Qube recovered from her outburst to see the Chosen One (and the others) were staring at her. The Chosen One had leant back like he was expecting her to explode.

“Well that was… new,” he said cautiously.

Qube coughed to cover her embarrassment. “Anyway, yes. Clearly, Definitely Bad Guy needs to light everything. If he wasn’t here, we could use the stick and the walls. Also, we are trapped in here, so I really hope there’s a teleportation area next to the True Fire.”

The Chosen One seemed to unfocus for a second, tracking back and forth as if reading an unseen book, before he snapped back to attention.

“Yup,” he said, waving at Definitely Bad Guy, “do as she says.”

Definitely Bad Guy, avoiding Qube’s eye, quickly cast some weak [Lesser Fireball]s. The wooden torches lit up, causing the stone well to burst into a flame that licked the ceiling. After a few moments the well sank into the ground and then slid away to reveal.... Another wooden ladder.

Qube glared at it. It had no hinges on it, it was hard wood, how had it managed to unfold? As she descended, it seemed sturdy enough, but it still made no sense. Once everyone had gathered in the next room (bunch of oddly-sized fires burning with no fuel, more wall magma, etc. etc.), Qube tried discreetly sniffing the wooden ladder. She couldn’t smell any agents on it like their Fireproof clothing. Maybe the stuff on the wood wasn’t truly Fireproof (otherwise Definitely Bad Guy’s fireballs probably wouldn’t have done anything to them) but rather fire resistant.

In fact, Qube wasn’t actually sure just how Fireproof their outfits were. While her own outfit was broken, the others had only boots and their regular amount of clothing to protect them. For Sexy Screamy Spider Lady, that was only a tiny amount of cloth that regularly disappeared into her body. If one of her legs was to brush up against the wall, it would be totally unprotected.

Did this mean that they could walk on fire, but not touch it with their bare hands? She stared at the multitude of differently-sized fires merrily burning all over the floor. Curious, she reached out to touch one. Just before she could touch it, Definitely Bad Guy grabbed her hand.

“Stay still,” he said quietly, while the Chosen One started walking around the room. Startled, Qube pulled away from the Mage.

“Is it a magical flame?” she whispered to him.

“I do not know,” he confessed. He turned towards the Chosen One, opened his mouth to shout something at him, and then stopped and looked back at Qube. He was squinting his eyes as if trying to process a headache.

Not knowing things must be very painful for him, Qube thought.

“I… you advise the Chosen One,” he ground out.

Qube beamed at him, pleased that he understood her seniority in the Companion hierarchy.

“So I will tell you this,” Definitely Bad Guy’s eyes suddenly pulsed red. “We are being watched. By the flames. They are… alive, in some way that I do not yet understand. We should seek to avoid provoking them.”

Qube nodded and walked over to where the Chosen One was inspecting an inscription on the wall. It was the one piece of rock that wasn’t covered in magma, which made it stand out quite nicely. Qube still hadn’t figured out why the Salamanders had decided to carve strangely cryptic messages inside their home — she would have to ask the Chosen One to ask them when he returned their True Fire.

Or maybe it was some kind of ploy by the lava slime? But why would they want to help anyone get to the True Fire? Also, how would they carve anything into stone? They had had a distinct lack of appendages with which to do such work, from what she had seen. Maybe they held tools with their eye stalks? Qube pulled a face at the mental image that thought conjured up.

She also wasn’t clear on why the lava slime had awoken some monster, or what they even wanted with the True Fire, but she was reasonably confident that it would become apparent once they beheld the True Fire itself. The crystalisation of a dragon’s First Breath sounded pretty powerful.

Qube was abruptly returned to reality by the Chosen One nudging her.

“Hey. Guiding light. Focus,” he said teasingly.

“I’m always focused,” Qube replied. “I was just focused on something else.”

“Well, focus on this,” the Chosen One said, pointing at the wall’s carvings. “Any idea as to what it could mean?” He was looking at her with a lilting half smile, an expression she couldn’t interpret.

Qube peered at the etchings. It was a series of flames in a row; some big, others small. The final image was of a treasure chest that looked surprisingly similar to the one that had held the magical bent stick in the Forbidden Forest Temple. Qube stared at it, thinking furiously. Her vision dimmed for a second, before it came to her.

“The fires in this room are different sizes. These are pictures of different sized fires. The prior etching had to do with getting out of the room. Perhaps if we do something with the differently sized fires we will get out of this room into a treasure room like the Forbidden Forest?”

Qube turned and looked at the Chosen One. His half smile was gone, his face strangely blank.

“Is that… does that make sense?”

“Yes,” he said eventually. “Very logical. Very well reasoned.” He studied her. “And almost correct. It looks like we need to put out the flames or touch them in a certain order to find a treasure chest.”

Qube frowned. “Wait a minute, if you knew the solution the entire time, why did you ask me?”

The Chosen One grinned at her, all trace of his earlier seriousness gone.

“Because,” he said, as if that explained anything.

