"I don't think they are smart enough to have particularly advanced magic, they mostly just throw goo at you and sometimes explode."

She makes a face.

"Great. Goo. Explosions and goo. My favorite. Ugh."

He laughs and plants a kiss on her cheek. "They are not my favourite, indeed."

"Thanks. No wonder you invested in such a nice bath. Well, no use complaining about it. Let's go."

"Onwards."

The volcano's big. This is going to be quite a trek, and they might need to stop to rest before reaching the lip.

Euuuughhhh.

"I really hope that someone was wise enough to put a waypoint up there," she mutters. "Maybe I should break out the fire resistance mantra. It'd probably help with this heat. That would make this climb slightly less unpleasant. Except for the part where I'd have to hum. Incessantly."

"I have water," he offers.

"I have some, thank you, I'm just—I'm actually still thinking about how I can be slightly less squishy, it's got me picking apart all of my known spells for what sorts of combinations I could make that would keep me not-dead. And going, 'Maybe I can solve my current problems with this spell!' ... Also bitching a little, admittedly, sorry about that."

"You are a delight even when you are, ah, 'bitching a little,' don't worry."

"Oh, good. I like being good company." She hums thoughtfully. "Do you have any ability to cause enemies to miss in their attacks? Like, by blinding them?"

"I have a few spells that do that, why?"

"I have a hex that would hit multiple enemies; it would make them all attack faster, but throw off their aim. And then I have several other hexes that would hurt them every time they attacked. But I would feel better about using these if there was some extra thing there to make it more likely that they'll miss, so I'm not helping the enemy hit you faster."

"Yes, I have some things that would work well with that."

"Okay," she nods. "Then I'll keep thinking in that vein until I feel like I've got something that won't get either of us killed. We'll see if I come up with anything usable."

He nods. Then looks up at how much more it seems like they have to walk. "We might need to walk a couple of hours into the night, still, or we could stop, eat, and sleep before that."

She gives another thoughtful hum. "How likely is it that the caldera will have horrible monsters worse than the ones we fight climbing the volcano?"

"...somewhat?"

"Okay. We should definitely eat on the way, regardless; it doesn't take very much time. I'm less sure about what to do about sleep. I think you're probably more experienced with these kinds of trade offs than I am, darling. If you think we ought to sleep, I could put an illusion over some kind of sleeping nook to disguise us?"

"Oh, the illusion would be useful, yes. I usually just trap the area around and leave an undead minion outside keeping guard. Yes, I think sleep is probably the better idea."

She nods. "Then we can start looking for suitably defensible sleeping spots and rest before we reach the top. I trust your judgement."

"Thank you, my princess."

So they look.

Eventually, they find a nice little overhang against one of the volcano's rock faces. Vetareh can make it look like the rock goes straight down, with no overhang at all, and they can sleep in the hidden space therein.

"Though I'll need a bit of time to fiddle with it to make sure it won't disappear when I fall asleep," she explains, as she frowns thoughtfully at it. "So you have time for traps and careful minion placement."

"Yes, ma'am."

He summons four minions out of thin air to accompany his flesh golem: a shadow fiend, a blood fiend, a bone fiend, and an immobile flesh wurm. Then he grabs his staff and starts making various faintly glowing circular marks appear on the ground around them.

And Vetareh begins carefully weaving an illusion. The rock face itself isn't all that hard; she can copy parts from above and flip and reflect and stretch or squash them so they don't look quite so copied. She can even disguise his glowing runes, and give his minions little illusions to hide in. His mobile minions get space underneath the hidden overhang, or in extra space created against a nearby rockface; the wurm gets to be a rock. This isn't particularly difficult. Instead, the trouble is everything else. It needs to reflect light correctly instead of just copying the surroundings, so she also needs to weave an illusion behind her illusion to project the reflected light. Then, behind that, she needs to add an illusion that will prevent ordinary light coming from the other direction, so that the entire thing casts shadows correctly, and so they could have some kind of light source inside the sleeping nook without giving themselves away.

Then, she needs to tie the whole nest of magic off, so it's tidy and self contained and won't bleed off power in a way that would be notable to people with a magic sensitivity as keenly honed as Vetareh. Once that's done, she needs to gently remove the parts of her magical essence that are propping this whole illusion up and settle the weight of this magical web over something else, because she doesn't want this whole thing to collapse into nothingness the minute she falls asleep. Because of that, she needs to find suitable bits of rock that are magically resonant enough to hang an illusion off of without dissipating so much that the illusion fades, or bleed off notable amounts of power. It's a balancing act, and a tricky one, at that. If she gets it too wrong, removes magical support too hastily, misjudges the weaknesses and strengths of her creation, the whole thing could come tumbling down and dissipate into nothingness. She'd need to start over.

Fortunately, this doesn't come up.

"... There," she says, letting out a breath she'd been holding as she successfully removes the last of her supports without the whole thing falling to pieces. Breathing too hard wouldn't actually disrupt a magical illusion, but try telling that to one's psychology. "Done. That should hold while we sleep."

He's looking at her with a very fond expression right now.