The Legend of Zelda: Shadowsong
Book One - Forest

Chapter Nine:
Possessed Arachnid: Queen Gohma

The stench that wallowed outward in sickening waves from the dark doorway of Gohma's lair was putrid enough to make Link's eyes water and his stomach heave nauseously. Beside him, Minuet made a small gagging sound and put her hands over her mouth and nose. It was the smell of rot; of disease-blotched vines and creepers decaying into blackened slime while still they lived, and as Link and Minuet entered the final room of the temple, sagecloaks pressed to their faces like masks to prevent themselves from breathing in too much of the foul air, its gruesome source met their eyes.

No green remained in this room, only bilious yellow and blood-colored red. The chamber was easily the size of the cavernous temple entryway, but it was completely circular, its walls rising up around them and meeting again in a domed ceiling far above. A massive circular oculus at the very peak of the dome, closed off as a means of escape despite its size by a thin network of elaborate black iron grating, released a shaft of light into the murky gloom, and this shaft seemed to rise from the center of the floor like a pillar made from sunlight, faintly illuminating the shadows beyond. Vines covered every surface, and they were sickly, putrid things, bristling with foot-long spines and so deformed by disease and corruption that they bled foul yellow sap, which pooled around the edges of the floor like a tacky, viscous moat.

Staring up at the oculus, Link could just make out the pale shroud of a massive spiderweb stretched across the entire ceiling, parting only to let the light shine through, as if the spider that created it had been too afraid to go near that lone column of brightness.

Gohma was nowhere to be seen, hiding, perhaps, in the concealing pall of cobwebs above.

"Where is she?" he whispered to Minuet. His voice echoed eerily in the huge, silent room.

It was as though the temple had been waiting for him to speak, for as soon as the last echoes of his voice died away, the door behind them rolled slowly shut with a deep grinding noise. There was a sense of finality as it at last slammed into place against the wall, and Link somehow knew that it wasn't going to open again. Minuet gripped his right arm tightly, whimpering.

"She's... She's up there." The girl's quavering arm rose, and she pointed upward at the shadowy webbing just beyond the light of the oculus. Link squinted into the gloom, trying to make out what she was pointing at. High above, nestled in the deep crenellations of the chamber's dome, a dark shape was huddled up against the palely glowing spiderweb.

The boy's breath caught and his legs felt suddenly unstable. Even at this distance the temple guardian was gigantic. Although he had meant to call out to her, his next words came out as more of a hushed rasp. "Queen Gohma?"

Somewhere in the midst of that black shape, a single huge eye flickered open. Burning a deep, reddish saffron, it swiveled around manically before fixing its unblinking gaze on the two of them, its garnet pupil dilating. His words were answered by a rattling hiss.

"Oh Farore..." Minuet breathed, and her whole body was shaking out of fear.

"Minuet, I don't know what to do," Link murmured to her while that mad eye stared down at the both of them. "What am I supposed to say to her?" He was honestly at a loss. With Gohma's great eye glaring down at him, his mind had gone blank.

The guardian's voice rattled again.

"Oh Farore, oh Farore," Minuet repeated. "She's... Link, use your spirit sense! She's talking!"

As reluctant as he was to open himself to the spirits and leave his body vulnerable in a place so tainted, Link trusted Minuet, and so he closed his eyes and tried to let his other senses reach out into the realm of the ethereal. With his senses magnified, Gohma's stare was like a beam of heat burning itself into his skin, and on every side the black taint that had nearly blinded Minuet swirled around him in slick, oily tendrils. The silent watcher was there as well, the feeling of it pressing in all around Link as if the mysterious spirit was everywhere at once, but it said nothing, only watching and waiting to see what he would do.

Another of Gohma's death-rattles, and Link's eyes flew open in shock as the rasping, insectoid sound formed into coherent words. Even as the spirit-sense shattered around him her voice remained, speaking low and strained, like a person on their deathbed with barely enough breath left to speak.

"Whooo... trespasses... in the temple of Farore..."

The boy's gaze rested for a moment on Minuet, but she had dissolved into terrified sobbing, singing to herself the ancient children's rhyme to ward off evil. "Irikokeht the Shadow, he walks the mirrored keep..." Without her connection to the Kokiri spirits, Link was on his own.

He turned to face Gohma's stare, hoping he looked braver than he felt. "My name is Lincoln Shepherd, and this is Minuet Weaver." He spread what was left of his ragged green cloak out so that the arachnid queen could see. "We're in training to be Sages, and we... We've come to help you."

"Yooooou..." the massive spider said in a hissed whisper that nevertheless carried through the great empty room. "So you are... the Hero of... this cycle. Yoooou have arrived... far too late... to be of any help to meeeee..."

