Over the past few days, Zelda has made absolutely no progress on her house enhancement projects. She and Link have barely even gone outside.
They're dozing when there's a knock at the door, and Link startles awake, saying, "Zelda?"
She mutters and nuzzles her face against his bare chest. "Someone's at the door."
"Who?" he asks, as if she would know.
"It's every villager in Hateno. They sensed that I touched male genitalia, and now they're here to run us out of town."
"Mmm. Did your hand magically turn bright green?"
Without opening her eyes, she holds her hand up near his face. He takes hold of it and kisses her fingers. She assumes it has not turned green and places some kisses against his chest. Smooth and neat, he pulls her hand over his shoulder, drawing her up and sealing his lips over hers. It's easy and warm and soft, and he slips a comfortable hand into the back of her pajama pants to squeeze her rear and pull her closer.
They're new pajama pants, as she can't bring herself to look at what she wore on Naboris. They're the same comfy Gerudo make, printed with the latest Gerudo design craze: snapping clawed crabs. It's silly how proud she is of them. She likes the new sleep shirt slightly less, but it's clear Link likes it a great deal. The shirt is sky blue and shows off her cleavage.
Just as he rolls over her, there's another knock at the door.
"Link," she groans. "Answer the door."
"Hmm."
"What if it's Sidon, and he's traveled all the way here to see you?"
"What if it's Purah, and she wants to talk at me?"
She nudges him in the ribs until he grumbles his way out of bed. He fumbles around on the floor for his shirt and pads downstairs.
From the sound of it, it's Symin, come to deliver something. He seems intent on leaving rather quickly, which begs the question of why he didn't just drop whatever it was on the doorstep and leave.
When Link returns, he climbs back into bed, and slips rather gracefully under her. "It was Symin. He brought back your plants. They're in a box on the table."
Link is still wearing a shirt, which is disappointing, but probably for the best since he answered the door. She cracks an eye open and immediately sits up. "You're wearing my shirt."
He looks down at the red cotton he's wearing and says, "This is my shirt."
"Oh please. That hasn't been your shirt for months."
He thinks about that. "You stretched it out all weird."
She did no such thing.
And now that she's looking at Link, it's not surprising the Symin made such a hasty exit. Link's hair is disheveled, and he has not one but two bright red marks on the side of his neck. At least he's not wearing the shirt inside out.
The Goddess only knows what Link would do if he were actively trying to ruin her reputation.
She did ask him to get the door, so it's really her own fault. Not that it matters anyway.
She stretches and finger combs her hair, which turns out to be a much larger endeavor than she first suspected. She pulls the front part down in front of her face, stretching it as far as it will go. It's now down to her shoulders and has started peeking out from beneath her kerchief.
She sets her jaw and makes an attempt at braiding it. The braid comes out thinner than usual, so she has to gather more hair as she goes, locking it into place without the use of the old clips she used to use. She'll need to do a better job combing if she intends to wear this out of doors, but as a proof of concept, it seems to be working.
Link rubs a hand absently up and down her thigh as she works. When she gets the left half of the braid done, she steals the hairband that has slipped from Link's hair and ties off the end of the braid where it's hidden under her hair. "That looks good," Link says.
"Really?"
"Yeah." He sits up, reaches out, and pats it, like he's afraid of dislodging it. "I like the bandana, but this is nice."
"It's a kerchief," she explains, separating out the hair on the right side so she can braid that as well.
"Hey," he says, scooching slightly closer. "You can say no. But what do you think about coming with me to the last part of the Champion Trial? To whatever's waiting for me on the Great Plateau?"
She pauses her braiding, looking up at him through her pinched fingers. "What kind of trial do you expect?"
He shrugs. "Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe better. Even if it's fighting a million monsters, there's got to be another shrine at the end, right?"
"Do you—" She stops herself. Bites her lip. "If the previous trials had you relive the other Champion's final battles..."
"You think it will have me fight Ganon again?"
She frowns at her hair.
He rubs her arm and smiles at her. "Ganon wasn't that bad. I don't think I'd be even a little emotional to kick him around some more."
She hums and goes back to her braid. This side is going to look worse than the other. She can't shake the feeling that there's one more champion whose final battle he hasn't faced and come out victorious. She can't help but picture the plain full of guardians, surging like a tide in the dark, a dozen red beams dotting his chest. It was dark and drizzling and her feet were covered in mud.
She blinks. She's in the house in Hateno, and it's the bright of midday, and she's wearing pajamas with crabs on them.
"I'll come," she says. "But only for the shrines."
#
When they land in the Shrine of Resurrection, Link says, "Oh! Have you seen my bathtub?" He grabs her hand and pulls her towards the stasis chamber.
