John woke up on his back, soaking in a very shallow, very clear, blue pool at the foot of the mountain with bomb fruits growing all about. Up above, Pyralsprite's trumpeting roar dulled to a satisfied growl and the winds began to slow. Ash and embers fell towards the earth like flakes of snow, a catastrophe averted. John smiled gingerly, and rubbed his cheek, also gingerly. There was a nasty lump roughly the size of a cucco egg on the left side of his face that was already starting to turn a gorgeous purple with olive green fading to yellow at the edges like some kind of magnificent, painful work of art. It hurt like a motherfucker and he was sure he must have died when he took the hit, but he did it. He defeated Hephaestus (or at least helped) and averted catastrophe and…he felt cold in the pit of his stomach. What was that last thing?
Roxy's voice sounded quietly yet gleefully in his left ear. "OMDNF John!" she said, shaking him by the shoulder. It hurt to blush. "I can't believe it!" It hurt to think. Everything tasted green, and fiery. He turned to looked at the pink-haired girl, likewise laying in the pool and looking considerably more comfortable than he felt, though just as beat-up and disheveled.
"What the fuck…" John muttered. He remembered something now: Aradia, that nice, sweet troll that had gone with them up the mountain. Already he thought f her as a friend. But she went crazy or something and…he remembered grabbing her by the neck. What the hell had he done? "You are such a perrrrrrv," Roxy whispered, winking a big pink eye.
"John," Aradia whimpered from the other side, and somehow hearing her voice did not reassure him in the slightest. He rolled over to his right. She was sitting up, legs crossed, wings folded against each other like a butterfly in repose, and was paying an inordinate amount of attention to a spot on the mountain ahead of her. Aradia twisted a lock of thick, wooly hair between her hands like it owed her money. "I'm sorry I went on a rampage and almost killed everyone, and I'm also sorry that as soon as I stopped being on a rampage the first thing I did was punch you."
"It's okay," John said quickly, choking a little and trying to stop the flood of emotions that was threatening to (he was sure) kill him. Life was so much easier without girls in it, he decided. "Really it was nothing—"
"No it wasn't!" Aradia said, coloring slightly. "But dammit John I am—"
"Don't say it," he warned, sitting up with a splash, bruise in horrible burning pain from the fearsome blush he had going.
"Too young—"
"Aradia," he warned, "just drop it I understand—"
"For quadrants!" she finished. Roxy burst out into jubilant laughter.
"Oh my Gods, Karkat told me to do it alright!?" John snapped. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes pensively, as if he had just lost at something. "He said if I ever got into trouble with troll women that I should…touch their faces and try to sound like the ocean!"
Aradia blinked. "Oh right," she said, cheerfully, flashing a big smile with all of her shiny white teeth. John smiled back, only realizing as he did so how threatening it was when other trolls smiled. Was this…another one of those cultural things? "Of course that was it! I mean what else could you have done except maybe kill me? Or…kiss me." (Roxy squealed delightedly in the background and John's heart rose up into his throat and he nearly choked on it) Aradia shut her eyes hard and shook her head, curls bouncing wildly as her face became a truly striking shade of burgundy. "Nope," she said, repeating it many times, "nope nope nope! I am not going to be thinking of kisses right after getting my first papping stolen by a human! Nope nope nope!" She shoved John apropos of nothing and he fell backwards into the water. "Dammit John!" she snapped, skin suddenly lightening to an almost sickly white. "I am not even pale for you! Don't you ever do that without my permission again!"
He sat back up. "Um, yes ma'am," he said. Roxy had fallen silent but only because she was laughing so hard that she could no longer breathe properly and the sound was coming out silently, racking her body with convulsions and sending violent ripples across the pool as she flopped like a dying fish.
Another trumpet-blast of a roar like audible gold tore the air, drawing all attention from John's lady troubles back to Pyralsprite, who had had quite enough of this preteen drama shit. He let out a trilling song and John could at last make out individual sounds and even words, finally coming to understand how dragons could have language as well why the trolls needed instruments to speak it.
Aradia grinned, and there was nothing threatening in it this time. "He says that he thanks you for your services," she said. "And that he has chosen not to eat you!" She wiggled her eyebrows. "That's a great honor, it means he likes you."
