Chapter Text
Ravio awoke to the sound of someone yelling.
For once, it wasn’t coming from himself, which surprised him as he flailed towards wakefulness.
He opened his eyes, blinking stupidly. Why was the fortress ceiling replaced by towering tree-trunks? Why was his nose itching with nature-magic? Why did his bed feel like pine needles? And why was some asshole kid shouting his head off?
Then he remembered.
Last night, he had carried the unconscious young Link as far into the dark woods as he could go, the two of them sopping wet and frigidly cold after their dunk in the river. Eventually, he collapsed in a hollow at the base of a redwood, flared roots making for a semi-hidden enclosure. After setting up the sloppiest concealment hexes of his entire life, Ravio then took off both their outer layers of soaked clothes and hung them on the buttress roots to dry. Still shivering in his long underwear, he gathered firewood from the many fallen branches that littered the ground, setting it alight with the last of his magic.
The cold had apparently made him stupid. Because after draining his magical reserves several times over in the past three days, this final drain on his magic instantly knocked him out.
Really, it was a miracle that he didn’t fall into the fire, or that some terrible monster hadn’t bypassed the shitty concealment sigils scrawled in the dirt and eaten them alive.
Now that he knew where he was (sort of, location in the Lost Woods was a bit of a fuzzy thing), he rolled over to see the boy on the ground where Ravio had left him. He was wearing nothing but his green shorts, wriggling around on his back but unable to get up as if pinned, swearing loudly in multiple languages (only some were being translated by the translation spell Lana had placed on Ravio, the rest being a strange mix of clicks and birdlike sounds) while digging trenches into the dirt with his bare feet as he attempted to get up. The undead fairy that followed him was frantically circling the area, adding to the chaos.
Perhaps later Ravio would be thankful that the boy’s lungs weren’t damaged in the gassing of Fort Baumer, but now? After being startled awake after a night of poor sleep in the Lost Woods? The Lost Woods full of predators with sharp ears and sharper teeth? Absolutely not.
“Where’s th’mask?! Where’s th’ocarina?!” The kid’s hands were at the back of his neck, working furiously to undo… something. Ravio had no idea what kept him pinned down.
“Shhh! Something might hear us!” he hissed, “I left all your equipment in your belt bags, calm down.”
“I need it now! It’s been sebenty-one hours! Where’s th’fucking moon!” The kid demanded, placing both hands behind his head and ripping something apart. Abruptly, he shot up.
On the ground where the boy had lain, ivy vines squirmed, broken tips weeping blood-red sap. With horror, Ravio realized that the small leaves on the back of the boy’s neck and shoulders had filled out into full vines, now broken and bleeding.
Had he been growing roots?
Ignoring the amputated vines bleeding onto his bare back, the boy whirled around the clearing, eyes wild, nearly stepping barefoot onto the dying fire Ravio had made earlier, poe-fairy trailing behind him.
Upon spotting his leather belt and bag hanging over a tall root, he ran to it and pulled out the Fierce Deity’s mask, alongside a sky-blue sweet-potato-shaped flute.
“You just recovered from magic exhaustion, do not go wrathful-god-mode now!” Ravio was now wide awake, and he lunged after the tiny hero, grabbing hold of the mask just before the boy put it on, dark magic numbing his fingers. The boy wouldn’t let go, and Ravio wasn’t strong enough to take it from him, but he kept the child from donning the mask. Barely.
The kid stared upwards, trees and mist blocking his view of the sky. He was breathing heavily, clenching the mask and ocarina with pale fingers. A painful memory flared up in Ravio’s chest.
“What about the moon?” Ravio asked as calmly as he could. The falling moon had loomed large in the mask’s dreams, so this panic had to be related. Mr. Tiny Hero had talked so casually about witnessing the apocalypse earlier, Ravio had forgotten how fucked the whole thing sounded. You don’t drop a celestial object on a pre-teen and expect them to walk it off.
The boy didn’t respond. Ravio tried gently tugging on the mask, trying to disregard the anesthetizing feel of its dark magic, but the child’s grip was like iron. Stupid Goron strength. He needed to negotiate his way to keeping the kid out of yet another magic exhaustion coma. He tried to think about what the dream visions of Termina had been like.
“The moon caused earthquakes, didn’t it? I don’t feel any earthquakes at all. That means the moon isn’t falling, right?”
Mr. Tiny Hero’s breathing slowly evened out, and the poe-fairy plonked onto his head, making soothing chimes. He kept looking up though.
“You can hold on to the mask and flute. Just please don’t do any magic yet. My arms are still sore from carrying you yesterday, I refuse to do that again.”
The boy gave a small nod, gloomy blue-green eyes still fixed on the gray sky crowded with trees.
“I think our stuff is dry now, so I’m going to get my robe and start breakfast. But I’m right here, okay?” Ravio took his hands off the mask, grateful to no longer be in contact with that level of dark magic, and the child thankfully made no move to put it on. He kept his eyes on the boy as he grabbed his cloak and scarf.
Once fully clothed, Ravio poked around the edges of their camp, gathering more firewood and a few wild onions, never leaving sight of the boy. Each time he looked back, the tiny hero still had his face to the sky, glaring at it like it had personally wronged him. Which, well, it had.
But he didn’t put the mask on, and that was good enough.
Breakfast was soup made from bouillon, dried fish, and wild onions. The first two came out of Ravio’s pockets sealed in wax paper and wrapped in twine, and he hoped the goddesses would forever bless Staven for his insistence on giving everyone waterproof rations before all the chaos in the escape of Fort Baumer.
