Chapter Text
“Oh, we have to collect something from the throne room, too. We can stop by there on our way out.”
The leather bracer slipped from Link’s fingers as he tried to pull it past the sleeve of his gambeson. “Hoz could probably get it for you.” He loosened the buckles on the bracer even further and tried again. “Want me to ask him?”
“No, no. He…” Zelda looked up from the Purah Pad and frowned, hesitant. “He already has so much on this plate with the volunteers that arrived this week,” she said. “I don’t want to trouble him.”
Link gave her a wry smile before turning back to his arm. “Don’t think he’d see it as trouble. He’d be thrilled to fulfil the Princess’s request.”
The bracer, once again, refused to budge past the start of the thick sleeve. Link gave his arm a shake, as if a jostle would magically convince the stubborn thing to do what it was told, but his armour was choosing to be particularly uncooperative today.
He heard Zelda approach, and her hands entered his view to catch his own. One of them gathered the uncooperative fabric at his wrist, while the other eased the bracer over it and up his arm until it was sitting in place.
It took a disappointingly short time. She tightened the straps to keep it from shifting, and all of a sudden, the warmth of her hands was pulling away.
Link wasn’t ready to let go of that just yet.
He caught one of the retreating hands and stared down at it, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles. Zelda, in the midst of turning away, paused. Behind her, framed by two lit sconces, was the tunnel that led to their destination. It was faint, but Link could see the little tendrils of red-black mist that wafted out from the tunnel, low to the ground.
“Link?”
He broke his gaze away from the arched entrance and pulled Zelda’s hand to his lips. She giggled as he planted several little kisses on her fingers, and moved her hand to wrap around his wrist and pull him to his feet. Her fingers slipped under the sleeve of his gambeson to rub the bare skin on his wrist. “Throne room,” she said, her voice soft. “Once we finish down here. Alright?”
Her fingers ghosted over his skin once more before she pulled her hand away, and the warmth on his arm left with her.
It was cold.
It was cold, it was dark, the slate bed was hard against his back; he recognised the scene. He’d had this dream before. The dream where he couldn’t move and the Shrine of Resurrection was humming and water was rising and rising around him, covering his mouth and filling his nose. The dream where he tried to tell them: Stop, don’t put me back in here, I’m breathing, I can breathe, but the desperate thoughts were unable to form on his lips because he couldn’t move.
Yeah, he’d had this dream plenty of times. Enough to recognise that he wasn’t actually back in the Shrine of Resurrection. He’d gotten out of it years ago. He just had to remind himself of that, and wait for his body to catch up with his mind.
He’d woken up. He’d freed the Divine Beasts. He’d fought his way through to Hyrule Castle. They’d defea—
They.
Zelda.
Link opened his eyes and sat up, immediately regretting the rapid movement as his head spun and pain flared through his body. It was cold—he’d been right about that at least—but rather than a tomb bathed with the cool blue light of Sheikah technology, his eyes focused on a dimly lit cave. A dimly lit cave that didn’t seem like it was that structurally sound, if the stone debris and the tree roots that invaded from somewhere up above were anything to go by.
Everything hurt. The memory of the gloom, burning through his skin and burrowing needles of poison into his veins, had settled into a deep-seated ache that pulsed through his whole body. His arm hurt most of all. He looked down to see the damage and—
That wasn’t his arm.
He turned the limb over slowly, inspecting it. In the low light of the cave, it almost looked like a smaller, less glowy version of the arm he’d seen holding the corpse under the castle. An arm he could’ve sworn was a corpse itself.
He was going to have to unpack that later, because someone, somewhere, was talking to him.
“I’ve heard a great deal about you from Zelda.” That drew him to his feet. He began hunting around the cave for an exit while the voice continued. Severe injuries… near death… that all tracked with how he felt. The confirmation that his arm had in fact been replaced with the weird glowy corpse arm didn’t help with the nausea that was already sitting in his gut, and he had to close his eyes to take a moment.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Reopening his eyes, he saw the sword.
It looked about as bad as he felt.
He brushed his fingers over the whorls of grey that marked the damaged blade, listening out for the voice within it. The spirit that resided in the blade gave no response to being picked up, and he forced a whisper out through his dry throat.
“Are you still there?”
Nothing.
He muttered an apology to the sword before using it to cut through some thinner roots that were blocking what appeared to be a doorway. A far larger room lay beyond it, with some circular sculpture sitting in the middle of it, displaying a pattern in glowing green.
The last green, glowing object he’d approached hadn’t exactly ended well for him, but looking around the stark room, Link was at a loss for what else he could try.