On Link's right side, Minuet's chanting grew more frantic. "He comes when you are dreaming, so dare you fall asleep..."

The warmth on the back of Link's left hand that had first begun at the doorway to Gohma's lair began to grow in intensity. "We have to!" he argued. "We promised the Kokiri spirits. There has to be some way." He had wanted to act the part of a Sage, hadn't he? And wasn't this what being a Sage was all about? Not cleaning out the temple, or meditating, or praying for the plants to grow, but dealing with dark, threatening magics that were determined to destroy everything he held sacred.

"And if he comes to take you, then this is what you say..." Minuet whimpered.

"Yooooou should not... have come here, Hero..." Gohma rattled, her voice growing even more strained with each word. "I am... no longer a temple guardian. Only a puppet... of Irikokeht the Shadow. For centuries he has... been sealed within this... temple, but now that... the triforces draw closer together... he has become self-aware. I can... hold him back... no longer..."

"I-ri-ko-keht-fo-knil-knil, to make him go away..." Minuet finished, and started again, her hands tightly clasped at her chest as if the simple childhood song was a prayer to Farore. "Irikokeht the Shadow, he walks the mirrored keep. He comes when you are dreaming, so dare you fall asleep..."

"What do you mean, self aware?" Link called out over the rhythm of Minuet's agitated chanting. "Who is Irikokeht; that soul eating monster from the old children's stories?"

"And if he comes to take you, then this is what you say: I-ri-ko-keht-fo-knil-knil, to make him go away..."

A pained hiss escaped the spider's jaws, and her whole body shuddered. "It issss too late! If yoooou wish to... help meeee... then yooou must... KILL ME!"

And with a mighty leap, she launched herself through the air at Link and Minuet.

Link's body was moving before his mind had even registered the danger. He wrapped his arms around a fear-frozen Minuet and threw them both to the side, hitting the ground and rolling away just as Queen Gohma's monstrous form came crashing to earth, making the entire room shudder with her landing and sending bits of stone debris clattering down from the ceiling. He scrambled to his feet in time to watch in horror as the spider's eight, ectomorphic black legs struck the vine-covered stone ground with force enough to raise sparks and the beast slowly raised herself to her full height. He had been wrong before; Gohma wasn't gigantic, she was gargantuan.

Mantled in ragged white hair that hung off her segmented arachnid body, the spider queen's twenty foot tall carapace loomed over Link, and her lone red-yellow eye glared malevolently down at him behind venomous fangs as long as his entire body, glistening with transparent acids that smoked in the stinking air. There was a thick chain wrapped like a collar around what might have passed for her neck, and dangling from it swung a tiny key of green-patina'd metal, dwarfed by her mass.

Link whipped his bow out and aimed an arrow at the center of the spider's bloated body, but didn't fire. "Minuet, get up!" he muttered through gritted teeth to the terrified girl sprawled across the ground behind him, and she complied, clamoring to her feet and dashing away across the room with wide eyes. The point of Link's arrow wavered slightly as Gohma closed in. With each step she took, her spiked legs smashed into the ground and sent chips of stone flying. The rotting vines scrawled across the floor snapped away like whips in her wake.

He must have bruised his left hand at some point while he was exploring the temple, because at the moment it felt as if it were on fire.

Link didn't want to hurt her. He and Minuet had promised the forest spirits that they would try to save the guardian, and so even with the monumental spider bearing down on him, he held his ground and tried one last time to speak to her. "Queen Gohma! I'm wearing a sagecloak, I'm Sage Fado's apprentice! You're not allowed to hurt me! Please, listen-"

One of those lance-like legs swept around and caught Link full in the chest, and his grip on the bow slipped and sent the arrow sailing, only to bounce harmlessly off Gohma's canescent hide. The boy was lifted off his feet and sent flying thirty feet across the room. His back hit the vine-covered wall and for the second time in so many days his head struck stone. The old injury he had almost forgotten, the blow to the head from fighting the Boko Baba, flared up as if needles made from white-hot iron were being hammered through his skull and into his brain.

His feet hit the floor and he swayed dangerously, his vision blurring...

NO, the watching spirit commanded. You will not pass out now; you are so much stronger than that.

With some difficulty Link raised his bow again and nocked another arrow, and this time he fired it without hesitation, striking the temple guardian just below the fangs and again doing no damage. Gohma's legs worked faster and she broke into a run, thundering towards him and intent on ramming him into the wall once more. He shot at her three more times before diving out of the way, but the arrows were absolutely useless. With every hit they simply bounced away.