His lone preservation bottle had been filled with drinking water, now being used as the base of the soup, with the bottle itself as the container. All he needed to do was heat it to make it more palatable, because with the clumped bouillon and fish bits it looked like something left in a chamber pot after a bad meal.
This presented a problem, because the embers of last night’s fire had cooled hours ago. Ravio expending any more magic was out of the question for at least another day, and while he considered trying to take apart one of the fuses of the leftover bombs, he didn’t trust himself to not accidentally blow himself up. He was an artificer and not a pyrotechnician for a reason.
He turned to Mr. Tiny Hero, who had finally managed to end his staring contest with the sky and was putting on his own clothes. The severed vines were mostly tucked under his tunic, though the green fabric now bore small bloodstains around the neck. “Ah. Do you have anything to light fires with? I’m low on magic.”
The boy stuck his hand out, and Ravio placed a branch from the new pile of firewood against his open palm.
Ravio had already arranged the firewood into a cone over the ashes, expecting the boy to pull out a flint or do that fancy rub-two-sticks-together-real-fast thing that he’d never actually seen work. Instead, the kid hummed softly, and the end of the stick burst into hot flames.
“Here.” Mr. Tiny Hero handed him the unlit end as Ravio gaped.
“You shouldn’t—gah!” he shoved the burning end of the stick into the firewood before the inferno could spread down the rest of it, and by extension, to him. “You shouldn’t be doing magic yet!” He couldn’t see any items used to create the fire, or even focus the magic, which meant that it was raw magic, a level of which would probably kill Ravio if he ever tried conjuring a flame that hot.
“Pfft. It’s like a fire arrow, those are easy. You saw real magic at th’fort! Cia’s been teaching me how t’add dark magic t’spells! I’m calling it Din’s Dark Fire! Yuga said it sounds tacky but fuck him.” The kid preened, then quickly stopped.
The fact that they were both stuck in the Lost Woods with someone working for their enemy dawned on them both. It was a disturbing realization, especially for Ravio, because he had no idea whatsoever how to escape the woods aside from waiting for Sheerow, and his potential adversary was a kid with Goron-strength and more raw magic than he had ever seen aside from Ganon himself. And that wasn’t even counting the death mask of Termina.
“So. Uhm. Why are we in th’Lost Woods? What happened at th’fort?” Mr. Tiny Hero threw out a lifeline by changing the subject and Ravio gladly took it.
“Ah. Well. After you warped us outside, the people the mask met in the dream helped us out. Zelda—er... Wizzro was planning on dumping poisonous gas into the dungeon, but we put a stop to that. We still had to escape the fort of course. Everyone else made it to the boats and fled downstream, but you and I missed the last boat out. So, I made an ice bridge and got us across the river. Then Sheerow flew off to deliver their message.” He glossed over the messy bits, and the cuccoo horror, but that was in fact most of what happened.
“Oh. Were th’horses okay?” the boy asked.
“The horses?”
“Yeah. There were a bunch of horses at th’fort. Are they okay?”
“Ah, the stable hand took them out every day at noon to graze, that’s when everything went to shit, she should have been able to escape with them.” He had barely been able to see thanks to the acid gas when he fled the fort, he hoped he was right about the stable hand.
“That’s good. Thanks.”
Ravio poked at the fire with another stick as it continued to grow. Sparks popped, warm splashes of color against the moss riddled wood. He nestled the soup jar into the edge of the flame. “Sooo… do you know how to get out of here? This isn’t the Easily-Navigable Woods.”
“Um. Well. I set th’return point for Farore’s wind back at th’fort, but I don’t think we want t’go back there. And my warp songs don’t work anymore. Where d’you think we should go? I kinda wanna back and kill Wizzro but I should prob’ly warn Cia that she’s been betrayed first.” Mr. Tiny Hero gently rubbed the torn vines at the back of his neck as he thought. “I think, I think Cia would like you! You should come with me! You’re real smart and she’s not mean t’people with dark magic!”
Well shit. Maybe he could follow the kid to the edge of the woods and make a run for it. It would break the little guy’s heart, but there was no way Ravio was about to work for someone invading Hyrule. Again. And pretending to work for Cia while secretly planning to betray her was right out, Yuga could have told Cia what a sneaky little liar Ravio was.
At the same time, running away meant leaving this child in her clutches. And Ravio had some real concerns about leaving a young boy alone with an ancient sorceress who was trying to capture another young man for goddesses-knew-what reasons.
Cia had to be keeping Mr. Tiny Hero away from the truth of what she was doing. After all, despite being deeply angry and gifted with disturbing magic, the boy worried about horses and hadn’t killed anyone at the fort despite having ample opportunity. And while the Fierce Deity should have been an army-shredding military asset for Cia, right beside her dragon-knight, Ravio had never heard of it doing that. Rather, it mostly appeared after battles to eat the souls of the dead. She had to be keeping secrets from the child, perhaps if he could see first-hand the horrors that Cia had wrought, he would rethink his allegiance. Considering how the Hyrulean army had treated the poor kid, he would never be a loyal subject again, but Ravio only needed to stop Mr. Tiny Hero from working with Cia.
So, he was going to manipulate Farore’s blessed hero. Again.
Ravio supposed it had worked out well enough last time.
“Let’s not be too hasty Mr. Tiny Hero. Sheerow is an accomplished courier, but they could get stuck or delayed. If Sheerow can’t get there in time, Lieutenant Link will pull that sword and we’ll all be in deep shit. Let’s go to the sword itself and make sure he doesn’t pull it. I’ll talk to them, let them know they’re making a mistake, explain that you’re helping to stop Ganon, save the day, get paid, all that good stuff.”
The small hero was so painfully easy to read, Ravio could practically see the gears turning in his head as he processed this plan. It wasn’t hard to understand how Cia had made him her flunky, the boy burned with a need to be needed. He could use that. This was good.
