As I'm sure it's been for a lot of us, this year has been ... a lot. But, as long as I live, this story does too. If it ever seems like I've abandoned it due to the long breaks between chapters, know that I'm probably just out there in the world having a helluva time, and I'm always still working on it whenever I can.

Next chapter will be out in a week, and the next-next one a week after that! That, I can pinky promise, because they're both done.

Quick recap of last chapter since it's been 800 years: Vanna and Link ascended Snowpeak, met Yeto, and traveled to his mansion.

I had been hoping that the inside of Yeto's mansion would be warmer. As per usual anymore, my hope was in vain.

A large section of the gabled roof of the foyer had collapsed, allowing snow to drift in. All around, the inside was more dilapidated than the view from outside had let on, filled with damaged remnants of prior grandeur. Both sets of staircases that led up to the second floor were so broken as to be unusable, leaving a tall set of double doors as our only way to pass through to where Yeto was presumably waiting for us.

On the other side of those double doors wasn't Yeto, but what I assumed was a human woman at first glance. She was lounging against a couch by a small fireplace, bundled up in a thick full-body sweater with no armholes.

After she turned her head toward us slowly, I changed my mind about her being human. She was close, to be sure, but no amount of normal human variation would have led to a face proportioned the way hers was. With her huge bug eyes and strangely wide head, she almost reminded me of Midna in a way. I wasn't sure if she was a Yeti or not, though, since she lacked the tusks, platypus tail, green scaly skin, and immense size of Yeto.

"Who...?" She stopped to cough. "Sorry, uh... I have sickness. Come closer, uh?"

My certainty that she wasn't human doubled when we approached her and I noticed that her six-toed feet each looked to have two soles in one. It was hard to keep myself from asking what she was.

Her tiny mouth spread into a weak grin, showcasing rodent-like buck teeth. "You cute little humans, uh. Husband told me you come to see pretty mirror he find for me. He in kitchen now making us food. Sit with me and find mirror after eat, uh?"

She motioned with her weird feet at the carpet in front of her. We sat down across from her at her request, with me about as close as I could be to the fireplace without catching on fire.

"Where is the mirror?" I asked.

"Oh, uh... Since I get mirror, I get sick, and then bad monsters appear. So many bad things happen since mirror... So we lock it in bedroom on third floor and hide key. But, uh, I not sure where key is... Fever makes head blurry."

A sudden loud bang shook the room, making Link and I jolt. Looking toward where the noise came from, it turned out to only be Yeto bursting through a door. I wondered how the door and the wall it smacked against weren't broken, especially if that was how he always entered rooms.

"New friends here!" Yeto bellowed. "Sorry I scare, uh. What I miss?"

"They ask where mirror is, uh... But I not remember where I hide key to bedroom."

"Ah... Told you let me hide it, uh," Yeto said, scratching his head. "It be a while until soup done, uh. Maybe they go look for key while wait? I can't leave soup alone long, uh..."

Link turned back to me. "Why don't I go? You can keep her company."

"I'll go with you," I said.

"Wouldn't you rather stay inside by the fire and get warmed up? I'll be fine on my own."

"But there're monsters. I don't want you to have to fight alone just because I'm a baby about the cold."

"Your problem with the cold is more than you bein' a 'baby' about it. It's dangerous for you to be in extreme temperatures."

"Hardly. I can't get frostbite or die of hypothermia. You can."

"Not with my built-in fur coat."

I didn't have a retort for that. Link realized as much, and having won, he rose to his feet and subtly tapped my shadow with his foot.

"So," Link said to Yeto's wife, "you got any clue where the key might be?"

"Uh... Maybe...? Leave kitchen, go to hallway, then room with weapon, then next room I think I leave key in, uh. Should be in chest."

"I show you on map of mansion in kitchen, uh," Yeto said. "Come!"