The image, as he got closer, mostly displayed an eye and a hand, surrounded by what appeared to be two serpents eating each other’s tails carved in stone. Tentatively, Link reached out and mirrored the hand on the image with his new transplant.
Thankfully, no gloom jumped out at him this time. The unnecessarily massive gears on the wall started up, and from behind the serpents, Link saw a door open.
With nowhere else to go, he moved forward.
He was clearly the first person to pass through these tunnels in a long time, and the path had fallen completely into ruin. Parts of the floor had given way at some points, demanding that he jump down and climb back up to continue on. The damage the gloom had done to him became more and more apparent as he followed it. Every gasping breath he took felt like it was pushing through something that had writhed its way into his body and wrapped around his lungs. His muscles screamed at him the second they deemed they had been working for too long. Swimming through the too-cold water that covered parts of the tunnel caused him to flinch a little harder than he normally would, and the cold lingered in his bones long after he got out of the ponds.
At one point, a misjudged jump had him slipping back down the rise he was climbing, fingers scrabbling for a handhold. He landed on his ass and lay back, staring up at the ceiling while he waited for his limbs to stop shaking. His chest heaved. Black spots danced in his vision.
The wall was barely twice his height.
This was going to be a fucking nightmare.
It felt like forever by the time he broke out from the tunnels. Shading his eyes from the glare of the sun, he looked around.
He was…really high up.
Nothing was recognisable. Not that Link would recognise being in the sky anyway, but none of the floating land masses he could see were familiar. If there was actual ground anywhere below, it was hidden by a thick blanket of clouds.
Peering over the edge of the path he was on, he clocked a large pond way, way down underneath the structure he was on.
Hopefully, it would be deep enough.
He was having deja vu.
Not the good kind of deja vu; the deja vu that usually preceded him getting a memory back. The kind of deja vu that he welcomed, because regardless of what was about to come to him, it would at least fill in one of the countless holes in his mind.
No, this particular instance of deja vu only threw him back to a mere six years ago. Zero idea of where he was, hunting down shrines under the guidance of a cryptic ghost, and getting his ass kicked by foes he normally wouldn’t bat an eye at. Only this time around, he was also lucky enough to be bestowed with a fever that would flush on and off at a whim, and bouts of nausea that made his stomach recoil at the idea of eating anything more extravagant than an apple.
And of course, the memory of how he ended up back in this situation.
It was possible that his exhaustion, coupled with the frustration that apparently everything on this island required the arm Rauru had given him (couldn’t the Zonai have made spare keys to their Temple of Time?) was showing on his face, because Rauru manifested beside him as he exited the first shrine.
“I know this must be… a lot to adjust to,” Rauru said, pointedly looking at the arm.
Link shrugged and reached for the Purah Pad at his hip. “I’ve done it before,” he muttered, bringing the Pad’s scope up to look for the other shrines on the island. Before she’d given it to the steward for safekeeping, Zelda had apparently collected the data of the area. So, he had a map. But, disappointingly, he couldn't find any other helpful information on the device. Other than the camera being broken. Robbie was gonna lose his mind when he found out about that.
“So I’ve heard.” Link glanced up from the scope. He thought he saw something like pity flash over the spirit’s face, but Rauru turned away before he could dissect the expression.
Link didn’t know what to think of him. Back on the Great Plateau, King Rhoam’s spirit had been a constant, inescapable presence. Even without his memories, or any awareness of who he was, Link had felt the old man’s eyes following him, evaluating him.
Rauru felt different. While he too followed Link’s journey around the islands, he seemed far less interested in analysing Link’s skills or asking pointed questions. Outside of directing him through the shrines, he didn’t seem to pay Link much attention at all. More often than not, Link found him simply gazing over the landscape, or watching the constructs at work with a faraway, wistful look on his face.
His attention being elsewhere was probably for the best. He hadn’t elaborated on what exactly Zelda had told him about her knight, but Link was pretty sure that “reckless, impatient idiot” was not one of the descriptions that had come up.
But a reckless, impatient idiot was exactly how Link felt.
The soldier constructs didn’t seem like they would pose that much of a danger around the islands. Sure, they kinda reminded Link of the guardians, and seeing them around often put him on edge, waiting for pink veins of malice to wrap through their forms. But they telegraphed their moves and went down easy enough that they shouldn’t have been an issue.
And perhaps—if Link hadn’t been barreling his way through the island, ignoring when the sky darkened into night, and choosing to fight literally any hindering obstacle out of pure fucking annoyance—they wouldn’t have been. Perhaps if he had taken a moment, concentrated, and realised that maybe fighting four at once might be difficult in his current state, they wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to become a danger.