He felt like an asshole.
The kid perked up and started sketching a map in the dirt with his boot. Ravio recognized Hyrule field immediately, a big circle with a dot for Castletown at the top, and a line curving around its eastern edge for the Zora River, marking the border between Hyrule Field and the Lost Woods. One dot at the eastern edge of the circle marked Fort Baumer, and another dot beyond the river to its east marked their (likely) position within the woods. “Yeah—yeah! We’re prob’ly about here, in th’woods. I mean, space is kinda weird here, but still.” He then toed another dot into the ground beyond the southern edge of the field. “Th’sword’s still in th’Temple of Time, but th’Temple moved, into th’woods. No idea how. It’s faster t’trabel across th’field than th’woods, so let’s get t’Hyrule Field, south of th’fort, then cross th’bridges in Ordon, that should be far enough from th’fort t’be safe,” he made a few lines over the river to indicate bridges. “We can then go ober th’field t’get closer t’th’Temple. That’s where th’new Link will prob’ly go.”
Mr. Tiny Hero turned around slowly, then pointed at a tree that looked exactly like every other tree, “Th’groundwater was flowing that way, towards th’riber, that must be southwest. Th’Ordon bridges are about three days of walking from here. I think. Cia made me study maps.”
“Groundwater?” Ravio asked.
“Um” Mr. Tiny Hero paused, as if realizing he had let slip something he shouldn’t. Something twitched at the back of his neck.
“It’s a Deku scrub thing, isn’t it?” He knew little about them aside from being plantlike conmen of the great forest (Ravio had really wanted to investigate his competition), which meant somehow they had to be able to navigate it.
The boy made a small nod.
“Mr. Tiny Hero, if you having roots saves Hyrule then that’s a good thing.”
“S’weird though. Weird gets you shot.” One of the boy’s hands involuntarily clutched the arrow scar on his other arm.
“In this Hyrule? Honestly? Yes. But I’ve met a weird hero and… he was pretty great! Maybe Loruleans have a higher tolerance for weird. We’ll be careful around these Hyruleans, alright?”
“He was weird too?” the boy asked softly.
“Well, yes. Nice guy. Maybe a little too nice if you ask me. Spent about half his adventure as a painting” Ravio paused, thumbing the ice rod in his robe pocket, checking it was still there. “I miss him.”
“A painting?”
“That’s right, with the help of a magic bracelet he could become flat as paper and stick to walls. Saved both Hyrule and Lorule with that ability. Though, Mr. Hero was starting to look a bit different near the end. Light hit him strangely. Probably spent too much time as art.”
The boy pondered the existence of another strange hero, chewing on his lip. Ravio didn’t have any issues with the kid’s plan to leave these awful woods ASAP and book it across Hyrule Field, but his stint in jail had made it clear that this Hyrule was far more conformist than Mr. Hero’s Hyrule. The two of them were dark-magic tainted foreigners traveling outside of the auspices of the military in a deeply fearful country during wartime. That could be a problem, and he’d need to be careful once they entered the Ordonian province, especially with the kid’s transformation scars getting more obvious.
With a burble, the soup announced it had finally come to a boil, and Ravio rushed over to carefully push it away from the fire with an unlit stick. Pondering could wait; he was starving.
Breakfast was best described as edible. Nevertheless, the two of them made quick work of the soup, Ravio poured half into one of Mr. Tiny Hero’s jars so they could each sip it at their leisure. Once finished, they spread out their items on the forest floor to see what they had available to work with.
Ravio had one (now empty) preservation jar; his warm scarf, robe, and sash (with a few hexes sewn into them for hygiene); the kid’s borrowed bomb bag with both bombs and bombchus (also hexed for waterproofedness, thank goodness); the wind-enchanted boomerang also given to him by the kid; the time traveling ice rod from Mr. Hero; one-hundred-eighty-four rupees (Colonel Firne, that rat bastard, hadn’t actually paid Ravio yet despite his promises); a small folding knife; a sewing kit he had scrounged together at the fort; a few handkerchiefs; and enough wax-wrapped bullion and jerky for one person for two days (down from three after their breakfast).
In contrast, Mr. Tiny Hero had a goddess-spurned arsenal stuffed in his little belt bag: six preservation jars with cute little cow logos (all empty now); one purple-green obsidian claymore longer than he was tall, with thorned roses carved into the fuller; a smaller sword with fine mosaic gold patterns set into the silver blade; a reflective shield (at first this seemed fairly normal, until Ravio glimpsed a howling face in that mirror); a delicately carved wooden flute; a wickedly strong looking bow (currently unstrung and minus any arrows); a hookshot; the Fierce Deity’s mask; a strange purple spyglass (a single look and it tried to suck down what little magic Ravio had, he avoided it after that); and a pictograph box. Notably, the blue flute Ravio had seen earlier was kept hidden. He filed that information away for later use.
Ravio sighed as he looked at the items. “Water might be a problem. Maybe you can drink out of the ground, but I can’t.”
“We’re fine. I’ll just make it rain.”
“Well… that’s a good skill to have if you keep setting things on fire. If water is covered, that leaves food. There’s enough for both of us for one more day. I think I can scrounge up some pine nuts and wild onions this time of year, but I don’t trust myself with mushroom foraging.
“Saria taught me th’easier mushrooms, and I can hunt! Th’woods are dangerous though. We should get going.”
“I agree we shouldn’t dilly-dally, but I carried your scrawny ass here yesterday. I’m taking a break.”
The boy fixed his gloomy eyes on Ravio. “Th’woods want your bones. We gotta go.”
“My bones?” Ravio asked incredulously.
