Naruto/Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time crossover
Disclaimer: I don't claim to own Naruto, that's an honor left for Masashi Kishimoto. I don't have anything to do with Zelda either. Nintendo are vicious.
A Hero In Time
By: Mage-Alia
Chapter 1
Summary: An earthquake shortly before the Chunin exam unearths a set of ruins from an ancient civilization and team 7 are sent to escort the investigators, but a simple scouting mission could turn in to something much more as the door is opened on a different destiny.
Something much bigger than the world they know.
No pairings
A/N: Plotbunny
The air was quiet as the four man squad and their employers entered the ruins.
Two days ago, on the borders between Earth Country and Fire Country an earthquake had unearthed a set of ruins that had excited archeologists all over the Elemental countries the moment they'd gotten word. With their proximity to Konoha the Hokage had decided that is was for the best when he postponed the upcoming Chunnin exams by four weeks to allow the excitement of this new phenomena to blow over, thus, Team 7, having just recovered from their mission to Wave, where walking along side the cart that held a bundle of tools all meant for the task of pulling apart the ruins and discovering their purpose.
The excited chatter of the civilians was only background noise and the Shinobi scanned their surroundings, but none of the Gennin where paying attention as the looked over the ruins in awe.
"Woaaahhh….." Naruto whispered, more to himself as he looked through the stone tombs of memory and saw a fountain in what looked to be a market square among the buildings. Time and the forest had long since overtaken the ruins. Casting them in shades of green as the civilians saw the ruins of a large palace rising into the distance as they jumped out of the cart and instantly set about taking photographs and wondering between the stones.
Sakura was looking around, equally as awed, but every now and then her eyes flickered to the Uchiha standing stoically to the side, betraying her thoughts. Kakashi had decided the area was mostly clear and had waved them off to explore as he sat down by the fountain and pulled out Icha Icha Paradise, his single visible eye trained on the pages like they held the answer to all existence.
Naruto took off the moment Kakashi had given the word and he roamed the area, passing further and further away from the fountain courtyard until just one ruined building stood before him. It was separated from the rest of the village by dense jungle that hid it in a curtain of green but it's strangest feature was the fact that it had very little wear. In fact, the building itself seemed to stand alone, outside of all space and time.
He didn't take his eyes off the vine covered stone once as he approached the entry, unable to do so even if he had wanted too. The blonde felt drawn, like an invisible hand guiding his steps as he moved into the shade of the building. An ancient weight seemed to fall upon his shoulders as he passed the threshold and into the eerily quiet hall.
The air hummed with music he couldn't hear, thrumming beneath his skin like a heartbeat as the sunlight faded behind him as he moved further and further away from the door. The building had only one room. Oddly disproportionate from the outside the white stones beneath his feet seemed to go on forever as the tug in his chest continued to pull him to the other end… across a large stone pad set into the floor and toward a black marble topped altar.
His feet finally stopped moving, leaving him standing squarely before an inscription carved along the stone and without thinking, he began to read.
"When the skies turn that of the darkest night, and future becomes bleak,
Look to the coming of Courage's light and follow him back to the Day.
Ancient enemies reborn beware, the rebirth of the greatest power.
Hero heed these words.
To open the way to the sacred realm where the power of the goddesses lie,
Bring forth the Heart of Water, the Soul of the Forest and the Spirit of Fire,
Present them before us, and open the way home."
Naruto finished reading the text on the Altar and reached out to trace one of the indents to one side.
"The door to take the Hero home?" He wondered, and his mind was cast back to shortly after their fight in Wave. They'd spent another week with Tazuna, Tsunami and Inari before they'd headed back to Konoha, and in that time Tsunami had pulled him aside to talk.
Wave – 3 Weeks ago
"Naruto, would you mind if I joined you?" Tsunami stood on the edge of the dock, watching him from a little ways off as he went about cleaning his Kunai and Shuriken. Naruto shrugged.
"Sure." He said non-chalantly, shifting everything into a tighter pile beside him and Tsunami sat down, her legs dangling over the water as she placed a small carved wooden box down between them.
"My husband, when we were married, he gave me an heirloom of his. He said that he descended from a tribe of people known as the Zora and it was a tradition of theirs, to only give away their hearts to the one they loved the most. The one they'd spend their entire lives with. Instead of rings, like a normal wedding, they had gems, Sapphires they received at birth." She opened the box between them and revealed a cluster of Sapphires, inlaid into a delicate gold frame that glinted up at them from amid the dark blue silk of the boxes lining.