"LINK!" The scream came from the part of the circular room nearest the door, where Minuet was crouched into a ball, making herself as small as possible. "Link, you have to find a weak point! You have to shoot her somewhere where the arrows won't just bounce off!"

"She doesn't have a weak point," he shouted back.

"Yes she does! The spirits say... eye! It's her eye, Link! It's the only part of her body that isn't protected!"

Queen Ghoma scuttled around and rushed him again, and the pain in Link's head was making it hard to concentrate. "What...?"

"The EYE, Link! The weak point is the eye!"

Of course. The spider's bulbous eye glimmered maliciously in the middle of her head, and Link aimed at it and loosed an arrow. It struck the vulnerable eyeball in mid-rush, and Ghoma, screaming furiously as she was suddenly, painfully blinded, smashed headlong into the wall. The entire temple quaked horribly, and part of the dome above crumbled and collapsed on top of Gohma, crushing the colossal spider into the ground and flooding the huge circular chamber with sunlight. The chain around the arachnid queen's neck snapped, and the tiny green key she'd been wearing fell to the ground with a little clink and bounced across the carpet of dead and broken vines.

It came to a rest in front of Minuet, and, looking shell-shocked, she picked it up. "Did... did we just win?"

Link stared down through a haze of pain at the slowly widening pool of syrupy black liquid oozing out from underneath the pile of rubble that had pulverized Gohma. "I killed her. I didn't mean to kill her, I just..." He put a hand to his pounding temple. "Just..."

"Link?"

And then it was as if time had stopped. The world around Link froze; Minuet turned statuesque with his name still hanging on her lips. In that split second when the world held its breath, the curse on the forest temple finally broke free.

He saw it rise from the detritus: a humanoid, pitch-black shape, like a living shadow. Clawing its spectral way out of the temple guardian's now useless body, its glowing, blood-red eyes stared out at Link from a shady translucent face that had haunted every child in Hyrule through nightmares and bedtime stories, exactly as it had been depicted in every picture book he'd ever read. Irikokeht the Shadow, the Eater of Souls.

That cursed silhouette at last pulled itself free from Gohma's corpse and immediately collapsed, tumbling down the pile of debris and rolling to the floor at Link's feet, too weakened by its recent defeat even to stand. Hissing wickedly, it pushed itself to its hands and knees. Link took a step backwards, and the thing that had driven Gohma to her death rested its eyes on him once again.

"My body..." it coughed weakly, and to Link's horror it stretched out a hand and seized him by the ankle, and try as he might he could not pull away. "You've killed it... A new body! I need a new body!"

"No!" Link gasped, trying desperately to pull his leg out of its viselike grasp.

It felt as though that same oily black taint that had corrupted the temple was now sliding itself under his skin where it gripped him, poisoning his veins as it worked its horrible way through his body, and Link realized with shocked revulsion that he, like Gohma, was about to be possessed. "No!" he shouted again, trying to kick it away. "I-ri-ko-keht-fo-knil-knil! I-RI-KO-KEHT-FO-KNIL-KNIL!!"

That chant doesn't actually work, was the quiet thought of the unseen watcher, and as it spoke Link felt a strange tingling sensation, as if something fluid and warm and not at all unpleasant had slipped gently up his spine and eased itself into the base of his skull. When the voice spoke again, it was from within his own head. But this will.

And his skull exploded with agony as his left hand burst into light.

* * *

"Link! Link! Link, please don't be dead!"

Lincoln Shepherd opened his eyes slowly, and Minuet's anxious face swam into view, wavering and blurred. He was lying sprawled out on his back on the vine-choked floor, and sunlight streamed in from a gaping hole in the ceiling above. His head throbbed painfully. "Min...uet?"

"Oh, Link!" There were tears in her wide green eyes. "You... you did it, Link! You killed Gohma! We couldn't save her but at least we stopped the curse!"

Link groaned and closed his eyes. "No we didn't. Didn't you see that... that thing? It grabbed my ankle and then there was this glowing golden light coming from my hand and it was like it... exploded or something, but it wasn't dead, just gone, or weakened, and..." Opening his eyes again, he trailed off at the worried look on her face. "Didn't you see it?"

She shook her head. "Those rocks fell and killed Gohma, and then you just collapsed."

He stared up at her, baffled. Minuet was the one with the spirit sense she couldn't turn off; he was used to her seeing things that he could not, but never had it happened the other way around. "It was Irikokeht the Shadow. He attacked me and tried to possess me!"

Minuet's eyebrows furrowed with concern. "Link, you hit your head really hard in that fight..."

"But you didn't see anything..." He was too exhausted to keep his eyes open any longer, and so he closed them again with a sigh. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I did just imagine it or something."

"But there's a way out now," she told him, trying to sound cheerful but still clearly shaken up. "We can just climb up over the rubble."