And perhaps he wouldn’t have ended up hunched over at the base of a tree, utterly exhausted and aching in more places than he could count. Fortunately for him, the constructs had only been armed with sticks of varying sizes, and he’d made it out of the scrap with a mere few scrapes and some gnarly bruises. The worst hit he’d taken was the one to his ego.
So yeah—he was thankful that Rauru was otherwise occupied.
That wasn’t to say there was no audience to his blunders however. As he leant his head back against the tree trunk, he caught a glimpse of the dragon that orbited the island. When he’d first seen it above the Temple of Time, he’d thought it was Farosh and was pleased to see at least one familiar face. But a closer look through the scope showed that the colour was off; this dragon was just as unfamiliar as the rest of the place.
He’d always had a good track record with the dragons liking him. Hopefully, this one would too.
At least enough that it wouldn’t judge him too harshly.
The arm didn’t exactly feel wrong, but it certainly didn’t feel right. It was definitely attached, with whatever fucked up magic surgery Rauru had done to him, but there was a sense of off-ness about the limb. The palm was slightly too slender. The fingers were slightly too long. And the nails—well, it was probably more apt to refer to them as claws, because they were far sharper and shaped differently than Hylian fingernails.
He couldn’t bite them shorter either. He tried.
He’d initially thought the strange rings and bangles were just jewellery, but they were more or less fused to the rest of the arm. He fiddled around with them, but they wouldn’t budge. They didn’t seem like skin, but what was Zonai skin like, anyway? That might’ve been too rude a question to ask.
The biggest hurdle however, was the internal stuff. While the muscle memory seemed to match his own, the strength of said muscles definitely did not. The arm was the first limb to start shaking when he was climbing, and while testing out the balance of a newly fused sword, the damn thing cramped up.
It felt like a shot of lightning that flared in the back of the hand and darted its way right up past the elbow. Link hissed and dropped the weapon to try and stretch the cramp out.
Rauru was sitting nearby, and looked away from the brightening sunrise sky to wince. Link wasn’t sure if it was out of sympathy, or because he felt the pain too. “I’m afraid you’ll find my arm is not as practised with weaponry as yours,” he said.
Link bent over to pick up the sword. “Didn’t fight much?”
“I had other ways of fighting.”
Link considered the mishmash of stick and construct horn for a while, then passed it over to his left hand. He had vague memories of being trained out of his left-handedness; the stern echo of some captain’s voice, preaching about the importance of uniformity within the ranks, floated somewhere in the back of his head. He was out of practice, but using a slightly rusty left hand had to be better than using a right hand that might drop his weapon in the middle of a battle. At the very least, it would do until he built up the strength in Rauru’s arm.
The morning bell sounded from the temple, and the constructs by the small lake unfolded from their sleeping positions and got right to work. One of them noted Link and cocked its strange, lizard-like head to the side.
“Apologies,” it said. “Transportation to the other side of the lake is on hold indefinitely. We need to fix the rafts.” It turned to join its fellow constructs around the collection of rotted wood pieces and strange green devices.
They didn’t actually seem to be doing much in the way of ‘fixing’ anything. They would closely inspect one part of the wreckage, their hands hovering over, not touching, then they would move elsewhere to inspect another part. Watching their ineffective work, a pang of sadness struck Link in the chest. “They’ll never actually be able to fix the rafts, will they?” he asked Rauru.
Rauru shook his head. “They had the capabilities to do so once,” he said, “but it’s been so long since my people were around to repair them or give them new instructions. They’re still active, yes, but their capacity has dwindled greatly from my time. I imagine it will only continue to do so.”
Link broke away from the depressing scene to peer over the edge of the island. Clouds. Just clouds. He’d tried to get a view of what was below him, tried to gauge if there was anything familiar about the land under the islands multiple times, but he’d only ever found clouds. The more time he spent not knowing where he was, the more agitation buzzed under his skin.
He could figure it out later. They could figure it out later. Right now, he just needed to get to this third shrine and get whatever power he needed to open the door to the Temple of Time. Once he’d done that, he could get into the building, reunite with Zelda, and the two of them would figure out what to do next. He just needed to stop wasting time.
Link stalked past the working constructs, and, giving the Zonai arm a shake, activated its ultrahand function. Scrap that earlier thought.
The arm did feel wrong.
He needed another shrine.
Of course he needed another shrine.
Link wanted to put his head through the door, but opted to close his eyes and lean against it instead. He could sense Rauru watching him.
The spirit kept his voice low and careful, but still every word grated on Link’s nerves. Rauru paused after his spiel, seemingly waiting for a response. The only reaction Link could give him was both fists curling up against the door.
“I feel I should reiterate,” Rauru added after a moment, “that you were very nearly beyond saving. I’m certain Zelda won’t mind if you were to slow down a little. For your own well-being.”