“Yeah.”
“But I’m using those.”
“Yeah.”
“Well! We’ve certainly been here long enough!” Ravio snatched his items off the ground, squirreling them away in his various pockets, then he kicked dirt over the campfire. The boy followed suit, moving his small armory into his belt bag. Somehow it all fit, thanks to the wonders of compaction enchantments.
Ravio could barely contain his impatience as the tiny hero packed. Memories of Lorule’s Skull Woods played in his mind. Apparently, the Lost Woods were just as deadly under a slightly more pleasant veneer. As the boy finished shoving the stupidly huge purple blade into the bag, Ravio started walking toward the tree Mr. Tiny Hero had pointed out earlier.
“Rabbio!” the boy called out.
“I’m rather attached to my bones Mr. Tiny Hero! I’m getting out of here!”
“RABBIO!” the boy shouted again. Ravio turned around to see what the fuss was.
The kid was glaring at Ravio, pointing his arm in a completely different direction from where he had been going.
“Oh.” Ravio looked around. The trees all looked the same. Maybe one had slightly more ivy than the other. Maybe. “Well then, lead on Mr. Tiny Hero.”
Mr. Tiny Hero stalked to the southwest, grumbling something about not being a hero and not staying tiny. Ravio rushed to follow.
Pine needles crunched underfoot as they trekked through the woods. Despite walking for hours, there was no change in the dull misty sky, in fact, Ravio couldn’t remember if it had even gotten dark before he passed out last night. The concepts of time and location seemed foreign to Farore’s holy ground. “Lost Woods” was right, Ravio would be wandering in circles until he was deboned if Mr. Tiny Hero wasn’t here to guide him.
As they traveled, the boy played little ditties on his wooden ocarina, and sometimes broke out into rhymes and songs, mostly in that clicking warbling language he had heard earlier, poe-fairy happily bobbling along in time with the beat. He could feel the translation spell strain, but aside from the occasional word it couldn’t translate that strange language to Hylian.
“Shouldn’t we be quiet?” Ravio whispered. The only other noise was the sound of them walking and the buzzing of oversized insects.
“They like music. Keeps them calm.” The boy answered, then piped another little tune into the ocarina.
“They?”
Mr. Tiny Hero pointed to a shadowed area under oversized ferns, where two yellow eyes peered out at them beneath wagon-wheel sized fiddlesticks. As soon as Ravio made eye contact it giggled and rattled.
“Skull kids. They hate adults. But they want t’be friends with your skeleton.” The boy said casually, as if reciting a boring fact about the weather. “I don’t know why they didn’t bother us last light.”
“I had a concealment hex on our little campsite.” Nervous as he was, Ravio couldn’t help but boast, apparently his hex had worked, even scrawled in his tired stupor.
“A what?”
“I’ll tell you once we’re a little further from ah, that.”
They walked on, away from the giggling yellow-eyed thing in the shadows. Sometimes their path was blocked by tree roots so large they had to climb over them, using furrows in the mossy bark for handholds. Once they encountered a rotting tree stump the width of Fort Baumer, bright red wood sloughing off the decomposing core like a slow-motion waterfall. For this, they had to walk around, and Mr. Tiny Hero gathered some frilly mushrooms and iridescent beetles off the dying wood. When asked why he was collecting the beetles, he said it was “for reasons.”
At times, even when the path was clear, the boy would suddenly point in a different direction, following some strange Deku-scrub instinct. Ravio fretted the entire time, head on a swivel, trying to spot any more little imps waiting to befriend his bones.
Terror is an excellent motivator, but it can only do so much in the face of exhaustion. So, at a location he felt was marginally safer than average, Ravio stopped to rest and picked up a broken branch to draw lines in the dirt. “Mr. Tiny Hero, welcome to introductory anti-memetic script-based magic class, we’re starting with a concealment sigil: here’s the first half—” He made a squiggle in the dirt as the boy settled beside him. “And here’s the other,” he said as he drew another series of lines. “Put them together with this line connected to this squiggle and…” He redrew the first squiggle, then closed his eyes and tried to put it out of his head as he drew the second set of lines on top by memory.
When he opened them, there was nothing. His eyes simply didn’t want to look at that spot or think about anything beyond it. Only with experience could he squint to see something like scratches in the dirt. A perfect success.
“WHAT TH’FUCK!” The kid yelled, and pulled out the purple spyglass from his bag, alternating looking at the hex with and without it. Ravio tried to avoid the spyglass even as it clawed and begged for his magic. Like so many of the boy’s items, it reeked of death.
“Is this a Sheikah thing? Could I try?” The boy’s eyes lit up as Ravio handed him the stick.
“Well, yes, I think the Sheikah developed it first, a long time ago. Practice that first sigil for now, we’ll add the second one later.” As the child put away the spyglass and happily scribbled in the dirt, Ravio wandered nearby, gathering fresh pinecones, then sat down to place them into his folded scarf, repeatedly smacking it against the ground until the cones broke apart and he could pick out the seeds, dropping them into his preservation jar with a satisfying plink. He found himself rambling about the Sheikah usage of the concealment hex in Lorule prior to their full integration into the royal family; the various limitations of it (you had to see the sigil for the hex to work); and the difficulties in learning it, because if you thought of the entire shape of the sigil at once, you’d simply forget what you were doing.
After about an hour, Mr. Tiny Hero was slightly less terrible at the first part of the sigil and Ravio had a small layer of pine nuts at the bottom of his jar. The boy’s handwriting was atrocious, and he held his stick like a sword, not a pen. Once again, Ravio wondered what kind of schooling the kid had, if any. But he complimented him on his persistence, gave him a handful of nuts, and offered to continue the lessons when they made camp for the night.
