The Gorons of the Southern Mine approved of Link's new buddy. The new little Hylian was inquisitive and enthusiastic about all manner of mining procedures, no matter how boring or pedantic. She swelled with excitement for the work they had done and the work they could do, bouncing excitedly it a way the Gorons found delightfully strange.

Gorons don't bounce.

She wanted to know about smelting and iron working and stone work. Could they build walls? Could they build roads? Could they build bridges? Could they build pipes? She tried to take notes in a journal made of paper, but the pages caught fire in her hand, and she squeaked and tossed it to the ground and stomped on it and shoved it away in her pack before it could light again. She then pulled out Link's strange Shiekah device and took notes on that as if she hadn't been slowed down at all.

None of the construction projects she suggested made any sense. Yeah, they could help her build a wall or a building out of bricks or stone, but why not just be out in the air? It's so nice out. Yeah, they could fix a bridge, but that seemed like a thing you'd do if you wanted to cross a river, and that sounded like a big expedition to somewhere cold with bad food. Who needed that? And, yeah, they could help her make her pipes, easy peasey, but it sounded like she wanted to move water around, and what was the point of that?

Not that the told her any of this. The eccentric Hylian had eccentric plans, but her excitement was contagious and she was very kind about the whole thing. Let her have fun constructing her weird Hylian inventions. To each their own.

#

Zelda wakes in a blind panic, with Ganon's hot, damp breath squeezing her tight. She gasps but can't breathe as flaming embers of malice flutter before her eyes. It's dark and close and hot and he's suffocating her, just as he's suffocated her every day for a century, and she clutches at her throat. He's laughing, laughing, laughing, and she wants to scream but she's choking.

Zelda? Zelda?

She's drenched in sweat and there's malice everywhere. It floats before her eyes and it's all she can see and it eats at her skin. It grabs her face, hot and tacky, and she cries out and jerks back. Ganon's laugh is a roar in her ears, louder louder until the demon is just screaming.

Cold grabs her face this time, and she squeaks in shock, but it's holding her firm and she can't pull away. It holds her jaw, hooks under her ears. Malice isn't cold.

"Zelda, close your eyes."

Malice isn't cold. She closes her eyes, tries to focus on the cold, but she's still gasping for breath, her chest heaving and tight and stabbing. Cold fingertips brush the back of her hair line. Cold thumbs hold her cheeks. Cold fingers find the soft places under her jaw.

"That's it. Breathe."

The hands on her face are warming as she sucks the chill from them. One hand vanishes as she tries to slow her breathing. It reappears refreshed and chilling again, and she shudders as it cups her face. So so gently. The warm hand disappears, and she leans into the cold.

He switches hands again and again, chilling one while the other comforts her. He presses his palm to the back of her neck. He presses his palm to her chest, cupping the base of her throat between thumb and forefinger, calloused finger draining the heat from her collarbone. He presses a palm to her forehead, and her face smooths under his care, her face tilting back and her lips parting, and slowly, slowly, she remembers.

Link. Eldin. They made camp at the Southern Mine.

She tries to place herself. Tries to observe. Use her ears. Hear what's actually there.

But what's actually there is a heat like Ganon and the crackling sound of malice.

And the cold. The cold she can latch onto. The cold isn't in her memories, but it's here. Now. In the future.

"I'm slipping a hand down the back of your shirt. Alright?"

She nods, and he rolls forward for a better angle, slipping a cool palm down her spine to rest between her shoulder blades. She lets out a breathy whimper, and opens her eyes.

"There you are," Link says. His voice is quiet. He smiles at her, but there's concern on his face. He's trying to hide it. His eyes are the wrong color. They're flat black and sparking with orange as they catch the fire. They're not blue at all. She shuts her eyes before her stomach can twist.

He has a frost blade in his lap, and he's clutching it with his free hand. It must hurt to be so close to it. She wants to be closer to it.

"Did the elixir stop working?" she asks.

"Nah," he murmurs. "Just a panic attack."

She snorts. It's undignified.

He shifts to change hands, pulling her hair over her shoulder as he sends cold down her spine.

She bows forward to rest her forehead on his shoulder. Her face is tacky with evaporated tears. She lets the chill of the blade rise up to cool her face. She wants to take it and tuck it under her armpit, where it will burn so cold, where it'll cool her whole body. She wants to lie down again and clutch it to her chest. If someone had told her a hundred years ago that she would want to snuggle with a giant, frozen sword, she would have scoffed at them.

"I'm such a mess," she moans.

"Hey, you're back to feeling embarrassed when you shouldn't be. That means you're feeling better."

In a small voice she asks, "Do you have any water?" She tries not to whine when he pulls away to shift through his stuff. Her head still rests on his shoulder, and the blade still radiates cold below her, but the heat reclaims where his hands held her. It takes a while for him to find the bottle of water.

"Careful. I dropped an ice arrow in there."

He did. The fletching sticks out of the jar, which grows colder as she holds it. She has to shift the arrow to the side to drink. The water's lukewarm as it hits her tongue.

When she's done, she rests her head back onto his shoulder.

"It's just...the heat. It's like..."

He waits for her to finish. It's unlike her not to finish. But she can't bring herself to describe the Calamity's breath with words.

Link knows what she means anyway. "Do we need to warp out of here?" he asks. "We can go to Rito Village first."

"No. I just need to...I need..." She needs to cool down, which is impossible, because she's surrounded by fire. Everything's burning. Her city is burning, and she's walking into it, and she's lifting a hand—

She grabs the ice arrow out of the empty bottle and presses the flat of the head against her breast bone. She hisses at the painful cold through her thin, red shirt, but the sting snatches her thoughts away and keeps them from spiraling. Link pulls her kerchief from her hair, eases the arrow away from her, and wraps it up to protect her before handing it back. It's not nearly as potent, and now her wild hair is free for all to see. She glares up at Link from her spot against his chest.