"Er, thanks I guess," said John. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes again. "Um can you tell him that—?"
"Nope," said Aradia with her trademarked cheer, "I don't have an instrument!" Another song erupted from the dragon's mouth. "Oh! Um, Pyralsprite used his magic to get us down here in case you were wondering, and he also declares you to be a friend to all trollkind, and all of us to be true heroes!" Aradia's eyes widened. "Wow! An actual compliment from Pyralsprite! Amazing!"
The rarity of the great dragon's compliments was not entirely lost on John. However, for the moment, he was too busy basking in the warm glow of those words. Sure, he thought, he might not be the hero, but damned if he wouldn't be a hero, to anyone who needed him.
The Empress honored them, of course, in her own empressarial way. He had received Pyralsprite's blessing after all, and had been named a friend of trollkind, and naturally friends of his were friends of trolls as well. "Any troll who harms you or yours shall be punished to the fullest extent of the law," she declared, raising her trident high, "as if they had done the same harm to a highblood!" A hush ran over the crowd; such honor had never been conferred to a Hylian before. And then a roar of approval broke through and the trolls rushed up to him and forcibly slathered his face in clown makeup. Roxy had somehow made off with the pictobox and proceeded to take as many pictographs as possible.
A grand feast was held in the party's honor out in the big, egg-shaped chamber, spread out across a dozen heavy tables that had been lugged out from somewhere by particularly huge blue-bloods. John was struck by how unique each troll was and often wondered how all these colorful creatures could be the same race, but was even more entranced by the food, comprising both human and troll delicacies. Aradia largely stuck to what she knew but was happy to try anything whereas Roxy ate everything with equal gusto. John however, being from a small island, was somewhat intimidated by the glorious spread, being unused to most things outside of fish, pork, baked goods (made of imported flour and dried fruits of course), and the fibrous white tubers that grew sporadically on Outset and other islands of the far south.
Tentatively, he poked a slab of dark meat with his fork and nearly jumped when it curled up into a ball. Aradia reached over across the table and cut it in half with a cleaver, revealing flaky, slightly green-tinted flesh inside. "Ocean grubs are delicious," she said, "and highly prized. Only sea-dwellers can go down deep enough to where they are, down where the ghosts of Hyrule live," here she winked knowingly, "but sometimes they move around even after they've been cooked. We take out their claws and teeth just in case they try to bite on the way down." Aradia giggled.
Trembling slightly, John scooped a lump of meat into his mouth. It tasted a bit like lobster, which he'd never had before, and a bit like mint. "It's…good!" he announced to the great pleasure of their hosts, and Roxy took another pictograph. "Clown John eating a bug!" she announced, to even greater jubilance. Before John could say anything she flipped it over and he saw that it was actually written on the back of the thing. John sighed.
The party went on into the night. Roxy danced a lively jig on the table to a pounding beat drummed out by the highbloods on the table; she was quickly joined by the Empress herself and the court had the decency to appear scandalized before doubling their speed to test her Condescension's grace. Someone acquired a Calatian fiddle, someone else a set of bagpipes made of dodongo stomachs, and yet a third person found an ocarina, and joined at the last minute by a Holodrumian horn and they formed a quartet. A very redfaced Karkat made passes at Pyralsprite's very tealfaced attendant, only freshly descended from the mountain and still bloodstained yet very receptive, and John felt that he was the only one in the entire city who had not had anything to drink until Aradia approached, holding something behind her back, with a huge smile that made him excessively uncomfortable. She pounced at the last minute and forced a bottle of something into his mouth that was at once incredibly sweet and horribly acidic.
"Sh, shshshsh," she said, cradling his head, "just consider this a little payback huh? Besides, Labrynnian rum isn't the worst thing I could have given you. A real prank would have involved Sosarian fire-whiskey, or even sopor, but I don't hate you that much!" Aradia giggled, and then she paled slightly as if realizing she'd misspoken, "or even a little," she added hurriedly.
She let John go and he fell to the floor, head swimming. No, seriously, he thought, life was so much easier when the only girl his age was his sister.