As they walked further through the woods, Ravio found he was tired earlier than expected. Not much of a surprise considering all that had happened the past few days. They had made good time anyways so he hoped an early rest would set him right for tomorrow.
They took shelter under an enormous mushroom clinging to an even larger stump. After gathering firewood into a pile under the protection of the mushroom cap, they placed their empty jars in the open air. Mr. Tiny Hero played a whirling tune with his wooden ocarina and rain poured down as thunder split the air. Eventually, the storm faded away and they greedily drank the storm water, saving what was left in one jar for soup.
Ravio attempted to play the same tune on the flute, but he could barely make the right notes, let alone make magic with it. Well, the boy could keep his expertise with songs and raw magic, and Ravio could have his with making sigils and programming magical circuits into metal.
They finished the pine nuts and most of the dried fish in silence, watching the mist thread through the trees as the ground slowly dried after the rainstorm. When they were done, Ravio continued giving the boy lessons in the concealment hex in the mud until he could shakily draw both of the required shapes. Combining them eluded the child however, and Ravio couldn’t stop yawning. Eventually, Mr. Tiny Hero grew too frustrated and Ravio sent him off to look for food.
In the warmth of the campfire, Ravio’s eyes grew heavy as he watched the boy return with some more frilly mushrooms. He finished the hexes, with Mr. Tiny Hero leaning over his shoulder to watch. As soon as he finished, Ravio laid down and fell asleep instantly, dreaming of lines that couldn’t be seen.
An early rest had not set him right. Ravio was uncomfortable laying on the ground, and felt worse getting up. He was greeted by the same dull gray sky and had no idea how long he had slept.
The fire burned with newly added wood, smoke rising into the pale gills of the fungus overhead, escaping out the sides into the damp air. Two mushroom skewers roasted above the flames. The smell of post-rain petrichor mingled with the scent of forest magic, and the jars were full of collected rainwater.
Ravio’s tongue felt gritty, and as he carefully sat up to reach for a jar, he noticed Mr. Tiny Hero in the distance, tirelessly scratching sigils into the damp soil with the poe-fairy resting on his head. He should have expected this, Farore’s blessed risked life and limb for silly magical tchotchkes, bad handwriting wasn’t going to deter the kid from a cool new ability.
One jar clinked against another as he grabbed for it, and the kid whirled around, dragging his stick through the current sigil and ruining it.
“Rabbio! You’re awake!”
“Regretfully, yes. Is this breakfast?” He pointed at the mushrooms.
“They’re not done yet, you hafta cook them really well or you’ll meet Farore if you eat them.”
“Of course,” Ravio muttered. It was too early for this.
“Yeah, and She’s usually pretty mad you just barged in t’see her. That’s what Fado says anyways. She ate them raw once and now she’s all weird.”
“I will defer to your mushroom wisdom Mr. Tiny Hero.” Inwardly, Ravio wondered if the kid had already eaten some of the psychedelic mushrooms given his… everything.
“Um.” The boy hesitated, like he didn’t want to say whatever would come next. “I can’t make the hex. I don’t— I don’t know why.”
“Well, have you ever made a sigil before?”
The kid shrugged. “No, but I can do plenty of magic. It’s always, y’know, just worked.”
That wasn’t a big surprise, the boy had magical power to spare, but finesse was a different beast. “Think of magic as being like art. You’re like a natural born musician who’s starting to learn calligraphy, meanwhile I have great penmanship but can’t carry a tune. Some things might come more-or-less easily to us, but with practice we can always improve. Here, I just drew the first part, show me how you draw the next.”
It took several more tries, with Ravio pausing to teach the kid how to hold the stick like a pen instead of a sword, and midway through they took a break to eat the fully cooked mushrooms (they did not meet Farore, much to his relief), but eventually Mr. Tiny Hero created something that you could kind-of sort-of only see when squinting.
“It worked! It worked Rabbio!” For a brief moment, the little boy was just that, a happy little boy who had mastered a difficult skill. Not a gloomy child warrior that knew about Sheikah dungeons and carried too many weapons.
It was nice to see.
Afterwards, Ravio extinguished the campfire with a very judicious application of the ice rod that exhausted him far more than it should have, and they packed up, with Mr. Tiny Hero leading the way through the woods, playing more little tunes on his wooden flute. Ravio wanted nothing more than to rest his aching body, but again and again he forced one foot in front of the other. The trees loomed high overhead and he kept hearing giggles in the distance.
The faster they got out of the woods, the better.
Ravio chewed on a sprig as he trundled along after the boy. His joints hurt, a fierce headache was building in his left temple, the hygiene hexes on his robe were being pushed to the limit, and his mouth tasted disgusting after two days without tooth scrub.
On top of that, it was getting cold. The autumn chill had apparently penetrated the depths of the woods and he shivered as he walked.
“You look like shit Rabbio,” the boy piped up, arms full of wild onion and mushrooms collected along the way. The dead fairy chimed in agreement.
“What a coincidence. I feel like shit too,” he snipped back.
As they passed a fallen log with a room-sized empty core, Mr. Tiny Hero pointed at it with his sharp nose “Let’s take a break.”
“We are still days away from exiting these Goddess-spurned woods, the fate of Hyrule might rest on our shoulders, and creepy things are watching us. We need to keep going,” was what Ravio wanted to say. Instead, he just sat down. Right there. Not even at the log he was probably going to have to sleep in. He didn’t want to think about the insects it held.
What was wrong with him? Normally he could walk twice as far in half the time. What was his excuse when the stakes were this high? He had only had three horrifyingly stressful days at Fort Baumer, a dunk in an ice-filled river, exhausted his magic multiple times, and two days of sleeping on the ground with barely enough food to sustain himself.