He is unmoved. He slides a cold hand to the small of her back under her shirt, and she shudders and closes her eyes, focusing on just his hand and breathing.

#

The Gorons roll up and greet them when they enter Goron City. They just do it individually, unlike other places where Link and Zelda had found themselves in the center of a swarm. Only half of the Gorons ask for things or let them know about problems. Mostly, they're just glad to see Link and meet Link's new friend. Those who do have issues that Link and Zelda could solve mostly talk about how the monsters are back at North Mine. Perhaps once they resolve that, the Gorons will open up about their other areas of concern.

Zelda's secretly relieved that the Gorons seem so relaxed. She's still jumping at movement out of the corners of her eyes. She spins to find nothing there but lava she mistook for malice. She's not sure how well she would have dealt with a dozen Gorons pinning her in, squeezing into her space, telling her of a thousand horrible problems.

Link leads her to Bludo the boss' house, where Bludo slaps his shoulder in greeting, and even though the boss seems on the frail side for a Goron, Link's knees still almost buckle. Zelda has such a strong sense of double vision, of the past and the future plying out before her eyes in exactly the same ways, that it's Daruk before her, ready to throw back his head and laugh like an avalanche, that she lowers her eyes to look at the floor to disrupt the vision.

"This is Zelda," Link says, rather than introducing her as the princess. She's not surprised that word of who she is hasn't reached the Gorons. They just opened the path to the city behind them, and the Zora have even more trouble than Hylians getting here. Hopefully, the Zoras won't spread it around too far. Hopefully, if they do mention it, the rest of Hyrule will dismiss the notion.

The boss peeks at her with one squinted eye. "The famous Zelda," he says. Then he complains about his back. Zelda adds it to her short list of complaints. She bets the Gerudo have something that would help him. They used to have a thick paste that they would rub on sore muscles, and it would heat and heat until the muscles eased. It smelled awful and medicinal.

She wonders if Link might have some squirreled away on his person at this very moment.

"We figured when Vah Rudania shot that big ol' explosion towards the castle and then shut down, that you'd beat that Calamity something fierce," Bludo says. "Well, Yunobo was convinced it was you, any how. Kept going on about it. So, yeah. Not surprising to hear."

"Zelda helped," Link says.

"Did you? Well, good job, little brother!"

It takes Zelda a second to realize he's speaking to her. "You're—You're too kind," she says. She ducks a short bow and rallies. "And now that the Calamity is over, we're hoping to rebuild some of the deteriorating infrastructure. It would be immensely helpful if we could ask for the Goron's expertise in these areas."

The boss seems almost interested in the Zora reservoir repairs. He scratches his chin and stares into space and says, "Hmmmm."

He's less interested in renewed trade and the mail system that Zelda wants to bring back once the roads are safe to travel.

He scoffs that they want to bring Vah Rudania back online.

"They say it used to protect us once," he says. "But I've never seen it do anything other than stomp around and make trouble and then shut itself off."

"With a new pilot, I believe she can once again be a force for good."

"And that new pilot would be you, would it?"

Zelda pulls back in surprise. "I...Of course not! We've never even considered anyone other than a Goron for the role. We'd hoped that you would have a recommendation. Someone with strength of spirit and a kind heart, a champion like Lord Daruk."

"No one's like Lord Daruk," Bludo mutters. "They don't make them that way anymore. But you're trying to get me to say Yunobo. Don't pretend you're not. Fine. Take him. He's the only one who'd be even slightly interested. He's been going on about the old beast anyway. But if he blows up anything important, that's on you."

Link grins at her, but Zelda doesn't know what to make of this. Can they truly have a Champion who has only the grudging support of his people? Although she herself was never technically a Champion, she supposes the same could have been said about her. Does she really want to put someone in the embarrassing position she once held? But then again, the stakes now are much lower. It's not life or death and the end of the world.

"What do you think about what Bludo said? About how no one is like Lord Daruk anymore?" Zelda asks over dinner. The Gorons let Link cook on the big grill, but she can tell how disgusted they are with Hylian food. "Perhaps in the interviewing years, Daruk's legacy has been embellished. Now he's some kind of mythical figure."

Link shrugs and talks between mouthfuls of curry. "He was a great guy."

"Oh, unquestionably. He was a tremendous leader and a brilliant warrior. He was a true friend. But he was not without fault. It seems as if those faults are no longer a part of his story. Now no one can live up to him."

"Faults like what?"

"Like...not that he was a coward, but he worried. And those worries distracted him. They ate at him. And—surely you must remember—he was kind hearted, but that meant he sometimes had trouble being decisive."

"Sounds like Yunobo," Link says.

"It just...it worries me to think of what they might expect of new Champions. How they could ever live up to expectations." She worries what the stories say about her.

He takes another bite and chews as he squints out over the cityscape. Zelda's trying not to look at it, focusing instead on her dinner. "You know what I remember?" he asks. "I remember that he liked me. I don't remember very many people liking me."

"What?"

"I mean, I get that my memories are spotty, and they all have the inevitable apocalypse as a background. The king and Urbosa had bigger things to deal with than me. And Revali was...well...Revali. And you were..."

"I was me?" She gives him a self-deprecating smile.

He returns a real smile. "You were you."

Then he's looking back at the city again. "But Daruk, he was kind. He was affectionate. He liked me and didn't care who knew it."

Zelda watches him for a long moment as he shrugs and eats more curry. She turns to try to see what he sees out over the lava and leans her shoulder against his.