“There are no exits here.” Anne-Liese informed us in the dark chamber below the mountain, even below the sea. “We are trapped.”

I was still on the ground and observed the discussion from a position below. The heat pressed down on me and the floor started to warm my skin through my clothes and the thick leather coat.

“Nonsense!” The Professor was standing strong and straight as ever and as I saw him, I felt as if my own posture was the most cowardly thing in all the world right at that moment. “My good girl, have you forgot everything I have talked about?”

“Stop it, we need to go back somehow. There is no way out of this, your song of stones has failed you.”

The Professor put his fingers to his forehead. “Lieschen, the fact th-”

“And stop calling me that!” Anne-Liese snapped at her uncle, fervour and anger driving her voice. “You are the one who insisted on neutralities like foregoing noble title, yet you belittle me like this. Stop it!”

“Well...” The Professor exhaled slowly before inhaling even slower. “the fact that this chamber is empty should tell you that there is a way out of this chamber. Otherwise, where else did the magma go?”

Myself tried to guess what the Professor was trying to imply here, meanwhile, puzzlement also appeared also on Anne-Liese's face. “The magma go?”

“Exaclty!” The Professor threw up his hands. “There is a way out, the same way the magma took out. Now get to looking, you could impossibly have searched the entire chamber.” With a dismissive gesture he sent all four of us deeper into the chamber, checking the floor and walls for any kind of hole or outlet or even just a spot where the rock sounded hollow as on the entrance to the mountain.

Ironically, it was Anne-Liese who found the outlet in question: “It’s here!”

We rushed to her to find a tiny hole leading into a deep cavity. Magma had obviously trickled over the rim of some hole and cooled to stone just was it was about to drop down.

“Step back!” The Professor said, raising his staff and bringing it down onto the edges of the hole. Stronger than any mundane strike, the frozen magma chipped away neatly to reveal a most peculiar material and object.

It was an empty heptagonal frame, its inside dimensions roughly five feet across, of perfect make out of a dark-green iridescent stone or metal of some sort.

“What is that?” was my first reaction to this sight. We all nearly bumped our heads as we tried to inspect the weird frame up close.

The edges were perfectly orthogonal and cut so fine, touching them looked like a dangerous act. On the sides themselves were letters or symbols of some sort I had never seen before, raised out of the stone rather than chiselled in. Meanwhile the hole itself led to a heptagonal shaft running downwards almost perfectly vertical. The inside stone was smoother than mirror-sheen, it seemed unnaturally perfectly cut, even crystals grown under controlled conditions by an alchemist in a laboratory would not show such regular angles and sides.

“Have you ever seen something like this, Professor?”

The Professor shook his head. “Not in all my life. The material, the symbols, none of it even familiar.”

Brad was the first to touch the material – be it stone, metal or whatever else – carefully running his finger over one of the edges, and immediately pulled it back. “OUCH, I cut myself?! Just a light touch to the edge and it was enough to cut my flesh?” He sucked on the wound.

Anne-Liese reached out her hand much more carefully, only touching the flat surfaces. “So cold to the touch in this heat?” She retrieved another wick, lit it and dropped it down the heptagonal shaft. It kept its brightness and colour perfect the entire time until it had burnt out, never hitting any sort of ground or bend. “Dearest goodness.” 

Brad seemed concerned with that statement. “What? Is it filled with noxious gases?” 

“No, not at all, the air is perfectly clean. It’s the distance that’s astonishing. The flame lasts under normal condition for one minute. That means that in order to fall until the flame goes out, this hole has to be at least two miles deep.” 

I tried imagining it. Two miles of a perfectly cut shaft like this? It seemed like a bad escape route. 

We all continued to be puzzled by this weird thing we had come across. Eventually, I stood back up and saw for the first time that Chrysita looked quite damaged. Her shoulders and parts of her chest had plates missing, crystals had received cracks and some of the metal linings had been bent out of their grooves. Her legs had open joints, underneath many rods of a white mineral or stone shining through between her dark granite-plated exterior. The scaffolding on her back seemed similarly beat up, one half completely missing and only few containers remaining. “Professor, Chrysita seems badly... injured I guess.”

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The Professor turned around and took a look at her. “Ooh this is much more dire than I thought.” He stepped closer, inspecting the many chipped and fractured places. “My dear Chrysita, you should have told me... how will I ever fix this? Lieschen and Brad, would you please take inventory?”

“And what should I do, Professor?”

Professor Scutolith poked his head out from behind Chrysita. “I need you to transcribe the symbols on that weird... thing. Maybe I can decipher a clue as to what it is and where that hole leads.”

We went ahead with our tasks. The heat was unbearable, but the tasks at hand were much more vital than our comfort. The symbols of the inscription intrigued me. They were not pictograms like many ancient scripts, or the simpler, curving lines of the common script. They were also not a language from the southern or western reaches of the world. Almost all of these symbols on the heptagon consisted of just a few straight lines and there was great variety, only very few symbols appearing more than once.