Link was reminded of the past winter in Hateno. Some traveller, stopping by to trade tabantha wheat to the general store, had also dropped off a case of the flu. Pruce of course, had given that to his kids, and after a single day at school, Azu managed to spread it across the rest of town. It had somehow—whether through a fluke or Hylia playing favourites—skipped Zelda, but she still carried it home and passed it to Link.
“You can slow down, you know,” Zelda had told him, her hand rubbing his chest after a particularly violent coughing fit. “It won’t do any harm for you to rest for a few days.” Her other hand, cool and gentle, had come up to push the hair back from his sweaty forehead.
The metal of the door’s handle was just as cool against his forehead, but nowhere near as gentle. His throat tightened. He would’ve liked nothing more than to slow down. He would’ve given anything to rest. They’d done their job, they’d defeated the Calamity. He’d thought, after that, rest was the only thing he and Zelda should’ve had to do.
They were supposed to be free.
He hadn’t been able to feel the spectral hand she’d held out to him earlier. He’d felt the warmth of the light that passed from her hand to the Zonai one. He’d felt the hum of power that ran up the arm as one of the empty spaces filled with a rune. But he hadn’t been able to feel her. That hurt more than any of the aches the gloom had left him with, or any of the bruises the constructs had given him. All he wanted was to touch her, to hold her again. And to see her floating right in front of him, hand stretched out for him to grasp, and not be able to feel her formed a spike of pain that hit him in the chest and buried itself far deeper than gloom could ever go.
His throat tightened further, and felt dangerously close to a sob that wanted to break past his lips, but he swallowed it down and pushed himself back from the door. He brought out the Purah Pad and held it out to Rauru. The words that fell from his mouth felt small and strangled. “Show me where the fourth shrine is.”
The recall ability Zelda had given him didn’t feel as alien as the others that came with the hand. For one, it didn’t come with the weird green glow when he used it.
But there was also something about recall that just felt familiar. It wasn’t all that different from when he concentrated enough in a fight; when his opponent and surroundings would slow right down and he was able to catch openings he wouldn’t have otherwise.
The soft, golden glow that the rune gave off helped too. It was definitely Zelda’s magic, and the flash it would give when he snapped his fingers raised his spirits a little. It took a bit of the sting out of going through the fourth shrine to get the final light blessing.
Back in the temple, face to face with Hylia’s statue, he offered up the four blessings.
He knew there was gloom in his body. He could feel it, roiling in his veins and wrapping around his bones. But that knowledge didn’t make it any less startling when, after making his offering, he saw the same red-black tendrils of gloom he had seen under the castle peel out of his body.
It might’ve been his imagination, but some of the tightness in his chest and flush in his cheeks ebbed. He still felt like crap, but maybe, a little less so than before.
There was one way to know for sure.
This time, despite the shake in his arms, the doors at the back of the temple gave way for him. They opened up to the morning sky, and something that appeared to be an altar. In the distance, Link could see that same glowing, golden light he knew.
“Well done.” Link turned to Rauru, and saw the edges of his form, already dissipating into little flames. “I’m sorry I can’t stay to help you further, but I can tell you that you will find more shrines around Hyrule. Continue to visit those, and you’ll continue to rid yourself of the gloom’s poison.”
The spirit faded further and looked out towards the altar with a smile on his face. “You’re exactly as Zelda said,” and the final remnants of his form flitted away.
He was gone before Link could thank him.
Link pushed forward to the altar, and once there, approached the light cautiously. He was unsure of what he was supposed to do next. Did he touch it? Use the recall ability on it? He reached out—
“Put me in there.”
Link started, and removed the Master Sword from his back. “What?”
“I can sense Princess Zelda. She has a plan to restore my strength.”
Link looked at the light, tried to see through it. “Zelda’s there?”
“You must restore your strength too. When the time comes to destroy this evil, I will meet you again.”
Link hesitated. The rune on the back of his hand pulsed.
“Put me in the light, Link.”
He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to expect. He placed the sword into the gathered light; it was warm against the Zonai hand. The sword floated in place, the light brightened, and then both were gone.
Before he was able to comprehend that, a roar cut through the silence and shook the stone under his feet. The dragon he’d seen orbiting the island broke through the clouds, roaring again. The cloudy barrier evaporated in its wake, and Link peered down.
“Link.”
He’d been above Hyrule this entire time. He noted the ruins of Castle Town, nestled next to the newer constructed form of Lookout Landing.
“Link. You must find me.”
Beyond the ruins he could see the castle, gloom whirling around it; a grim, foreboding shield.
“Find me.”
Link jumped.