"I killed Gohma," he murmured sleepily.

"What? Oh no, Link, please stay awake."

"Hm...?" Her voice sounded oddly muffled, like she was speaking from a long ways away and through a heavy fog.

"Please, Link. Don't go to sleep now. Link! Link, I can't carry you back to Ordon by myself!"

But he was already drifting off into unconsciousness, and the safe darkness enveloped him as Minuet's pleading voice faded away. There was someone waiting for him in that darkness, a silent presence watching like a pair of unseen eyes from the shadows. Some small part of his tired mind registered that the mysterious presence that had observed and guided him throughout the temple was now immovably, irrevocably lodged in the back of his head, just as silent as before and content to watch events unfold without intervening.

You... what are you doing inside my head? he thought blearily.

I need your help.

My help?

Yes. But you need to wake up now.

What...? he began, but a moment later another throb of pain shot through his head and his eyes flew open again. "Ah!"

He was being hoisted to his feet by two sets of arms, Minuet on one side and the bent, wizened form of Sage Fado on the other. A grim look furrowed the laugh lines on the old Sage's face as he gently shook Link awake. "On your feet, Lincoln, and stay with us now." A little blue fairy, like a sphere of dancing light, whirred in frenzied circles around the old man's head.

Link blinked lethargically. "Sage Fado?"

"Drink this," Fado commanded, and a glass bottle filled with opaque, jewel-bright red liquid was thrust into Link's hands. Recognizing the drink as a healing potion, the boy raised it to his lips and took a swig. It tasted bitterly medicinal, but as soon as he swallowed the concoction began to work its magic, soothing the pain in his skull and clearing the thick foggy haze that had been obscuring his thoughts. The Sage gave him an approving nod. "Better now?"

"Much better," he answered, handing the bottle back, and then: "Wait, no! Sage Fado, there's something inside my head. One of the Kokiri spirits, I think."

"Is it Irikokeht?" the old man asked, and Minuet gave a small gasp beside him.

"No, I don't think... Wait, you know about Irikokeht?"

Fado smiled gently. "I am the Sage of Forest, Lincoln. Of course I know what the temple was guarding. Now, if you've been possessed by Irikokeht the Shadow, that's something I need to know as soon as possible."

"It's not Irikokeht," Link replied. "When Gohma died, he tried to possess me, but this other spirit stopped him. I don't know if it's good or evil, but it's been helping us survive." His eyes widened as the realization struck him, for the first time since his thoughts had become lucid again, that he had killed the temple guardian. "Oh no... Sage Fado, we killed her!"

"The spirits asked us to help Gohma," Minuet piped in, "But we ended up killing her instead! She forced us; she was going after Link, trying to kill him! The spirits said she had to be stopped and then I told Link to shoot her in the eye and she ran straight into the wall and the temple just fell down on top of her! We didn't mean to kill her!"

The grandfatherly old Sage hushed her. "It's alright, Minuet. You didn't kill her."

"But we did!" She pointed to the pile of rubble.

"No, child. Queen Gohma is a temple guardian; she experiences a form of immortality through reincarnation. Even now Gohma's new body is hatching from a giant egg sack hidden somewhere in the temple, with all the memories of her past life intact. It will take some time for her to grow to such a size again, but she is far from dead."

"Oh..." Minuet lapsed into silence.

"Now Lincoln," Fado murmured, turning back to Link, "Once we've returned to Ordon, we'll see if we can find out just who this mysterious spirit of yours is."

"What about Irikokeht?" he asked, and Sage Fado's smile turned disconsolate.

"I'm afraid that nothing can be done about Irikokeht the Shadow. It is a small mercy that he is no doubt weakened by battle, but even so, the seal on the temple is broken. The Eater of Souls is free."

______________

Thoughts:

This chapter is the product of one massively inspirational all-night writing session, which is how I tend to write most fight scenes. Boss battles are fun.

Our main villain has finally shown up: Irikokeht the Shadow, aka Dark Link with a more convoluted name! Although really he's been here all along, what with Zelda's little Biggoron's Bluff story in chapter three. I always thought he would make an excellent main villain.

That anti-evil rhyme in its entirety, by the way, is "Irikokeht the Shadow, he walks the mirrored keep. He comes when you are dreaming, so dare you fall asleep? And if he comes to take you, then this is what you say: I-ri-ko-keht-fo-knil-knil to make him go away." I've composed a little tune to go with it, so I'll post a link to the midi file on my main page under Shadowsong's story progress, in case anyone is interested.

In the next chapter (which also happens to be the FINAL chapter of book one) there will be lots of exposition and we may actually find out what on earth is going on.