There's currently a korok inside it.
Link grins at her as if seeing this is a special treat for her, a piece of technology she's never even conceived of before, much less managed to restore to functionality on her own and then ordered its use on him in the moment of their greatest need.
Link gives it a fond look. "I spent most of my life in this bathtub. You could say I grew up here. This is kinda like me taking you home to meet the family!" He gestures at the korok, who giggles and squeaks, "Blessings!"
She stares at the both of them.
"Oh! And this is that terrible weapon I was telling you about, remember? The one-hit obliterator. Don't touch it."
She has no plans to touch it. "Where do you think the challenge is?"
"The voice said to put the slate in the slot thing."
"I don't believe a voice told you that."
"I'm paraphrasing." He slips the slate from her hands and sets it in the pedestal. It spins and twists, and with a sudden clunk all the beams of the door slide closed, sealing them in. She grabs for Link's arm in the dark, but before the fear can do more than squeeze her chest, the whole room shudders, and then the floor is moving, and she's holding Link's arm for balance now more than reassurance.
"We're lowering," she whispers, the thrill of new discovery pushing aside her fear. This room was an elevator all along. She spins around, searching the ceiling and the walls. The challenge must have lain dormant in the ground for eons.
Even as they continue downward, the door reopens, leading out onto the antechamber, which has turned into a balcony encased in the same force-field-like curtain that surrounds the Sheikah monks. They step out to a view of a tremendous cavern with what must be artificial light, but is so different from the light inside the shrines. Are they in a previously undiscovered pit? She tries to place where they are on the plateau. Maybe they're under the River of the Dead, and the light looks strange filtered through the water.
Link squeezes her arm and nods to the space below them...and the enormous engine that takes up the bulk of the cavern.
Zelda can't breathe.
The room comes to rest with a shudder, and Link grabs her arm before she can race out into the room. "I saw a guardian. Wait here a second." He darts off, his running footsteps loud on the stone. She bounces in excitement, them jumps at the explosion. He calls the all clear, and she forces herself to take a deep breath, push down the fear and embrace the excitement. As she meets up with him again, she tries to make herself look where she's going, keep an eye out for more guardians, but her eyes dart around, trying to take in everything, make sense of it all.
Link waits for her by a prominently placed guidance stone, and as soon as she joins him, they have a map, and as soon as they have a map and access to a modicum of control over this new Divine Beast—because the slate says it's a Divine Beast—Zelda has the central axle that stretches across the great room spinning, and she's running around, making sense of the gears. She takes excessive notes, eventually getting caught up enough that she plops down on the stairs to write in a journal and then climbs up to get a better look at how things fit together. Link doesn't rush her, but he's on alert, wary that they'll stumble across more guardians. He hovers behind her and below her, his eyes in constant motion. He keeps turning his back to her to watch the room, and the set of his shoulders reminds her so strongly of when he acted as her appointed knight that anything she means to say to him catches in her throat. But then he turns back and looks up at the contraptions over their heads, his eyes alight and his face open, and her hesitations wash away.
The beast is a marvel. She has no idea what it does.
It seems that there are four side chambers off the main room, with a control panel that they must activate inside each. Even getting inside each chamber is a bit of a puzzle, but she's certain she can solve them.
"What kind of animal do you think it resembles from the outside? It's underground, so perhaps some sort of tunneling beast. And I would guess it has four appendages, given the side rooms, so perhaps some sort of quadrupedal beast. Maybe a dog."
"Or a wolf," Link says.
"Maybe it's a mole!"
"Maybe it's like the Lord of the Mountain. Or a dragon!"
When she next checks the time, her face flushes at how long she's taken. She hastily dusts off her pants and says, "Well, I suppose we should activate the terminals now." Link turns to face her, and his carefully blank look tells her that he's trying his best not to laugh.
She leads him to the chamber involving lava first, just to poke at him a bit. To get inside the chamber, Link has to hop onto a cog of a spinning gear and ride it over a pool of lava. He tries to find a different way for her to get in: can he pull her up somehow, or is there something to push to make a bridge, or could she just stay behind? While he's searching for a safe path, she steps on the next cog to come splashing out of the lava and smirks as she hops onto the platform beside him. He is unimpressed.
Inside there is more lava, as expected, but to cross it they have to walk across a spinning axle covered in spikes. Tongues of fire shoot out from all directions at odd intervals. They stare at the room a moment, before Zelda says, "Perhaps I'll just stay here."
