible effort, I shut the power away—my ruby turns frigid with power. The magma pulls away and I am bent double over the anvil, drenched in sweat.

The poem is upon it, writ in gleaming cold platinum. It is too long to fit, so the first half of the runes lie on the floor beside it.

I'll have to reorder them. But the making of them is over.

“I am ready for a break,” I tell Nazak. “I will return to my quarters.”

Once there, I take a long draught of water then fall asleep immediately. When I wake I have a vague memory of my dreams, of being trapped in molten stone, but these memories soon fade.

My body remains fevered. There is water in a flagon on my table, and I drink deeply. It does little to alleviate my fatigue. I will not enrune yet—I will just make mistakes if I try.

I attempt to memorize some runes from the books, yet my mind clouds over and I fall asleep in my chair.