Oh no.
He was getting sick.
Fuck.
What was he supposed to do? Usually when he got ill he laid in bed, drank too much tea, and sent Sheerow to buy potions from the local witch.
“Regretfully, I appear to be getting sick Mr. Tiny Hero.” Ravio shivered slightly “I… ah. I don’t know very much about medicine, how about you and your friend?”
The poe-fairy lifted off from the boy’s head and rang in the negative.
Meanwhile the boy perked up in his obvious please love me I’m helpful way “Saria taught me some stuff! What kinda sick are you?”
Ravio looked down at the shaking hands in his lap. “Feverish. Headache. Aching joints.”
The boy dropped the wild onions and mushrooms on the ground, and Ravio winced inwardly as they were covered in dirt. Even children raised in polite society had trouble understanding sanitation, there was no hope for the borderline feral hero. “I’ll get you some medicine! Stay here!” He then rushed away before Ravio could protest, disappearing into the plant life like he had been born there.
Ravio sighed and pulled out the bouillon and last bits of dried fish. This was going to be a long day.
“That’s bark Mr. Tiny Hero. From a tree,” Ravio noted.
“Where th’fuck else would bark come from? I had t’look all over for a willow tree.” The kid placed the sheaths of bark on the ground, dangerously close to the pile of wood for the campfire that Ravio had (painfully, creakingly) gathered. As the young Link arranged the branches and started the fire, Ravio gave it even odds that one of them would accidentally chuck the bark accidentally into the flames.
“I am not going to eat bark.” He stated flatly. What was next? Would the kid make a mud puddle with sticks in it and call it a potion?
“It’s good for febers!” Mr. Tiny Hero protested, pointy nose scrunched up in disapproval.
“Well, if I’m utterly incapacitated by a ‘feber’ you can give it to me.” Shit. That was mean. Ravio was asshole when he was sick and now he didn’t even have Sheerow and their saintly patience to help.
“Whateber” Mr. Tiny Hero picked up a stick and made to move away, presumably to practice more sigils.
Ravio sighed and decided to move the conversation towards something that would let Mr. Tiny Hero be the expert. That, and make soup. Soup and flattery let all sins be forgiven.
“So, Cia was nice to you?”
The boy’s head snapped to face him so quickly the dead fairy fell off and had to take wing. “Yeah! She’s got like, a whole mansion, with big warm beds, and spells that make food, and there’s hot water that comes out of pipes! It’s a lot nicer than Zelda’s castle, and people don’t follow me around! She eben had an artist make a statue of me for th’rose garden! She’s got more statues of th’other hero though, plus some dog.”
Ravio felt a cold pit in his stomach that had nothing to do with his fever. “She, ah, does she like this other hero?”
“I think she like, needs him. Cia has t’fix time, and she needs a hero for that. So, she made one appear by pretending to be th’bad guy.”
“Pretending?”
“Yeah” The kid started fidgeting with the stick, uncomfortable. “Sometimes people call you a bad guy when you sabe eberybody. Sometimes people call you a hero when you’re fucking everything up. It—it’s confusing.”
“And the battlefields?” Ravio attempted to be gentle. The kid was naïve, but not stupid, he had to know something was up with the sorceress.
The boy idly stabbed the stick at the ground. “They attack anyone with dark magic. You got lucky they didn’t kill you. She has t’defend herself. I make sure nobody’s soul is stuck here though.”
“Colonel Firne said they attacked Castle Town too.” Ravio replied, then cursed inwardly as soon as the words left his mouth. He couldn’t afford to have the kid hate him.
“Well Colonel Firne lied and he was gonna kill you!” The stick snapped in two as the boy thrust it into the ground again. Fists clenched and shoulders up at his overlarge ears, Mr. Tiny Hero tensed up into a tight little spring of rage. Then, with a sharp exhale, the boy’s anger deflated. He dropped the remaining end of the stick to the ground and stalked off.
Ravio sighed. So much for his attempt at being nice. It just took so much effort to play the endearing comic relief role. As soon as he was tired everything always came out more sharply than he wanted. Yes, technically Mr. Tiny Hero was working with the mad sorceress, but he had been threatened with torture by a Hyrulean Colonel, shot by Hyrulean archers, and still was helping Ravio escape from the woods. The kid could leave Ravio behind at any point and simply hadn’t so far.
Where words had failed perhaps soup would succeed. Ravio cut up the wild onions, combining them and the last bouillon bits into the soup jar, then placed it by the fire.
Eventually, the boy came back with another stick, and Ravio gave him half of the soup and gently instructed him on making the concealment hexes for the night, despite his frustrations at his growing headache and whomever had failed to teach the child basic penmanship. Mr. Tiny Hero seemed at least somewhat agreeable, and Ravio figured that was as good as he would get.
Aching, shivering, but full of soup and protected by shaky concealment hexes, Ravio laid down to rest in the core of the rotted log.
He came to consciousness like a drowning man came up for air, briefly, gulping down fresh breaths of reality before being submerged again.
It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. The only constant was bitter cold and chattering teeth.
Small but strong arms carried him across a swaying bridge that spanned a deep ravine. The bridge was formed of woven roots, tied and knotted together by tiny hands. “Saria!” the boy holding him called out. There was no response. He heard sniffling as he was carried onwards.
Hilda looked at him, raven hair thrashing about in the wind as the two of them stood on a decaying parapet. The storms were getting worse. “Do you think I want to do this? The bracelet only works for people with natural magic. Evacuation is not an option.” Her hands gripped her scepter so hard she shook. “I will not abandon them.”