---

After studying the various fires, the Chosen One started waving his hand through them in the order displayed on the placard. Each flame he waved through turned blue, and made a small ding sound. Once he’d touched all of them, a section of the floor slid aside to reveal…

Another wooden ladder.

As Qube climbed down the ladder, she pondered the point of these tests. Why did they exist? They were too cumbersome to be the normal way of traveling between levels; plus, the salamanders had their magma highways for that. And the clues were both far too obvious to deter intruders, but also obscure enough to be irritating for anyone whom the salamanders wanted to be able to travel freely.

They also signified a considerable amount of mana had been spent on creating them. Why, just to maintain those fires alone would take more mana than she had inside her! Were the mana reserves of dragons so formidable that this to them was no different than setting up a childproof gate? A terrifying thought. But if this was the work of dragons, why then was it so simple? Dragons were renowned for their love of fiendishly clever riddles; why hadn’t they been forced to deal with anything difficult? Or any combat — dragons were known to be bloodthirsty beasts.

In fact, this trek through the heart of an active volcano had been remarkably peaceful, Qube thought as she reached the bottom of the ladder. It was almost… relaxing.

As if in response to her thoughts, she felt the ground around them start to shake. She whipped around to see flames gushing out of holes in the ground, twisting together to form long, spindly limbs, topped by tiny stretched heads with little coal buttons for eyes. They started waving, flailing their arms around in wild patterns.

“[Lesser Shield]!” Qube shouted, instantly protecting the Chosen One. She wasn’t sure if these creatures could get through their Fireproof clothing, but she wasn’t about to risk the Chosen One’s life to find out.

She also had no idea how, exactly, they were supposed to defeat incorporeal elements. They had no flesh, so all their physical weapons were useless, and they were made of fire itself, so it wasn’t like Definitely Bad Guy’s fireballs could affect them, either. There wasn’t even any debris or water in the area that they could use— oh, if only she had some kind of [Summon Water] spell, she could be of use, but as it was there was no way for them to fight these —

The Chosen One swept his Sacred Sword through the foremost Fire Elemental, instantly killing it.

Oh.

Several of Sexy Screamy Spider Lady’s wooden arrows embedded themselves into another Fire Elemental, causing it to wail and explode into a pile of ashes, a small bag of what was probably coins sticking out of the dust.

Well, all right then.

“Time to fight fire with fire!” Definitely Bad Guy said, and threw a fireball at a vaguely mage-shaped Fire Elemental (its head kind of looking like a pointy mage hat). For some reason it exploded. Even though it was made of fire.

Sewer Bard stood at the back of the group with Qube, strumming his lute, green music drifting forth and hanging over the party. His song seemed to perk them up, make every strike hit true, and cut more deeply through the flame.

It was a sad day, Qube reflected, when Sewer Bard’s fighting made the most sense out of everyone.

As the last Fire Elemental exploded and faded into a pile of ashes, a heavy-looking metal chest rose up from the ground. On it, there was emblazoned a tiny golden crown just above a large keyhole. Qube looked to the Sewer Bard, to see if he would try and pick the lock, but instead he was just watching the Chosen One. Qube turned and looked at the Chosen One as well, to see him sifting through the ashes of the dead Fire Elementals.

“Chosen One, do you think the Sewer Bard should try and pick this lock?” Qube subtly hinted to the Hero. The Chosen One glanced at her, then went back to looting the… corpses? Ash piles? The Fire Elementals hadn’t seemed to have any physical material that they had been burning, so what was the ash composed of?

“Here we go!” the Chosen One said, holding aloft a giant golden key, somehow untouched by the ash it had been lying within. He waved it at the metal chest, causing the key to disappear and the chest to open itself.

Qube, prepared by the experience of the relatively small magical bent stick, was not disappointed by the size of the magical item the Chosen One pulled out. It was a strange rectangular box, with two little stiff eyestalks sticking out the top of them, a thread strung between them.

As soon as the Chosen One picked up the box, another section of the floor slid away, once again showing them where the inevitable wooden ladder was. Qube felt like maybe she should be more disturbed by the massacre of the Fire Elementals, but instead felt the horrifying mental images slide out of her mind as soon as she started descending the ladder. If she stopped to think about it, she would have been remarkably proud of how well she was handling all the murder that had occurred since she had left the village. But then, that was what she had been training for, in a way. After all, a Childhood Companion was no good if they kept freaking out over every little killing, now were they?

But she had no time to think about her thinking patterns, as what could charitably be called a song began as soon as the Chosen One stepped out onto the floor. His metal box lit up, the string between the eyestalks bouncing and twitching to the rhythm of the ‘song’. As she stepped off the ladder beside the Chosen One, Qube realised that they were standing on a small island of rock in the middle of a lake of lava.

In the liquid heat around them, there were hundreds upon hundreds of giant lava slimes, all singing their eerie tea-kettle in sync, bouncing around the cavernous area, making their shrieks almost harmonious, and oddly causing it to no longer be ear-bleedingly awful.

And, rising up out of the lava, there was a Giant Lava Slime, its eyestalks the size of boulders, and, between the eyestalks, on its rounded head, there was a tiny little golden crown.