At around midnight, the Prince deigned to enter the grand hall. Nothing could quite silence the roaring soiree, because no one throws a party like a troll does and even a trollish Prince does not have that kind of power, but a respectful amount of obeisance was given as he approached John, followed closely by his surprisingly fierce looking seahorse lusus. The Pearl was in his hands, casting a livid orange light on his face.
Eridan's nose wrinkled when he looked at John, lying on the floor, stinking of alcohol and covered in clown makeup, John knew that he probably was not making a grand impression. "You smell odd," said Eridan.
"Yeah," said John. The alcohol was starting to affect his brain and he decided that the thing to do was to just own it, and lay on the floor like he had meant to all along.
"Eridan," Aradia said in a warning voice, "you don't want to talk to John like that. He climbed the mountain! He met with Pyralsprite and didn't get eaten! And he killed the monster that was making him rampage!" She jabbed Eridan's chest with her finger. "You have no excuse not to go up there and earn your wings now!" She narrowed her eyes. "And didn't you and John have a wager?"
"Actually you did all those things," said John before he could think it over.
Aradia slapped her forehead. "Dammit John I was trying to get you the Pearl." John slapped his own forehead and wondered how in all the hells he could be a hero with that kind of stupidity.
Eridan looked down at his feet, seeming troubled. Once or twice he opened his mouth as if to speak only to shut it, a slight violet flush appearing on his cheeks. "Well," he said, trying to make it sound like it didn't pain him extremely, "he did make it all the way." And without further ado, he passed it on, to the shock and surprise of all present.
The Prince hissed at the staring eyes. "Sweet merciful Nayru I'm not that bad am I?" He was met with silence. Eridan growled. "I don't care what you all think! I'm going to go and get my wings first thing in the morning and then you'll have to find some other spiritual leader to look down your noses at!" He spun on his heel and marched over to the Empress's table; she leapt down from it and swept him up in an embrace.
"You've matured!" she shouted, voice trembling with emotion. "Thank Din, Nayru, Farore, and any other gods you care to name!"
The next morning, with the sun rising over the ocean, a thin line of pink on the horizon showing through the water, John and Roxy loaded up the boat. John was feeling like someone had gone at his brain with a cheese grater and was wishing he was dead or at least asleep, and his ears were hanging so low he was surprised they hadn't melted off, but he had the Pearl in his hands and it kept him warm as he shivered against the morning chill. It was still early December after all and the winter was not merely coming but already in progress.
Roxy in contrast was positively kittenish, ears perked up all the way. "This is so great John! We've accomplished something!" she was busily loading supplies into Jaspers' hull. John was glad of it, because he was sure he wouldn't be able to do anything in the state he was in. Jaspers meowed contentedly, happy to see his friends again after their time apart and eager to set off once more.
The trolls had formally seen them off last night, and now only a few were watching them from the entrance to the hollow mountain; the rest were off watching the Prince engage on his journey into manhood. Presumably that's where Aradia was. A gull cried in the distance. "Where to next?" John asked, looking at the Pearl more than at the boat but still listening intently.
"South," said Jaspers. Some of the trolls uphill, who had heard him, started. One began to ramble about how he was right and not crazy until a highblood shooshed him into submission. Ignoring them, the cat-boat turned and gave him a friendly smile. "Farore's Pearl will be the easiest one to get considering where we are now. That's in Forest Haven, where the Carapacians live. Their king is very nice; he'll probably give us the thing without any trouble!" John nodded, slowly to avoid making his head feel anymore like shit than it already did. He didn't think he could handle anything with any sort of difficulty now.
"How don't you feel like garbage?" John asked Roxy weakly. "You drank way more than I did!"
Roxy smirked. "I drank a cup of water for every cup of alcohol, ate a whole bunch, and took breaks. Also I've built up hella tolerance," she added with a playful wink.
Roxy was going to take care of the sail as John steered the rudder just like on the way over; once again John was perfectly content to have to do as little as possible when every motion made him feel like he was going to vomit. He stepped into the water, every nerve firing in agony against the cold and he asked every god he knew about to damn Aradia, and the nation of Labrynna, and the very concept of rum.