Link followed Yeto into the room he'd come in from, leaving me alone with Yeto's wife. She said nothing to me, making me wonder if she didn't care to have company or if she simply felt too ill to do much talking. Sighing, I rested my head against the column next to the fireplace.

For a multitude of reasons, I soon found myself regretting letting Link and Midna both leave me with a sickly, seemingly armless Yeti-like creature. It occurred to me that, though this was the Yeti's house, this had to technically be a dungeon, too—Snowpeak Ruins, as Zi had called it—which meant it was very likely more dangerous than any regular old house with monsters, with devious puzzles and death traps abound. And then, thinking of Zi brought my mind back to the day before, to my conversation with the fortuneteller, Fanadi, who had told me that son and father were coming soon. I wanted to go back and demand a more concrete answer as to how soon soon was.

Unable to suppress the feeling that soon was much sooner than I'd ever anticipate, I decided to try to decode the last cryptic words she had given me before telling me to fly away—"Death is on the table... But the answer is with you."

I went through countless potential answers in my head, none seeming more likely than the last, and I was left feeling frustrated and even more anxious. How was I supposed to know if I had the answer right or not?

"What's your name?" I asked Yeto's wife to distract myself when I couldn't handle thinking about it anymore.

"Husband not tell you, uh? My name Yeta."

"Yeta?" I repeated, and she nodded. "...Is it just a coincidence that you and your husband have matching names?"

Her giggle at my question turned into coughs, and she was still grinning when she got over her fit. "Uh, you know nothing of Yeti, do you? It okay, uh. That our family name. I-ending male, A-ending female, you get?"

"Oh. I didn't think family names were much of a thing here. So... You are a Yeti? You look a lot more human than your husband."

"That because I half, uh. Mother human, father Yeti."

My imagination going places I never wanted it to, I almost regretted asking. Almost. Horrified as I was for her mother, I was also burning with curiosity and teeming with more questions that I probably didn't really want the answers to.

At least talking to her had certainly gotten my mind off of everything else bothering me.

"Now you know about me, I ask you, uh? What your and friend names, and why you want see mirror?" Yeta asked.

It figured she was casual about a human-Yeti relationship given that she was the product of it, but I struggled to move my mind off that track. "Um, I'm Vanna, and my friend is Link. And the mirror... It's kinda a long story, but to keep it short, it's a fragment of a really important mirror and we need all the pieces, so—"

A murderous glare suddenly appeared on Yeta's face. "You here to take it?!" she snarled.

Her outburst led to another bout of coughing, during which I stumbled over words trying to apologetically explain why it was so important for us to take it. When she calmed, her stare was blank, like she was looking right through me. Her eyes blinked closed, and her head fell back against the couch.

I stayed where I was for a moment, wondering what the hell just happened before I got up to go tell Yeto.

Yeto said he'd seen her become defensive about the mirror multiple times. He had suggested getting rid of it since it seemed to be what had made her ill to begin with, but she insisted on keeping it, and locking it away in their house was the only compromise they could come to that didn't anger her. Apparently, it was common for her to fall asleep after each time she snapped, but he still wanted to go check on her quickly, so he told me to keep an eye on his soup while he went.

"Psst! Vanna?" a female voice quietly called out, making me jump.

It sounded like the voice came from behind a shelf, so I poked my head around it to look. Amid an assortment of wooden crates, rolled-up rugs, folded quilts, and other odds and ends were several pots, and a chicken foot was poking out of one of them.

"Ooccoo," I breathed out. I walked over to her and helped get her and her son out once again, and once again found that they were still disturbing to see. "Seriously, haven't we been over how you shouldn't keep getting into pots?"

"Oh, but I had to this time! The beast-man was going to cook me! You must let us into your pouch before he comes back!"

It took some effort to get my pouch off my belt from under Link's thick coat with gloved fingers, but I did it, and Ooccoo and her son slipped inside just in time. The door opened back up and Yeto called for me. I hurried back around to the other side of the shelf, clipping my pouch back to my belt as I moved.