On the other end of the fiery bridge, there's a puzzle involving a twisted, spinning tube and a ball that (of course) needs to go in a hole. The only way to get the ball through the tube is for Zelda (who has the slate) to change the direction of all the spinning at precise moments, so Link has to shout over the noise of the churning gears and the roaring flames to let her know when to switch directions. He is very bad at it. Back and forth and back, with the ball tumbling out the way it came in on a few botched attempts, and Link shouting that he's sorry, he'll get it this time, until he finally vanishes down a slope and reappears with a ball. He opens a small gate near where Zelda waits, and together they activate the first terminal.
There's a deep clunking out in the main chamber, and Zelda hurries to get back out and see what's happened, what's changed, but the door is rotating, and she has to wait for it to come back around again before she can duck out. The second she does, Link grabs for her and snatches her back, pressing her tight against the wall.
"What? No! We need to see what—"
"What changed is now there's a bunch of guardians, standing outside waiting for us."
She blinks at him. He lifts his eyebrows.
The door has rotated again, so she can't see out. Instead, she pulls out the slate and has it search for guardians. "The little ones," Link says.
The slate pings in her hands, and she nearly drops it.
"They're just the little ones," he assures her.
The door comes around again, and Link smacks a kiss to the side of her forehead and ducks out. She counts four guardians, their faces swiveling towards Link, their eyes lighting to attention, before the door rotates around again. All she's left with is the sounds of explosions—the impact of lasers or the defeat of the guardians?—and the steady ping of the slate. Ping. They're out there. Ping. They're out there. Ping. They're out there. She can't close her eyes and imagine anything but death. She can't open her eyes to the present and watch the horrible lava. So she turns her back to the room and watches the door turn and turn and turn.
Another explosion, and the slate tries to find a new target. Then it goes silent.
Link's arms are full of ancient springs and screws, which he presents to her with a grin.
The next chamber is a huge tube with the floor and walls and ceiling near the entrance spinning under their feet. Clearly, she has to make the rest of the room spin as well, because the chamber has an electric pylon in glowing green, which needs to connect to the wires leading to the next terminal.
"Oh," she says. "The rooms are themed."
"What?"
"This is electricity. The next two chambers are going to be water and wind."
She gets out the magnesis rune and starts moving things about as Link thinks about her prediction as if he doesn't quite believe her.
There's a metal rod that she needs that's being stored up in the ceiling. Both she and Link hold the slate up as high as they can, but neither are tall enough to reach it. So Link rides the spinning floor up the wall until he's close enough to the roof to tug it free, at which point he falls off, loses control of the metal slab, and they both come crashing down. The metal beam bounces, and then is dragged to the side as the floor moves under it. The noise leaves her ears ringing.
Link lands gently with his paraglider. "You okay?" he asks.
She glares at him as she straightens up from where she ducked for cover, and snatches the slate out of his hands. She maneuvers the beam with pointed grace, and soon they activate the second terminal to another deep rumble that causes the ground to tremble.
The slate doesn't ping, but Link flicks through the screens to the compendium and has it search for the bigger guardian scouts.
There's a bigger guardian scout.
Link goes off to fight it, and there are a handful of explosions, but when he returns he looks confused and the slate is still pinging.
"There's another one," she says.
"That one was a turret." He takes the slate from her, and carefully they head out into the main room. He follows the pinging, eyes darting from the slate to the area ahead, as she sticks close to his back, peering over his shoulder. "It's up there," he says, gesturing to a platform above the main axle. He looks around, trying to find a way up, but she tugs his sleeve and guides him back to the lava gear that he hates, from which they can hop to another gear and then the platform. The moment their feet touch solid ground, there's an ominous clicking and a guardian's eye swivels to face them.
Link swears and charges it, keeping its attention, while Zelda stares at it, horror swirling through her curiosity until the two are so wrapped together that she can't tell them apart. It's not like the stalkers. It has arms and it's armed with weapons she's only caught glimpses of in Link's arsenal. This guardian has a shield. And a sword. And is programmed well enough to use them.
She's irrationally upset when it explodes.
She looks away, and that's when she notices that the far wall of the main chamber has changed. Designs of strange animals are carved into long beams, and now two of those beams have shifted position. They've pulled back. Almost as if they'd unlocked. She pulls out her journal to compare it to the sketch she drew earlier. She pulls out the slate, and, yes, she can extend the main axle out and possibly fit it into a hole in the far wall. The shape is similar. Like a keyhole. She tries it, shoving at the metallic beam extending from the axle until it matches up perfectly and slots into place. The whole engine catches. And grinds. And stops.
"What happened?" Link leans over her shoulder to get a good look, and she pulls the axle from where it's clearly intended to go. It's hard to get it out, as she has to fight against the engine, but once she does, the axle resumes its spinning as if nothing went wrong.