A streak of red and brown swept down from the sky and smashed into him, pressing John into a bone crushing hug just as he was about to step onto the boat. In fact, since he had a leg up already, he fell backwards into the water. Roxy, being sensible, caught the Pearl in midair to the applause of the watching trolls.
"You weren't going to leave without me were you John?" asked Aradia's smiling, exuberant face, the great weight of her wet hair pulling her head uncomfortably close.
John blinked. "What?"
"Well of course I'm coming with you!" Aradia announced, shocked that he could even say otherwise.
Roxy reached out over the edge of the boat and threw her arm around Aradia's neck. "YES! This is so awesome! I'm so happy! Say she can come John! Please!" They both looked at him and fluttered their eyelashes. "Pleaaaaase?" they asked in tandem.
John sighed. He would like to believe he was the leader of this expedition but the pair of them being cute together like this would likely render him incapable of making rational decisions altogether, at least without their say-so. "Fine," he breathed. The pair of them shouted in celebration and jumped for joy, shaking Jaspers until he roared in discomfort, sending the fragile troll uphill into a spasmodic fit.
There was a favorable northerly wind, which slightly irked John, who had wanted to practice some more with the Breath Waker. "There will come another time to use it," said Jaspers, voice going sagely yet again. "And many more thereafter. You may tire of it before the end."
Aradia and Roxy chattered together as the day wore on. Aradia had been seeing off Eridan apparently, and had flown right off the mountain as soon as he entered the caverns to join them. The Empress had laughingly given her blessing, as had Pyralsprite. "But the most important thing to me," she said conspiratorially, "is this!" Aradia opened up her bag and pulled out Terezi's harp. John and Roxy watched it glint in the sunlight with admiration.
"Want to play us something?" Roxy asked eagerly.
"How about you conduct me John?" Aradia asked.
John opened his mouth to say yes and Jaspers gave a sudden lurch as he passed over an ocean swell and John threw up over the edge until his gums bled. "Maybe later," he said, sounding absolutely miserable. At the very least, the pressure in his head had lessened.
Aradia gently stroked his ear, sliding a finger down into his hair. "I'm sorry," she said sadly. "I guess that prank…was less funny than I thought it would be." John smiled weakly and nodded as emphatically as he could.
Roxy cleared her throat after an awkward little while. "That harp is pretty impressive you know," she said. "But can it do more than just look and sound pretty?" she gave a roguish grin. "Is it…magical?"
"Yes!" Aradia said. "It is! Very magical!"
"Can you show us?" asked John.
Aradia shook her head enthusiastically. "Nope! I've never even tried to use magic!"
Roxy rubbed her hands together conspiratorially. "I can teach you guys! It's so easy and damn useful, I'm surprised that not everyone does it."
The distance from Dragonroost to Forest Haven was easily more than twice that from Windfall to Dragonroost, which had taken a good part of the day. "How much longer?" asked Aradia, the eagerness leaking just slightly from her voice. It would soon be time for the sun to set, and to their right the sea was ablaze with flakes of gold as it approached the horizon.
Jaspers turned his sinuous neck to look at her awkwardly under the sail. "We'll get there in a few hours if we sail through the night!"
Roxy gasped with false excitement. "Yeah we're not doing that!" she said.
Jaspers was nonplussed and looked back to the south again. "Okay," he said, "there's an island coming up where you can rest."
"Oh there was no worry about islands," Roxy joked with a dismissive yet playful wave of her hand. "I mean, if we had the time and the killer abs, we could just swim from island to island and not even worry about boats at all! That's one thing you can say about the Great Sea."
The island in question was low and somewhat flat, almost perfectly round but with a little spit of land stretching out into the water, like a tail, or the fuse of a bomb. It was thickly wooded and the children had no trouble securing Jaspers to a tree. They saw that there was a squat knoll that someone had cut terraces into. The soil was rocky, but very rich and black, and unnaturally warm, hot even, though they thought nothing of it.
The trees, John noticed, had pale yellow and grey-streaked wood, and did not grow naturally as far south as Outset. Forest Haven was about level with it on their charts, and this island was not too far from there, so he wondered if this had been some sort of experimental tree farm.