"I'm here," I said.

"Uh! What you do back there? I ask you watch soup, uh."

"Sorry. It didn't look like it was gonna boil over or anything, so I thought it was okay to look around...?" I shrugged. "You know, some of those quilts you have back there look like you."

He let out a laugh so boisterous that I felt his warm breath standing yards away from him. "That because they made out of me fur that I shed, uh! You wear if like. You looks cold."

"Erm, I'm good. Thanks."

Yeto patted a crate near his cooking pot and told me to sit and make myself comfortable in here since Yeta was still out of it. I ended up liking it more there than out by the fireplace anyway—the cooking pot, being bigger than me, required a much larger fire to keep the soup inside boiling, making the kitchen warm enough that I could nearly forget I was out in the middle of my own personal frozen hellscape.

I was trying to politely decline Yeto's offer to taste test his soup—which reeked, unsurprisingly, of reekfish—when a frost-covered Link made it back with a pumpkin. His skin, where it wasn't obscured by the glittery white ice crystals, was a bright red.

Yeto and I were both rushing over to him as soon as we saw him, though it turned out that Yeto was only interested in the pumpkin and not the affliction Link was very clearly in. The ferocity he yanked the pumpkin away from Link with was enough to send Link tumbling to the floor.

"Seriously?" I shouted toward Yeto as I crouched down next to Link.

"Pumpkin make for better soup flavor, uh!" was the only justification Yeto gave before taking the pumpkin over to his cutting board.

My hands hovered awkwardly in front of Link, feeling like I had to do something but having no idea where to even begin. "So much for your built-in fur coat, huh?" I mumbled.

"Paws aren't good at holding pumpkins," he responded innocently. "Needed hands."

"You might not even have hands much longer if you stay like this. Come on, let's go by the fire."

He was stiff standing up, like his body had turned into the ice that covered him. Once he was sitting down next to the fire, I raised a finger, told him to stay put, and went back around the shelf. I returned with one of the quilts made out of Yeto's fur and tried to wrap it around him, only to be surprised when he tried to move out of the way.

"I don't want that," he said. "It's already hot enough with the fire here."

It took me a second to realize he wasn't joking. Curiously, I slipped off a glove and reached out to touch his cheek. The second skin met skin, Link winced away and hissed. Had I not known I was touching his face, I would have assumed it was ice.

"Jesus, Link," I said. "You're freezing."

"No, your hand's just like fire. I'm hot."

"Maybe you feel that way, but—"

"'Cause it's true."

"Link," I said slowly. "I know normal temperatures can feel uncomfortably warm when you're cold—and yes, you are cold, even if you think you're not—but that doesn't mean you should avoid getting warm. You need to get warmed up, unless you wanna die. So I'm gonna put this blanket back on you, okay? For your own good."

He wasn't happy about it, but this time he let me wrap it around him. It swallowed him up, leaving only his head poking out through the top. "You really don't think this is a li'l overkill? I'll drown in my sweat in here before I freeze to death."

"No, it's not overkill, not when you're so cold you don't even know how cold you are. Really, what happened out there? You weren't even gone that long."

"I didn't find the key. The pumpkin I brought back was where the wife said it was."

"That's—well, not surprising she gave you the wrong location, considering how she is right now. But I was trying to ask about..." I gestured to him, moving my hand up and down, "...this. The frost."

"...A Freezard froze me," he admitted. At the look I made, he tagged on, "But I'm fine."

His answer was consistent with the state he was in but confounding at the same time. Freezards were one of the entries from Link's monster encyclopedia that had stuck out to me the most—mainly because the book had led me to believe that being frozen by one was a death sentence. It mentioned strong enough victims being able to break free of the ice that encased them, but hadn't specified what came of those people afterward, hence me assuming death would still come around to them. After all, who could really survive being literally frozen?