"He also said that this particular Sapphire was special. Kaiza told me of its legend, that it has been passed down from generation to generation, from one of the ancient princesses of his people, meant for a Hero. A long time ago there was a land that lived in perfect harmony, but a great evil besieged it and very nearly destroyed everything until a hero emerged on the battlefield. He changed the tide of the war and in the end, good and order prevailed and peace reigned once again. But the Hero vanished after the final battle and never returned." Naruto listened to every word with every part of his being and he didn't even notice as his hands stopped rubbing the whetstone along his kunai's blade, falling limp.
"So this Gem, he said it was a key. A way for the Hero to find his way back home." She lifted it out of its box by a sparkling golden chain and held it up to the light.
"Kaiza also told me, when he died, that I should choose another to carry it on. He was the last surviving member of his clan and after him there was no one of the same blood to pass it to." Naruto couldn't even move as she reached over and draped the sapphire around his neck, unconsciously smoothing his spiky hair a little before her hands drew away, like she would have done with Inari.
"I believe you should be the one to bear it from now on." She sighed and closed the box. "It was a gift, meant for a Hero, and you Naruto, you saved the village and the bridge. If it wasn't for you, Inari would probably have never found the strength to stand up and rally the villagers like he did and for that we would forever be in your debt…"
Present
"Is it really so close to that time already? But where is the Hero?" Naruto breathed out and subconsciously reached for the necklace as he leaned against the altar.
"NARUTO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE!?" The serene atmosphere of the Temple was broken as Sakura barged in and began to yell. Reacting on instinct Naruto turned around and started a roaring argument that soon carried on outside. Out of the shadows after them, stepped Sasuke who crossed to the altar and studied it, a fanatic light in his eyes before he too left the Temple.
Kakashi, who had followed Naruto in before either Sasuke or Sakura had turned up just looked at the altar where the glyphs on the stone where completely unreadable, resembling no human language currently in existence. Naruto had not only read the glyphs, he'd translated them and understood the content. The answer to that was simple, the ruins where old enough that Kyuubi might be old enough to remember their origins… but that lead to the question of how much influence the Kyuubi had over Naruto. Could the seal have weakened?
His single visible eye drooped and the Jounin heaved a sigh.
Why did he have to have such troublesome students?
They spent another two weeks in the ruins.
Naruto was oddly distant when he wasn't playing translator for the Archeologists. They'd discovered him reading off a stone that had been standing apart from the bulk of the ruins and ever since they'd been running him ragged with questions until they'd figured out enough that they could decipher the language on their own. They were fascinated by the temple and the writings on the altar. Kakashi kept a close eye on the Blonde, occasionally asking subtle questions about the Prophecy on the stone but the blonde either noticed the questions for what they were and avoided them, or was simply to oblivious to understand that he was being interrogated. Either way, his silence on the issue was frustrating.
Eventually they left the ruins as their relief team arrived and Team Seven returned to Konoha. The village was a welcome change of pace to the dead air of the ruins. Shouting stall vendors, laughing children… all the noises they took for granted took on a new significance.
Naruto sighed as he dragged himself back to his apartment and threw down his bags in the corner, wanting nothing more than a shower and then to go to sleep for the rest of the day. Kakashi had pushed them coming back from the border, he'd been in a hurry to reach Konoha before the end of the day. Shedding his clothing Naruto made his way to the bathroom, stopping only to set down the Zora's Saphire and the small blue instrument he'd found in the ruins on a shelf.
The instrument had caught his eye, one day after making his way back from reading the inscriptions in the Temple. It had been lying in a dusty corner, unnoticed by the usually hawk eyed excavators. He'd picked it up on a whim and it had nearly shocked him with its latent power. Like the Sapphire, it had a strange energy flowing through it, and later once it had been cleaned up, Naruto had tried his hand at playing it.
The music had been unnaturally clear.
In spite of the fact he'd never so much as touched an instrument in his life he found his fingers going through the motions like he'd played his entire life. Of course, whatever lingering power the instrument held was used up in that moment and he'd gone back to blowing awkwardly through the mouth piece, but the memory of the song stayed with him and after some practice, he could perform the song by heart. It was strangely comforting to hear.
He was up on the rooftops playing it late one evening when he started thinking of the prophecy once more. His one burning question being the most obvious.
Where was the Hero?
When Kakashi told them a week before the beginning of the Chunnin exams that they'd be competing Naruto had been thrilled. With grand plans for training with his Bunshins he'd gone looking for a training ground. His first stop had been training ground seven, but he'd been rebuffed by Sakura who'd kicked him out lest he get in the way of her Sasuke time. The next ten fields had been occupied and the eleventh was marked off as dangerous... but eventually he came to the edge of the woods that bordered the Forest of Death, and stopped, peering into the white mist that seeped between widely spaced trees.