Before the sun had quite set, the party had built itself a lovely fire with a hit of Roxy's magic. John went off and made himself a crude harpoon by carving a few points onto a stick and speared himself a fish, which Aradia prepared as a stew. By the time it was cooking, the sun was gone; there was the slightest hint of red on the horizon, with a band of very dull yellow and, visible to the careful eye, another band of palest green separating it from the increasingly darker shades of blue and purple until the deep, dense canopy directly above, in which a single star had begun to shine. "It's the mother of all monsters," said Roxy, pointing up at it. "She's crying over her poor babies who get slaughtered every day."
Aradia shook her head. "Echidna lives in the ocean, far away to the south, in a land where it's night for half the year and daytime for the other half. The nights are so cold that everything turns to ice, but come sunrise it all melts away in seconds and life reemerges. Plants spring up, frogs unfreeze, and the Iguanas come out of hibernation and fill the steaming jungles with their poetry until nightfall comes again."
The two of them looked at John expectantly. He was at a complete loss. "Well," he began, "um, once my nana told us about the Ghost Ship," he said. The girls nodded their heads. "It appears all over the Great Sea," he said, feeling encouraged, "whenever the moon rises. It looks like an ancient wreck that's been pulled to the surface, covered in barnacles and leaking rust like bloody wounds! And it's surrounded by blue foxfire all over." John made an expansive gesture. Inspired, he picked up a branch from the fire and waved it around, tracing patterns in the air with its burning tip. "They say that a famous cartographer charted its appearances."
"How?" asked Roxy, grinning, leaning her head on her fists. Aradia said nothing, positively enraptured by the idea of a scary story.
"It would appear off the coast of a different island depending on the phases of the moon," John said smartly. "Anyway, he followed it wherever it appeared and he marked the island and the phase of the moon on his chart. It was a beautiful chart, made with royal purple ink on tanned rayskin," he was unsure about that but it sounded cool so he threw it in, "Some say it was a highblood troll," he said, making up even more things, "and that he used his own blood to draw the chart, because as he went on, he went more and more insane. I mean, how can you see something like the Ghost Ship so often and stay sane? But troll or not, once it was completed," John whispered, "once every island where the Ghost Ship was seen was marked with the right phase of the moon," he paused for dramatic effect, "he died."
Roxy gasped. Aradia squealed with joy. She looked around with almost desperate fervor. "Is this one of the islands?" she wondered. "What moon is it tonight!?"
"Shut up," said Roxy, ears lowered defensively, "it's just a story."
"Nope," said John, feeling mischievous, "it's a true fact!"
Aradia unfurled her wings and fluttered upwards, still struggling to fly and only barely clearing the canopy of trees. "The moon just rose!" she announced. "It's a half moon!" she said as she touched down amid the group again. Then she bent down over the cookpot and tasted it with a wooden spoon. "And this needs more salt," she said, in the exact same tone.
"Well," said Roxy, arms folded, "the moon rose and nothing happened."
John chuckled. "Were you actually scared?"
"No," Roxy insisted forcefully. "Gimme my stew!" She held out her bowl emphatically, the subject officially closed.
By the time they had finished, many more stars had come out, but a fog was beginning to roll in, obscuring their light. "Okay," said Roxy, sounding much more satisfied and much less nervous. "Magic though you guys!"
John nodded. "What can you teach us?"
"Well," Roxy started primly, "my shadow-based magic is totally advanced and only Sheikah can ever master it, but all Hylians," she gestured to Aradia, "and lowbloods especially, have at least a little bit of magic in them."
She snapped her fingers and small red flame blew up on her fingertips like the flame of a match. Aradia 'oohed'. "This is called Din's fire," said Roxy. "It's a pretty basic spell though I'm not very good at it. Like I said, the Sheikah are all about shadows and stuff. Still, pretty much anyone can do it."
Aradia tried snapping her fingers, only to discover that she didn't know how. John did know how, but was unable to do anything at all. Roxy sighed. "No you guys," she said, "you need to, like," she struggled for a way to explain it, having never had to actually teach anyone anything, "Feel unrelenting force inside yourself! The power of fire belongs to Din, and Din is the goddess of power! You need to find your inner Din and let her out—"
Aradia burst into flames for an instant and her companions stared at her as she sat, steaming, in front of the fire, a look of perfect happiness on her face. "I let out my inner goddess," she whispered, finding the phrase funny.