"I shouldn't have given in," I muttered. I shook my head and huffed. "Okay, you know what? I'm gonna be the one to look for the key."

"Vanna—"

"No. And don't tell me about your fur coat, because that obviously can't help you if you need hands and you're not in it. It's nowhere near as dangerous for something like that to happen to me as it is to you. I can not get hypothermia. At worst, I'll stop working until I'm back to a normal temperature. It's not a big deal."

"It is a big deal," he said. I went to refute him, but he continued on. "I talked to Zi about you back in the Arbiter's Grounds when we were together, about you passin' out in the heat. He said extreme temperatures can damage you—not just heat. That time alone could'a done messed you up more than you know."

"So? Better for me to be damaged than you to be dead."

A moment passed, during which I could watch that statement sinking in, sobering him. He lowered his sight to the ground, and finally gave a quiet, "Yeah."

Things got worse for Link before they got better.

Going from so freezing that cold feels like hot to freezing just enough to be painfully aware you're freezing left him yearning for the former, though he knew it was good he'd recovered past that point. All the shivers that'd been suppressed by the previous severity of his condition hit him full force, to the point where he could hardly raise the spoon to his mouth when Yeto offered him some soup. Fatigue caught up to him not long after, and he barely made it to the couch in the living room before passing out.

He slept through the rest of the day and well into the next. By then, the frost had all thawed and his skin had returned to a more normal color, but he still couldn't stave off the shivers and he stayed cold to the touch.

We moved back into the kitchen to sit near the cooking pot's large flame for warmth not long after he woke. Come lunchtime, we were eating soup again, this time pumpkin flavored, and Yeto was out in the living room feeding Yeta hers. I finished mine first, what with Link still struggling to have any soup left on his spoon by the time he got it to his mouth.

"Wha-what did you do whi-while I was out?" Link asked after a successful mouthful.

"Read books, went through their collection of paintings... When I got bored, I took Ooccoo and her son out front to build snowmen. Junior wasn't good at it."

Link snorted at the last sentence, which made me laugh, which made him laugh even more. "You went out into the sn-snow for fun?"

I playfully nudged his knee with my foot. "Come on, I'm not that much of a snow-hater that I can't have any fun in it. I liked sledding here yesterday, too, remember?"

"Mm, yeah. Well..." He raised the bowl to his mouth slowly and took a sip of the broth. "Guess we'll have to come back here sometime. Maybe in the summer ... and not in the mi-middle of a blizzard."

A little smile crept up on my face at that. Summer was months away (technically, it wouldn't even be winter yet for a couple more weeks), and all this quest stuff with Midna would probably be over by then—yet he was still imagining me being there with him after all that time. It made me feel pathetically sentimental to think that I'd become a fixture of his life as much as he'd become one of mine.

"I think I'd like that," I said.

He smiled in return, and let things fall back into a comfortable silence. Link still had some left to go of his meal when Yeto came back to the kitchen a couple of minutes later, empty bowl in hand.

"Hey," I greeted him. "How's Yeta?"

"Feeling a little better, uh. She say she think she know where key is now," he responded as he sat the bowl down on the countertop. "Green boy, uh, you go look again?"

"Actually, I'm going to look for it," I said, standing and eyeing Link to make sure he didn't intend to go back on his prior agreement.

"Uh, okay." Yeto didn't sound like he particularly cared which one of us was going. "Room not far from here where she say it is, but it dangerous. Go to courtyard, and door across lead straight to room with key in chest, uh... But big ice monster keep appearing in front of it. We move cannon there. You shoot it to get through if it back again, uh."

I imagined he must have been talking about a Freezard, but then his last sentence caught up to me. "Shoot it with a cannon?" I repeated.

"Uh," Yeto said affirmatively.

I blinked a few times, waiting for him to supply more information. He didn't. "...I ... don't know how to shoot a cannon," I finally said.

He stomped over to an open crate and dug around inside it, and his hands came back out with a crumpled, sooty sheet of paper. "Here," he said, shoving it toward me. "Manual for cannons, uh."