He wouldn't have known it at that point... but Naruto had just stumbled across what was possibly one of the most dangerous forests in Fire Country. There had been a forest that stood, long before the first Hokage had raised the army of sentinel pines that guarded their borders and filled the spaces between with growth. The Lost Woods were a legend, existing like a genjutsu, invisible to some, and blatantly obvious to others, the only reason there weren't any signs marking it as dangerous was because anyone who found it were rarely seen again...
But he didn't know that.
Instead, when Naruto looked through the mist, he saw a pathway. Flashes of life came and went as the mist parted and closed, showing sun dappled clearings, wide open meadows, lakes that sparkled in a morning light and there somewhere beyond them all was a song...
The dancing darting melody sounded like it was played on an instrument like the one in his kunai pouch.
And without thinking twice about the ominous mist and strangely still trees Naruto plunged forward down the pathway. Something in the mist shuddered at his passing, writhing around in the leaves and undergrowth as it followed the brightly dressed boy into the forest and behind them both, the mist of the Lost Woods surged back into its place, hiding the path, and the woods themselves from the world.
Naruto wasn't sure how long he'd been following the music.
It fluttered in his ears and sounded like lost memories as it tugged him onwards, growing stronger when he was on the right path and growing softer when he tried to stray. Great hollow logs acted like pathways, that while looking perfectly normal on one side, would look completely different the next and more than once he found himself turning around only to find that the passage he'd taken moments before had disappeared. But he stayed on the path set by the music, not allowing the faint fear he felt to seep through as he finally came out into a dim clearing.
If there was a sky, it wasn't visible above the mist, even though there were no trees to obscure the view. At ground level the fog lifted and Naruto could finally see where he'd ended up.
It was a village.
Hollowed out trees had windows and doors, evidence of rotted curtains visible in some of them as the forest appeared to have begun to reclaim the little abandoned homes. Naruto found himself wondering from house to house, finding oddly preserved objects amid the desiccated contents. Children's drawings littered the walls, scratched into wood or marked out in faded stains. Patterns that had once been bright had turned grey and Naruto felt out of place in the bleached out world.
In one tall tree house he'd had to use a length of wire to climb, he found a ceramic pot full of gems that he'd had to break to free them. Other things there seemed to be the most well preserved items in the village. Charcoal drawings on a board to one side of the room, a little wooden bed that had lost most of its padding a, a chest of draws filled with green tunics, a green hat and white under clothes (Even if only one set was wearable), a pair of boots and a blackened shield in a trunk by the door and sitting on the table, with a whetstone nearby like the last owner had intended to come back and sharpen it, sat a sheathed short sword.
Naruto found himself dropping the gems back on the table beside it, when it finally sunk in that someone had actually lived here... in the bleak forest with the child sized houses in which no adult could comfortably stay. Someone had called this place home.
But now they were gone.
His training, however neglected, finally kicked in and he looked around, trying to fill the blanks as he jumped back down to the ground and set off toward the other end of the village where another opening was visible in the almost solid wall of trees that encircled the clearing. The blonde marched down the passage, ducking his head a little as the canopy above him turned to stone and twisted around a few bends before finally opening out into a grand clearing, and revealing what was easily the most massive tree Naruto had ever seen. It's bark was folded and scared with age, and the giant knots in the grain of its wood made a face that stared down at him like a great intimidating sentinel...
It kind of felt like staring down one of the faces of the Hokage Mountain... only bigger.
Intimidated by the sight, Naruto was torn between staying in the clearing and leaving as fast as he could before something in the tree Shifted and the nin was frozen in his tracks as something spoke.
'Greetings, Young Hero.'
Naruto almost decided just to cut it and run, before he realized what the voice had called him.
"Hero?" He asked, his voice coming out sounding strangled. "I'm no Hero." The wind whistled through the trees once more and he found his neck itching like someone was watching him as he finally turned his eyes from the forest to look at the Great Tree.
And the tree looked back.
Black, tired eyes looked down from a weary face and the tree gave off the same air of Old that Hokage-jiji sometimes did when he felt like the world was too heavy on his shoulders and he Looked. Really Looked.
'Hmmmmm... maybe... maybe not yet...' The Tree said in response, the limbs and boughs creaking with age as they settled above. 'But you are here for a reason... I guided you as best I could with the last of my power, and there is so little time left...'
'Once, there was a shinning kingdom... a place of peace and balance, of light and hope, made by three goddesses that descended from the chaotic heavens and molded the lands and it's people from nothing...'
'This kingdom was called Hyrule.'
Once again, Naruto stood in the tree house, this time looking down on the village in wary caution as he kept a close watch out for things creeping in the night.
