“Oh, Walander, what’s this?” Reese cried, annoying Heath because his nosy sister found it first.

A stone table in the cave’s far end held the wonder Reese spotted. It was an object with a wood spool base. It held ten wires, bent, and going outward from its center. Each wire ended with a crystal ball of different sizes, clarity, and color. The largest middle orb was a yellow gemstone with faint cloudy streaks.

 “My orrery,” Walander said, carefully lifting the piece with its wood base. The motion started the orrery’s outer wires spinning.

 “My granddad Taid made one with me, a wonderful room-sized model. Over the years I’ve been trapped here, I collected semi-precious stones. One day I realized my recall memory would let me go back to see how to make this. I messed up cutting four semi-precious gems to learn how to shape the orbs. Here, the yellow gem Danburite makes up the center sunstone. Mars is the red garnet.

“You find garnets everywhere in this state. I used my rarest find, a green tourmaline, for Earth and common white quartz for its moon. Aquamarine, amethyst, and topaz make up the other planets. Saturn’s rings were hardest to get right. I sliced a stone and polished it with sandpaper I had found, holding the stone underwater to make it smooth.”

 Heath gently touched the middle sunstone, “Awesome.”

The troll’s wide cheeks pinked with pride. “With all the cutting, polishing, and careful drilling wire holes and not breaking the gems, it took ten years to finish.”

-Except from Walander Sees the Elephant by M. H. Ungar ©2025. This author’s Middle-Grade novel Walander is unpublished.