Link frowns. "It's like..."
"A door," she says. "We've been unlocking it. Look."
He nods slowly.
"Ha! I knew that noise was suspicious. Now this makes sense. We need to activate the next two terminals, unlock the next two locks, then open this door. Now we have a real goal."
"But...what's behind the door?"
They stare at each other. Then Zelda's eyes widen. "Maybe it's another set of rooms like these! But even more complicated!"
He snorts. "More likely it's a whole army of guardians. They'll just swarm out as soon as we open the door."
She swallows. "Maybe. But maybe instead of them attacking us, we'll actually be able to control them this time. These are shrine guardians. They'll be untouched by malice. The few we've seen today are just a test for you. They're not actively malevolent." At least, that's what she's telling herself so she doesn't have a panic attack every time a laser goes off. "You have to admit, this would be the perfect place to gather all the guardian remains and study them safely."
He doesn't say she's right. But she is.
From here they can make it to the next chamber, which—of course—has a giant propeller. It isn't moving, however. It looks as if it hasn't moved in a millennia, which it hasn't. It doesn't seem to be connected to the workings outside, so she needs to head back out into the main room and find a way to get things moving. Slowly, she's bringing the whole best online. There's another metal beam stored away, and she doesn't give Link the chance to throw it on the floor and kill them both. She slides it into place with a satisfying chunk. Back inside, the chamber has become a giant wind tunnel that aids in their paragliding over to the terminal.
She's expecting another guardian. She's ready for another guardian. They're a test. They're marvels of technology. She's not expecting a skywatcher. Link drops to a crouch as if that will help it not see him. He quietly pulls out an arrow, lines up a shot, and lets it fly. It's barely loose from his bow when he curses himself and rolls straight off the landing onto the ground below. It's not a perfect shot, and the skywatcher swings back and forth, then swivels, its eye coming to rest somewhere below, the red beam of light trailing what can only be Link. For a second, all she can see it that red beam, all she can hear is the ever heightening whine, ratcheting, ratcheting. She's back in the past and the worst has happened and the end is near. An explosion rips her out of it, and the skywatcher swings against the blast. A bomb arrow. A bit of a wild shot.
Zelda pulls out her bow and her fingers glow blue in the glow of the ancient arrow. The guardian isn't looking at her, and it's mostly holding still, aiming at Link, so she has a clear shot.
Which she takes. The skywatcher fizzles and pops, then bursts, its parts raining to the floor.
She eases out into the main room, another ancient arrow ready in her bow, searching for a second guardian. Link moves on the level below so he can see her. "Good shot," he calls.
She lowers her bow.
The final room proves a bit more challenging to reach, and she has a few unsuccessful attempts before she figures out all the steps required. She has to use stasis to fight against gravity, then ride up and elevator pulled by a pulley, and time it all correctly, but she succeeds, bouncing on her heels one they reach a solid platform. She has made much better elevators than this Divine Beast.
Inside, the room is even more of a challenge, not because she doesn't know what to do—that much is obvious—but because the slate or the terrain makes it obnoxiously difficult to align the cryonis rune correctly. After moving about the room and trying and trying and trying and trying to form an ice pillar to hit a plunger, Link decides that cryonis must not be the way to go and tries to take the slate from her to look for metallic things.
As if she hasn't already looked for metallic things!
There must be a way, but Link keeps bickering with her and then he keeps going down into the ankle-deep water, trying to hit the plunger with a sledge hammer, and making a nuisance of himself by getting in the way of the rune's workings.
When she finally gets it (she was correct), they are able to move into a room full of waterfalls. Link is the one to figure out how to lower the water level, because it involves using stasis and then smashing a valve several times with a sledgehammer. He's so pleased with himself once he's turned off the waterfalls and the water level lowers, that she can't help but laugh and kiss his cheek before heading for the newly revealed walkway, where Link gets to launch a ball back at the valve to raise the water level back up again. It's such a silly mess of logic, that she spends too long diagramming the room while Link waits at the final terminal.
They stand before the great door, the Master Sword drawn and the slate at the ready.
They look at each other. Both braced for the worst but hopeful for the best. What if it's a horde of guardians? What if it's control over this new Divine Beast?
This isn't something she has to do. This is something she wants to do. For herself, and for Link.
She lowers the slate. Turning to face him, she reaches for his cheek, pulling him in for a kiss.
Against her lips, he says, "Run straight for the bathtub if things go bad."
She breathes a laugh. "Such a worrier."
"We're a pair then."
She rests her forehead against his. "I love you."
"Love you."
"Come on." She takes one last quick kiss. "This will be fun."
They face the door. She slots the axle into place. The door shudders. And eases open.