08/28/2026: Perfectly Safe

The party climbs the forested shoulder of Mt. Strixhaven, the volcano Alistir insists, with mounting and increasingly suspicious enthusiasm, is perfectly safe. No one has yet explained why a perfectly safe volcano requires this many signs reading DANGER, NO ADMITTANCE, RESTRICTED, and KEEP OUT. Alister assures them that these signs are only to keep out those who have no actual business in the caves. “This place,” Alister says confidently, “is perfectly safe.”

Sweating and out of breath, they arrive at a flat panel of thick stone. DO NOT ENTER is carved into it in letters three feet tall. The door has no knob, no pull, no keyhole, no hinges.

Hester strides up and gives it a mighty push.

The door gives a fraction of an inch.

Diro and his Stand step in to shove, and the slab swings upward to nest flush against the roof of a hand-carved tunnel. The dark inside is total. KFC goes back out to gather what she needs to fashion a torch.

The tunnel travels deep into the mountainside, with side passages branching east and west. Broken battle axes and scattered armor, pitted with age and rust, litter the tiles. By the time anyone thinks to check the floor for tracks, the party has already walked through the dust.

⚔️

KFC descends three steps into the western passage and finds an abandoned dormitory, or possibly a guard post. She is not alone. Something watches from the dark across the hallway. Something is laughing.

KFC points and laughs back. This turns out to be the correct diplomatic approach, because the something is not one creature but several, and all of them find this hilarious.

*Magmin,* KFC thinks. *But can magmin giggle?* She tries to recall her First Year Magical Physiologies lecture and comes up empty.

She continues down into an abandoned kitchen — a dark clay oven, a low table, counters all sized for the duergar who once used them. Except one cupboard, set high on the wall. High for a duergar. Only shoulder height for KFC.

She puts her fist through it. From the wreckage of the door drops a single crystal bottle, which she snatches out of the air before it hits the floor. The liquid inside glows faintly orange and is warm through the glass. She turns it over, trying to place it. It looks familiar. She cannot say why.

⚔️

Diro, meanwhile, decides that a hallway lined with iron doors — torn from their hinges and stoved in from the *other* side — is best traveled from the ceiling. He climbs twenty feet of worked stone and informs the party this is completely safe, even as the air grows warmer by the second.

Below him a river of lava moves sluggishly beneath a badly damaged stone bridge. A narrow ledge of intact stone might hold weight, if tested. On the far side, the tunnel disappears into dark. Diro does not test it. He keeps climbing, and the wall curves unhelpfully upward toward the mouth of the cone.

⚔️

Alistir casts Pass Without Trace to keep the party hidden, then is immediately frustrated to watch everyone wander out of its radius one by one. No one else seems bothered. Everyone, after all, feels perfectly safe.

⚔️

KFC finds Hester and holds up the small phial of orange liquid. "What do you think this is? I was going to drink it, but I wanted to make sure it's perfectly safe."

"Hmm," Hester says. "It looks like a potion of Fire Resistance."

She peers into a small shrine choked with ash. Dwarf-shaped voids mark the floor where bodies once fell. In front of a dais and a throne-like chair stands a figure, dwarf-sized, made of something that looks like glass.

She steps inside. It is, after all, perfectly safe.

The ash stirs at her feet the moment she disturbs it. Instead of settling, it tumbles into a growing ball, takes on a vaguely humanoid shape, and ignites with a whoosh.

"Who disturbs this place? Who disturbs my slumber?"

Hester recognizes the massive burning shape for what it is — a fire elemental, enormous and uncontrolled. "Um — we were just leaving," she says, already backing toward the door.

"You shall not pass—" the elemental booms.

KFC mutters, "I've heard that somewhere before."

"—through the portal I guard! No one may pass into the Underdark through this door!"

"We've been to the Underdark!" KFC's whole face lights up with the news.

"And you shall not pass!" the elemental repeats, sounding frustrated now.

"OK, I won't!" Hester snaps.

This appears to stump it entirely. "Oh. Well, then. Cool."

"Why are you guarding a door to the Underdark?" KFC asks, conversationally.

"It is the charge I was given," it says, and tells the story of the duergar who lived here beneath the volcano until fifty years ago — the same dwarves whose outlines are pressed into the ash on the floor.

The elemental loses cohesion and collapses into a drift of cinders, settling over the tiles like snow.

⚔️

Down the passage, Reyna and Debbie explore the rooms Hester and KFC bypassed. Reyna wanders into a forge room before she notices the half-dozen magmin surrounding her, the room thick with their giggling. What catches her eye is the set of smith's tools resting on the anvil — finely made, elegant even, if that word can be used for hammers, tongs, and chisels. They look perfectly safe.

Reyna crosses the room to look closer.

"No touching!" One of the fiery creatures steps between her and the tools.

"But no one is using them," Reyna points out.

"We are charged to guard the forge and all its tools." The creature says this plainly, its molten face wavering with heat.

"You're right," Reyna says, and with a last look at the tools, returns to the hallway to rejoin Debbie.

⚔️

The pair find KFC and Hester just outside the shrine.

"What's the book?" Debbie asks, pointing at a red leather tome sitting on the ash-covered table.

"What book? I was too busy looking at—" But Debbie is already stepping into the shrine to retrieve it. Her foot disturbs the ash. It begins to swirl, gathers into a ball, and ignites. The fire elemental wheels to confront her, and finds her hands already gripping the book.

"It's you!!" Something in its burning face reads, unmistakably, as recognition.

Debbie nearly drops the book. Then the penny drops for her, too.

It is the same fire elemental she once conjured to fight Murgaxor. And she is devastated to learn it has been trapped here ever since, bound by its charge to guard this entrance to the Underdark until its caster returns to dismiss it.

⚔️

The reunion is warm, complicated only by the fact that hugging it will burn Debbie to death. KFC solves this by handing over the very convenient Potion of Fire Resistance. The two embrace.

The looted spellbook, it turns out, is full of high-level cleric magic no one in the party can read except Debbie, who speaks Dwarvish. She attempts to cast Free Celestial, hoping against the odds that elementals might qualify on a technicality.

They do not.

"I'll come back to visit you as often as I can," Debbie promises. "You are perfectly safe!"

"Thank you, my Maker. I hope so. I speak to him when I get too lonely to stand it any longer" — it gestures to the glassy, vitrified duergar figure still frozen mid-prayer — "but he is not good at conversation." If it could weep, Debbie thinks, it would be weeping now.

⚔️

High above all of this, Diro is still climbing, now working his way sideways along the wall. Below him, three magmin step out onto the surface of the lava river and wave up at him.

Diro waves back. When they keep waving, he calls down, "I'm already! It's perfectly safe up here!"

He is saying this as he passes a crack in the rock. Inside it is a salamander — larger than Diro, serpentine, wreathed in fire. Its yellow eyes fix on him. It leans out and bites him twice, tail lashing.

Diro reels backward, calling for help in the specific tone of a man who believes he is being eaten by a dragon.

⚔️

Below, Alistir — still on the ground, still not entirely sure what's happening above — shouts up into the dark.

"Diro! Have you found anything?"

The volcano, everyone agrees, remains perfectly safe.