John tried to do something, wanting to be just as impressive, but couldn't quite get the hand of it. "Try to think of something that makes you feel powerful," Roxy said helpfully.
John immediately thought of the Breath Waker. He produced his deck of cards. The Ace of Gears—he absently recalled snatching the motor from Hephaestus's great hammer at some point but the whole thing was hazy between the god's emergence and waking up at the foot of the mountain. He shuffled the card back into the deck. No, the Prince of Wands was the obvious home for the magic rod, and he stared at it for a second, wondering how he hadn't thought of it before. A magical tool for magical spells, of course—
No, but he hadn't felt powerful at all when he had played it before. He'd felt free, and that was something entirely different. As he stared at the card, he knew that it was not sacred to Din and he would never be able to conjure her fire with it. He put it back in the deck and thought some more.
His hammer. It made John shiver a little to think of the things he'd done with it. He'd killed—monsters yes, but he'd killed and Echidna would weep for her children no matter how monstrous—but that in itself did not make him feel powerful. But when he'd been a blacksmith's apprentice all that little while ago, it had made him feel magnificent. When he was shaping metal into something useful, he thought he could do anything.
John unslung the hammer from his back and held it out in front of him in a defensive stance. He felt something surging up from his stomach, which he absently thought of as odd before pushing it outward, through his hands into the hammer, up the handle and into the head—
And it erupted in a brilliant blue gas flame that propelled it into a swing against his will like a jet engine, spinning John around at high speed three times, holding on so tightly his nails scored the handle. Dizzy, he fell to the ground. "Did…" he began, trying to keep steady, "did I do that right?"
"That was awesome, John!" said Roxy, eyes lighting up. "You just did the legendary Sheikah spinning slash! With a hammer! That is impressive!"
"And with blue fire too," added Aradia. "That's way hotter than red fire." John chuckled proudly and sat back down.
The children chatted for a while yet, and the brilliant half-moon shone over the canopy, light only amplified and reflected by the ever thickening fog by the time they decided to go to bed. A slight tremor shook them, but so slight that they barely felt it at all, with the exception of Aradia, who felt them damn near all the time and tended to ignore them much as she tried to ignore her attendants and their cold, dead gaze. They did not think to set a watch as they said their goodnights, trusting to Jaspers' unsleeping gaze to warn them of danger.
The moon was high overhead when the figure that had been watching them emerged from the wood. Jaspers saw the small, pale old Hylian and meowed a greeting. He grunted noncommittally and stepped over John's sleeping body to stand on the shore. The ground underneath was steaming. The pale man held a chart, an ancient thing made of rayskin and troll blood, and looked up at the sky. He made a sound somewhere between a sharp exhalation of breath and a guffawing laugh.
Just off shore, a hulking wreck of a ship rose from the sea, surrounded by cold foxfire. It sailed against the wind, making no impact on the water, leaving no wake, but as real as anything. "It looks haunted," said Jaspers, conversationally. The bright night was quickly darkening, as if the fog had turned to smoke, but smoke as cold as the grave.
"It's going to make me rich," said the pale man.
The island rumbled, much harder this time. A loud boom shook the air.
Author's note: yesterday was my dad's birthday, which lands on the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which you may or may not know is an incarnation of the Virgin Mary. 12 12 is also a Kanaya day if you go by the pseudo-canonical way of determining your patron troll: 1+2+1+2=6. Kanaya's ancestor is naturally the troll equivalent of the Virgin Mary. To quote the fabulous rezi: "Everything is Homestuck. Everything"
So good to be back in fanfiction, being met with the accolades of the crowds of people who share my interests, and so good to be back with Breath Waker after OMDNF three months? 0_0 I'm so sorry! *cries*
Oh, hey two Zelda songs in this chapter! To make up for the last one of course.
So yeah, we're going a bit off the rails here, but the train is still coasting along next to the rails, and if the tracks make a sharp turn we'll be able to get back on so we can comfortably straddle the original plot until we build up enough speed to take glorious flight! Not really spoilers: the tower of the gods will make a nonsense of you and the canon and everything you hold dear ^_^