"Oh. Thanks." I considered asking him to come help me anyway since he obviously knew how to handle them—I was terrified of accidentally blowing myself to pieces, even with instructions—but decided that I needed to stop being such a wimp. If that walking quilt could use a cannon without blowing himself up, so could I.

Some of the paper looked like it had been blown off, but enough remained of the instructions for me to get the gist of it. I handed it back to Yeto when I was done looking over it. Link told me to be safe before Yeto and I walked out of the kitchen, and I told him I'd try my best not to come back an ice sculpture like he had.

Yeto brought me to the door in the sitting room that led out to the courtyard, and then there was a quiet knock from the front door, and he left to go see who it was. I took a moment to steel myself before opening the door, but there was no way to prepare myself for the glacial draft that hit me in the face when I did.

It was impossible to miss the Freezard; it was much bigger than I'd thought it would be, rivaling Yeto's size. Also impossible to miss were the wolves made of ice bounding toward me the second they saw me. They were dealt with easily enough, as most of them practically killed themselves by jumping directly into my extended sword, but their numbers made them a nuisance. As one shattered at the end of my blade, another formed in the snow. A few managed to clamp their jaws around my arm, but their teeth were unable to penetrate my skin thanks to the absurd number of thick layers I was wearing.

It was only after I'd finally managed to trudge my way over to the cannon and peeked carefully into its empty barrel that I realized I'd need to hunt down a cannonball. I could see one covered in frost right next to the Freezard, but I was not going up to grab it. Rather than setting out to hunt one down immediately, I opted to try to destroy it another way—bomb arrows.

The resulting flames from the explosion flickered over its hulking form for less than a second, only to be extinguished in a puff of glittery steam. When the flurries and smoke settled, there was no sign there'd been an explosion at all.

The disappointment from my little failed experiment didn't last long, at least, as I luckily managed to find a few cannonballs stashed in a nearby hallway. Getting one back to the cannon was more of a problem than finding them in the first place. It was so heavy that I needed both hands to carry it, leaving me vulnerable to the ice wolves. My outer layers were in tatters by the time I made it over, which was at approximately the same time that I remembered I had a magic pouch I could have stuffed it in for the walk over. I was chiding myself for being forgetful—and pondering if some fault could be put on the temperature affecting me—as I pushed the cannonball down the barrel.

I ducked behind a nearby column and clamped my hands over my ears in preparation for the cannon going off. When it did, it shook my body like an earthquake, and the boom made my hearing crackle away to white noise in spite of my effort covering my ears.

Peering back around the column, I saw that the giant, immobilized Freezard was no longer blocking the double doors, but in its place were several chunks of it gliding around. As best as I could through the thick snow, I made a dash for the doors, sidestepping the mobile remains of the Freezard. Safely inside, I let out a sigh that I couldn't hear before turning and taking in the room I had entered.

The first thing I caught sight of made me lurch back, only to let out another relieved sigh when I realized it was just a suit of armor. It was positioned in a way that the gauntlets held up a thick chain attached to a spiked metal ball resting on the stone next to the suit's shoes. The whole room, I then realized, was an armory. Iron bars lined either side, and behind them were a variety of extra armor pieces and weaponry. I was slow walking down the gap between the iron bars, checking out all the contents stored behind them. I had half a mind to ask Yeto if Link and I could have some of it. Most of the armor could never fit his body, and the weapons would be puny in his monstrous hands.

I had just passed up another suit of armor and was steps away from the door leading to the room where the key supposedly was when my hearing finally came back. It was not the gentle tap of my boots on the stone floor that alerted me to this change, however; it was a strange whirling sound coming from behind me.

My head had barely turned in the direction of the sound when the suit of armor nearest to me broke apart, pieces clattering noisily to the floor. In the middle of the fallen pieces was the spiked metal ball. My eyes followed the chain it was attached to back to the other end of the room, where it was still in the grasp of the other suit of armor—which had turned to face me, hunched over, foot raised to take another step forward.