Ravio was in a circular room made entirely of wood, laid down on a rotting bed frame padded with dried leaves. A fire pit in the center of the room crackled with a guttering flame, illuminating cracked pots and childlike carvings in the wooden walls. Clearly no one had been there for ages. Lightning flashed, chased by thunder, revealing silvery rain and the silhouette of the boy in the open doorway. He spoke to the undead fairy, but the sound was lost in the thunder. When lightning flashed again, Ravio could see that the child had been crying.
Lavishly illustrated tomes littered the carved hardwood table he sat at. Yuga sat down next to him, carrying even more books. It was the early hours of the morning in Mr. Hero’s Hyrule and the two of them had snuck into the Royal Library, using their bracelets to slip past the guards by flattening themselves against tapestry covered walls. Ravio sighed, flipping through the book adorned with gold leaf. “We know the royal family has a third of the Tri-Force; supposedly another third went to a sealed monster by the name of Ganon; and the third can only be found by the soul of a hero or something. How do we even start looking for that?” The taller man grinned as he opened one of the illuminated manuscripts he had brought over, revealing a figure in green standing before a dark monster. “That part’s simple Ravio, to summon a hero, all you require is a villain.”
He was by a firepit again, this time outside, propped up against an ivy-covered tree. Ravio was sick of trees. He’d do almost anything to see a lake, or a field, or a road; anything but these overwhelmingly magical trees that made his nose itch. To his left he heard the boy yell, but it was harder than usual to focus in that direction… Ah. A poorly drawn concealment sigil had been scrawled into the dirt. With the clang of a sword against armor, the scene came into focus, a hulking spider circled the child and poe-fairy, looking for an opening past the boy’s violet-green claymore. The spider lunged, but the tiny hero executed an acrobatic flip over the spider and plunged the blade into the soft gaps in the spider’s carapace. Green blood spurted from the wound, covering the boy’s grinning face as the spider curled up in its death throes. The boy wiped the blood off his face with the tail of his hat and looked up at the skeletal fairy fondly. “Now we don’t hafta worry about dinner!”
“Even if we unseal Ganon, how do we get his Tri-Force piece? Supposedly he wasn’t the cooperative type,” Ravio asked his two co-conspirators. “I’d say let the hero kill him, but at least once the hero either never showed up or died, I can’t tell which. That’s not exactly reassuring!” All three of them were standing at a table covered with a map of Hyrule they had smuggled back into Lorule castle. This scheme was getting too complicated. Maybe they could go back to the evacuation idea, figure out a way to make the bracelet store enough magic to let anyone cross the rift, but Yuga kept quashing that plan and Ravio was starting to become suspicious. “Leave that to me,” Yuga replied. “I can control him, if their histories are correct Ganon is a mindless beast now anyways, easily dominated.” Hilda furrowed her brows. “That’s impossible, that dark power would kill you,” she said. Yuga grinned toothily, and Ravio was surer than ever that the sorcerer was up to something. “You are mostly correct, your grace. But Ganon was a man once himself and he channeled this magic. In the same way your lineage allows you to channel light magic far beyond what any of us could survive, certain… lineages allow similar things for dark magic. I belong to one of them.”
The boy sat on a log facing away from him. He was talking again, perhaps to the dead fairy. “I remembered more of th’dream. Th’first one. With th’fire. And Ganondorf laughing. I didn’t want Ruto’s timeline to be real because then —” he leaned over and dug his fingers into his hair, letting out a single choked sob. “I keep fucking it up! I’m trying t’help! I really am! Why do I always get it wrong?!”
Ravio was in the high-security cell in Fort Baumer, trying to extract information from the young Link on how to use the Fierce Deity mask without dying. Except the kid had just dropped the fact that Yuga was alive. “Crazy artist with too much makeup. Said my nose was too big. D’you know him?” the boy had asked Ravio. At the time, he was too terrified of the sorcerer’s return to pay attention to how odd that statement was, because Yuga had one of the biggest beaks Ravio had ever seen, in fact, it looked a little like Mr. Tiny Hero’s…
There was something important he needed to figure out, some clues he hadn’t pieced together. He needed… He needed to…
Wake.
Up.
Ravio sat up. He felt lighter, the piercing chills of the fever having gone away. He looked over to see Mr. Tiny Hero intently stirring bark in a bottle of boiling water on the campfire with a stick. It looked disgusting.
Then he realized there was a second child watching the potion-making. It slowly turned its head to look at him, terrible blind eyes piercing through his soul.
It was wearing the Fierce Deity’s mask.
“Link... Ravio’s soul is coming out.” The second child whispered loudly.
Ravio blinked stupidly, then looked down.
His own body was beneath him, covered in sweat, pale as a corpse, and shaking like an aspen leaf.
“OH-NONONONO!” In a panic, he made to back away from himself, but the masked child rushed over and tackled him back down into his body.
“What are you doing?!” As the chills and aches returned with a vengeance, Ravio struggled against the masked child’s grip.
“You can see me? Oh… you’re almost out of Hyrule then.”
“I’m dyING?!” Ravio screeched.
“Probably. So… your face… could I have it?”
“Mask, you can’t just ask for people’s faces!” Mr. Tiny Hero yelled from his place at the campfire. “Keep his soul in for fibe more minutes! Th’potion’s almost ready!”
“Probably doesn’t have any cool powers anyways…” the other child groused as it continued to hold him down. Ravio tried again to wriggle his way out of its clutches and failed. One overpowered nightmare child was enough, now he had to deal with two of the little bastards.
Then again, sick as he was, he probably couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, let alone a weird spirit-mask-god-child-thing’s grip.