Hours earlier, the Great Deku Tree, as it had been identified, had told him about the kingdom called Hyrule. It had been a utopia, where the races had lived in harmony under the rule of a king. Under his dominion had been the Hyilians, a long eared and long lived race that reminded him of elves, an aquatic race known as the Zora whom Naruto had heard of before, a people made of stone who lived in a volcano, the dark dwellers who played guardian to the royal line, the desert tribes that consisted mostly of women and the children of the lost woods, fairies given human form to interact with the rest of the world.
They'd lived with thousands of years of peace until threats from both inside the kingdom and beyond it had finally made their mark. The shadow people, the Sheikah, had started their own civil war. Caught between duty to the kings and queens and their own dark past they tore themselves in two, fighting a bloody and ruthless war in secret, but no matter how hard the few still loyal to the royal family tried, their fight leaked over into the other races. Their rites of shadow and death tainted whatever they touched and soon, the king had had to take action, calling on the powers left by the goddesses he'd stopped the war, but he'd intervened too late. The Shiekah had paid the price of their war in blood, and their people - once numerous, became only a few hundred who retreated further into shadow out of shame.
But no one anticipated the reactions of those from outside their borders.
The neighboring lands had all kept careful eyes on the prosperous realm of Hyrule, and with their primary defenders all but eradicated they had fallen on the kingdom like starving wolves. Naturally, the people of Hyrule rose up. They fought back, turning the tide of the war and pushing the invaders back until they slinked away defeated and an uneasy peace fell upon them, lasting for another two hundred years until finally someone dared try take the kingdom again. A Dark Sorcerer who wielded magical powers unlike anything seen before, raised an army and attacked, sweeping across the world like a plague, marching right to the doors of the palace, only to be stopped in his tracks by a man in green, who fought back with an odd magic of his own, blessed by the goddesses he'd fought alongside the defenders and opened the way for the people of the castle and it's surrounding town to escape.
Throughout the short war his mere presence gave the people hope as he finally confronted the Sorcerer, but the Sorcerer escaped, using his strange magic to leap through a portal the Hero refused to let him go and followed as the portal closed behind him... but even as he disappeared, the armies of the sorcerer had broken ranks, scattering as the Hyilians and their king retaliated, snatching their victory from the near defeat and liberating their kingdom once and for all...
But the people mourned the loss of their Hero.
Lost to the flow of time they decided to leave him a message. A message that only he would read, and only he could understand. A way home...
The Deku Tree had stopped speaking then, his story apparently over as he lapsed into silence and Naruto had blinked furiously realizing that during the story he'd sat down and listened in a trance as the images conjured by the Tree's words danced behind his eyes. The tree had given a heaving sigh that made the air feel even more heavy than before as the wind had ruffled the bare branches above and the blonde had caught sight of something glittering in the faint misty light before it fell, landing with a ringing chime against the hard packed dirt at the base of the Tree.
'This is all that remains of that age... a key for the hero and a match for the one you already wear.'
Naruto looked ever at the table where the hero's sapphire lay and beside it on its chain now hung a large bright emerald, set into a delicate scroll of gold wire shaped like a leaf.
'My time is short... but I am glad.. to have lived long enough to welcome you home...'
And like that, the tree groaned and settled for the last time as the color leached out of its bark, turning the Great Tree a petrified white as it spoke its last.
But as the Deku Tree found its peaceful end, Naruto's nightmare had only just begun. When the Tree died, the power that had been holding back the denizens of the forest suddenly faded and the white mist that had been so empty before was now dark and foreboding with an ancient power as everything living in those woods had tried it's best to kill him. His clothing had made him stick out like a beacon in the night as he ran for his life, he tried fighting the monsters with Kunai and Shuriken but they made no impact as the larger creatures just shrugged off the blows, tearing his clothes as they attacked and at one point something had grabbed his jacket, forcing him to shed it as he ran for his life and backtracked to the only place high enough to be defensible against the monsters of the forest.
But this time he didn't have the luxury of respecting the dead as he changed into the Green Tunic and white underclothes that would blend far better into the green of the forest, donned the boots and picked up the shield before finally taking the sword and securing the sheathe to his back. On his way back out into the night he grabbed the gems again, and stopped by a dirty broken shard of mirror that had fallen near the door. His own refection was almost alien, the green was a vast change from the usual Orange and he barely recognized himself as he studied his own face and decided something was missing from the outfit as he absentmindedly tightened the brown leather belt and looked around before spying the Green hat draped over the edge of a chest of drawers.
Jogging over he picked it up and with a shrug pulled his forehead protector down to his neck and pulled the hat on over his hair before he made his way to the door and out into the village where the horrors of forest waited, much better prepared than before.
A/N: Okay, so maybe there was a story or two left in my head after all.
Don't forget to Review.
Cya