Acting unthinkingly, automatically, in self-preservation, I quickly slipped into the next room to get away from it.

That decision was regretted near instantaneously when I found that the small room I was in had no other doors leading out of it. I raced to the chest in the room and ripped it open, planning to grab the key from inside and then use the chest to get up to the small gated window and escape. Inside was not a key, but a wheel of cheese—but I couldn't allow myself to feel any disappointment about this whole thing having been pointless, not when I could hear the whirl of the ball and chain getting closer every second.

I slammed the chest shut, stood atop it, and reached up to wrap my fingers around the thin intricate bars that covered the window. No matter how hard I yanked on them, they wouldn't yield.

"Midna!" I yelled. "You need to either rip these bars off for me or teleport me away, now!"

Every millisecond that passed as I waited for her to appear from my shadow was painful. My panic came to its height when a full five seconds passed, and I realized why she wasn't appearing.

She was still in Link's shadow.

My hand was shaking as I retrieved my sword from its sheath and jumped off the chest. I was going to have to fight this thing—this gigantic, fully-armored, ball-and-chain-wielding thing—by myself, in this tiny room.

I knew I could not open the doors and step out to face it myself—that thing would immediately send the ball flying directly toward me faster than I could back out of the way. If I waited for it to break through the doors, though, I would have a chance to run forward and attack before it could draw the heavy ball back. Still, even knowing that this had to be the best option, it was excruciating waiting for the spiked ball to burst through the flimsy wooden doors. The distress of waiting hopelessly for Midna's appearance was nothing compared to the terror that flooded through every part of me in anticipation of this.

There was the shortest familiar sound from behind the door, a sort of electric snap, followed by loud metallic thumps, and the whirl of the ball and chain was no more.

"...What?" I whispered to myself.

I waited, listening intently for more, but all I could hear was footfalls—soft ones, not the kind I knew I would hear if it was the armor-clad monster approaching the door. Wondering who, or what, was out there now, I opened one of the doors and peeked out.

My heart stopped.

I slipped between the iron bars before I could process anything other than the urgent need to get out. My legs picking up the pace of my now thundering heart, I raced to the other side of the room from behind the safety of the bars. I had to make it to the other door where they couldn't catch me. I had to get out. I had to get out.

But Zi was faster than me. He made it to the door before I did, and I could not slip back through the bars to get to it with him standing right there.

Again, I found myself acting without thinking, self-preservation reigning supreme over any hesitance I might have otherwise had, and I thrust my sword forward from between the bars to stab him in the leg.

His laser gun clambered to the ground, and as he staggered backward in pain and his dad ran toward us, I dropped my sword, slipped back through the bars, and bolted out the doors. I didn't care about the ice wolves that lunged at me, nor the little chunks of the Freezard that slid my way—I only cursed the heavy snow for slowing me down, turning my movement to a slog. The doors to the sitting room looked so far away.

The doors behind me blasted open, but I didn't look back. I didn't want to know how fast they were gaining on me. I knew I was no match for the Riders, even when one was hindered by an injury and the other by his age, with their legs being nearly twice as long as mine.

"Link!" I screamed as loud as I could. "Midna! Midna, warp me!"

Arms wrapped around my midsection suddenly, and I was jerked backward. I screeched for him to let me go, to get off, while I tried to get out of his grasp with all my might.

Mr. Rider walked in front of me, retrieved a copy of NEVA out of his back pocket, and grabbed my right wrist so tight it hurt. I kicked him in the shin, but it only made him grunt in pain and squeeze my wrist even harder. He was strapping NEVA around my arm when the sitting room door swung open and Link ran out at full speed with Midna at his side.

But they were too late.

"NEVA, activate," Mr. Rider spat. "Teleport: Ridertech office base."