Geology — 1

Leo stopped fidgeting. "Fire?"

Leo's eyes went wide. "A snail? On a mountain?"

She guided Leo’s hand to a spot where the grey granite was crisscrossed with a thin, pink vein. "Imagine, billions of years ago. No Mount Anya. Just fire. A sea of molten rock, deeper than any ocean, hotter than any sun."

Her younger brother, Leo, sighed, kicking a pebble down the trail. "It's a rock, Elara. We've been hiking for an hour to look at a rock."

She looked from the fossil to the distant peak where the granite began. "So you see, Leo, this mountain isn't one thing. It's a library. The bottom floors are fire and strength. The middle floors are mud and time and ghosts of the deep. And the top…" She looked up at the jagged peak. "The top is the latest chapter, still being written."

"A nautilus," Elara said. "From when this place was a shallow sea, full of mud. Remember the sand we saw? It got buried. The weight of new rock on top squeezed it, cemented it, turned it into this—sedimentary rock. And sometimes, it caught a life and kept it forever."

"Water?" Leo asked, watching a trickle of meltwater from a snowfield above run down the rock face.

"Water, wind, ice," Elara confirmed. "The patient assassins. They take the hard, strong birth-rock and grind it into dust. They carry it to the sea. They bury it."