Being back in his own body was miserable, the trees spun overhead like a cheap carnival ride, and he couldn’t tell if he was burning up or freezing to death. Surely it wouldn’t be so bad to leave his body again, just a little? He felt himself trying to sit up while also laying down.
“Stay in! Or you’ll die… and then I’ll take your face!” the masked child hissed, now sitting on him, straddling his torso and pushing down on something near his heart.
“Honestly I’m considering letting you have it.” he croaked. This was awful. He was tired. Couldn’t he just… leave?
“What ties you here?”
“Huh?”
“What ties you to living?”
Well. That was a good question. Rupees, mostly. And baked goods. And Sheerow. And…
Mr. Hero…
Tears welled up in his eyes. It was terrible. How dare his face betray him like that. How dare he start weeping like a child in front of actual children. He was supposed to be the adult! He needed to get over the hero he had met in another timeline. He wasn’t going to see him again and that was that. Two different worlds and such.
“I… could I have my ice rod? It’s… It’s important,” he forced himself to say through a snotty nose and chattering teeth.
The masked child looked over at the poe-fairy, who bobbled in acknowledgement and went over to his robe, diving into a pocket and, wings beating furiously, pulled out the ice rod. It dropped to the ground, and she picked up one end and dragged it over, sapphire end scraping on the dirt. He wanted to yell at her for damaging expensive items but found he was too tired to bother. As soon as it came within reach, he clumsily grabbed for it.
The ice rod was cold of course. Something his feverish body despised at that moment. But he missed Mr. Hero with a terrible ferocity and clutched the ice rod against his chest as tightly as he could, as if Mr. Hero having held it before meant that they were holding hands in some strange time-displaced way. He sniffled and shivered in the dirt some more.
“I’be got th’potion!” Mr. Tiny Hero ran over, bottle full of disgusting bark-juice in one hand. The masked child moved over, and both children helped Ravio sit up slightly (body and soul). Mr. Tiny Hero held up the jar to his lips with his free hand.
Disgusting bitter taste aside, the liquid was very warm, and Ravio felt paradoxically cold in the way only the truly sick could. He drank eagerly and let the hot tea run down his throat. It tasted exactly like he expected bark would taste and his shivering meant that half the liquid ended up on his chest, but he didn’t care.
“How long until it works?” the masked child asked, still holding its hands halfway inside his chest. He could feel its little fingers around his sternum. Gross.
“Thirty minutes or so. Might help if he sleeps.”
“Hah. I’m not going to fall asleep anytime soon feeling this shitty—” Ravio slurred as Mr. Tiny Hero pulled out that little wooden flute and played that same soft lilting tune he had hummed in the dungeon earlier.
Within seconds Ravio was asleep.
Ravio swirled about in his dreams like ink in water. He was fleeing Yuga, then Wizzro, then the Fierce Deity, sometimes through the woods, and sometimes as a flat painting on a wall. As he dodged and twisted through a small crack in existence filled with impossible colors, he found himself in the upstairs bedroom of his childhood home.
The window was wide open, with a few purple feathers resting on the windowsill, gently rocking in the breeze. It was a beautiful day, clear blue evening sky with only some hints of the void eating the world. When Ravio looked down he could see he was in his ten-year-old body again, wearing purple bunny jammies. He could even feel the gap in his gums from a recently lost tooth.
Ah. This dream again. The last he had seen of his mother.
“Oh. So this is Lorule?”
Ravio flung himself to the side so hard he landed in his mother’s bed, the tri-force patterned quilt cushioning his impact. The masked child was there, looking out the open window.
Of course, the ghost of Termina had gotten into his dreams before, why not again?
“This is a private dream you know,” Ravio said as he stood up and faced the other child, whistling slightly through his missing tooth. Once again, the bizarre gigantism of this era’s Hyrule was obvious; despite looking about the same age the masked child was almost a head taller than him. He wondered if the third timeline was any different.
“Sorry. You were having bad dreams so I… moved you. Would you like to go somewhere else?” it replied.
One of the feathers on the windowsill blew away in the wind. “No.” Ravio said with a forcefulness that surprised him.
“This place is important to you, isn’t it?”
Ravio nodded, bunny ears of his jammies bobbing along. He sat down on his mother’s bed, touching the blue-and-gold quilted pattern she had spent so many nights working on.
“Am I dying?” he blurted out. Tears welled up in his eyes and he found himself getting unreasonably angry because they got in the way of seeing her handiwork.
“Not yet, but… you’re close. It could go either way.”
He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and went back to looking out the window.
“Didn’t you say you came from a dark world?” he asked.
“Yes, though it was… not as imbalanced as here. In Termina, both good and evil used darkness and light.”
“Do you know what happens when a world gets too dark?”
The masked child shook its head.
“It loses form. People lose form. Some of them forget who they are and just…” he gestured to the window “…they become animals. Or monsters. We had a whole cult wearing masks to try to make that happen faster. A cleaner sort of suicide I guess.”
He took a shuddering breath and continued. “She wasn’t one of them. Mom. Held on as long as she could, but she wasn’t a happy sort of person. Tried to hide it, like parents do, but I could tell. I’m good at reading people, I guess. She taught me how to fix magical items and bake, everything I know really. But the famine was getting bad and I think one day she figured that there’d be more food if there was only one of us and well…”
The window stared through him as much as he stared through it.
“Sheerow was once a person too, I think. They don’t remember anything, so even if I ever saw her again, I don’t think she’d remember me.” His tiny hand clenched the soft quilt.
The last feather blew out the window.
“Would you like me to stay with you?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I think I’d like that.”
Termina’s dead sat down next to Ravio on his mother’s beautiful quilt, and together they watched the sunset through the window, sparkling stars coming out in patches where they weren’t obscured by the void.