When I was done, I turned back to the others. The professor was still looking all over Chrysita’s body while Brad and Anne-Liese sat on the ground, dismayed. I walked over and sat down next to them. “How is our inventory?”

“Not good.” Anne-Liese answered. “We lost two casks of water, only a half left, but an entire cask of flux. We have a small bit of dried pork left and some bread, but not much more. Our tent is also gone. And your instruments are mostly scraps at this point”

I could not find any hope in this state of affairs. The cask of flux could be of use in most situation, but the other circumstances dashed even that hope to the ground.

“These supplies will probably last less than two days. Let’s hope we can tunnel out of here before that.”

“There will be no tunnelling!” the Professor replied while having his head halfway buried in an especially gruesome hole in Chrysita’s body.

Anne-Liese's fury foamed up again. “What? How else can we get out of here?”

The Professor merely raised his arm towards the heptagonal hole.

“WHAT? Why?”

“What other way out is there, Lieschen?”

“Tunnelling out with your magic?"

“There’s magma that way. Quick-thinking Havellan might have halted the magma for a moment, but by now the rest of the volcano will have refilled from that hole I so carelessly struck.”

“And down there is better?!”

At this, the Professor pulled his head out of Chrysita’s body and pointed upwards the tunnel. “Up there is magma.” He moved his arm towards the walls surrounding us. “Just beyond this warm granite is magma.” Then he pointed to the heptagonal frame. “Down there is no magma. I know because if there was, it would have pressed its way back up. We have an unpressured, possibly huge cavity down there, that much I can tell, and since there are no further channels leaving away from here, there might be another connection upwards from down there.”

“And then? Are we just going to hitch a ride on the next volcano back up? How will we ever return to the surface?”

“I do not know. But I know if we do not take this chance, we never will for sure. Except as smoke and ash.”

Anne-Liese seemed defeated. “Fine, uncle. Have it your way. How will we descend then?”

Professor Scutolith smiled and slapped the still not moving Chrysita. “Oh her. I am currently making adjustment to turn her into a sled that holds us and our cargo. You can do your part by bundling all we have left together with that scaffolding.” Then he got back to rummaging around in Chrysita’s body.

We immediately got to taking the last few intact parts of Chrysita’s carrying scaffolding and with rope and nails attach it into something vaguely sturdy, even using the remains of the tripod used for the Professor’s instruments. Then we added the metal hooks for Chrysita’s shoulders to it. Shortly thereafter, the Professor too was done with his modifications to Chrysita.

The holes on the back, the outer side of arms and legs had been plugged by moving around granite plates from other places, leaving bare may limbs. The spine and bottom also had been reinforced with extra layers. Everywhere that plates had been completely removed, the inside of Chrysita show through: bundles of rods of shimmering white with fine threads of silvery metal wrapping around them.

“We will sit on her lap and drop down the hole.” The Professor showed us the places where he had put up reinforced plating. “When the ground comes into sight, Chrysita will stem against the smooth walls with all might to slow us down. Any problem still remaining can be solved by os two spellweavers.” With a look of pride and satisfaction over his own work, the Professor stood next to the modified Chrysita.

While I had faith in the Professor’s ingenuity, Brad and Anne-Liese were less enthusiastic, the latter of which expressed her emotions quite loudly. “We are supposed to just drop down that weird tunnel? Without knowing what is on the other side? Have you lost your last remnants of sanity, uncle?” The last word’s echo resounded from the stone walls in the dark distance.

The Professor merely shook his head in disappointment. “I know that either way brings danger with it, but I do not want to die of heat and melting rock slowly enclosing me. If I die, falling sounds faster and less painful. You are free to stay.”

Anne-Liese wanted to start another retort, but Brad walked calmly over to the Professor’s side, then addressed him calmly. “You are mad, Professor. But this situation is even madder. I’ll secure us with ropes to the golem’s body so we don’t fly off our sled.”

He prepared a length of rope and bound it around Chrysita’s waist. Anne-Liese stood there alone and defeated. “Fine then, into madness’ maws then, I guess.”

Chrysita sat down on the edge of the heptagon, then we sat down on her legs, Brad and me on the right, the Professor and his niece on the left, like on the opposing benches of a passenger carriage. Tethered to the golem’s body, I tried to relax. I looked down the tight seven-sided shaft, running into the blackness of the abyss, miles below air, water and rock. The Professor noticed my worried exterior. “I know you are worried, boy, but rest assured, we are taking the safest path possible.” He tried his best at what I assumed to be a reassuring smile, then turned to the others. “Everyone ready?” The others nodded, then the professor turned to Chrysita’s head, looming above us like a humongous granite mother, her children on her lap.

“Let’s go, old girl.”

Chrysita scooted forward, over the edge.