I made a fair amount of art for this chapter! This time a painted illustration for Harry looking all creepy in the honeycomb caverns, a pixel map of the "level", a digital painting of the Zora ReDead that appears in this chapter (which I'm super extra proud of!), and an example of what said ReDead would look like if it were alive. All of those are up on garden-eel-draws under the "dungeon 4" tag for current and later readers to find!

Content warning for hella thalassophobia and a much less benign corpse than the one that showed up in the last chapter.

Hermione felt guilty for how hard she was gripping Harry's arm, but she couldn't help it. They were traveling down a series of razor-edged honeycomb caves simultaneously lit and obscured by a bright turquoise fog of luminous plankton. Sharp ridges of stone lurched from the murk with hardly any warning, seeming to burst into existence just in time to snatch at their clothes and claw at their skin. Malfoy and Ron had disappeared down different tunnels, leaving her and Harry on their own. They were further alienated by the fact that they couldn't speak to one another. The spheres of light around their heads contained their words as surely as their air supply. So Hermione clung to Harry as tightly as she could without dragging him down and they traveled in chilling silence.

She was tempted to close her eyes. There was something about the fog that hit her in a primal part of her brain. She could see and yet she was blind, and it terrified her to her core. Her ears were useless, filled only with the sound of her heartbeat and harsh breaths. She could only hope her panting wasn't depleting her (possibly limited?) bubble of air. The water was cold—approaching the temperatures within the Forbidden Forest. While the magical earring she wore seemed to ward off the effects of water pressure, she could tell purely by the temperature and her mental map that they were farther down than she wanted to imagine. And yet the water was lit in a cheery shade of aqua that made her think of summer vacations on white-sand beaches. She hated that color now.

Hermione winced as a stone outcrop caught a ripped opening in her clothes and drew a scratch down her shin. It wasn't the first injury she'd suffered down here and she'd lost hope that it would be the last. Maneuvering almost blind in a cave where every possible handhold was either incredibly sharp, too awkwardly angled to be stable, or an equally free-floating Harry Potter meant there had been a lot of instances in which she'd tried to catch herself and earned a new cut for her troubles. Both of her hands were bleeding, the pain making them feel oddly warm despite the frigid water. She'd suffered more nicks and bruises to her knees and shoulders—the things most likely to run into a wall if she couldn't see it in time. There was even a shallow slice in her neck that she'd suffered when she hadn't seen a curved spike sticking out of the giant hollows in the stone. Harry had had to calm her down after that one, finding a semi-flat place to plant his feet and hold onto her while she sobbed uncontrollably. It had taken an embarrassingly long time for her to seal the hysterical panic this place inspired into a logical compartment to be dealt with later.

Hermione put her hand to the shallow wound, which had only half-healed when she'd done her usual round of medical spells on it. Magic didn't quite work down here; she had to assume it was a mixture of Hyrule's own magic and the broken space in the local area. If Vaati hadn't dragged his storm through the dimensional rift he'd opened nearby, there was a chance magic might not have worked at all. A swell of anxiety made her stomach turn. As frightening as it already was to be more than a hundred meters underwater in a cave system abandoned by its previous Zora occupants for unknown reasons, she could hardly fathom how petrified she'd be if her magic also didn't work—if she were just…helpless, frail little Hermione.

Something poked her shoulder and she shrieked. The sound bounced back and stabbed her in the ears. Then she felt a deliberate double-tap on her arm and she realized it had only been Harry.

She turned toward him. Seeing his face made ghostly by the thick, glowing water made her feel sick. He looked like a sunken corpse with vague shadowy spots where his eyes and mouth should have been.

"Wh-What?" she asked aloud.

Harry pointed to his left, where a circular section of the water was somewhat darker than their surroundings. Hermione suppressed a scream that would have hurt her tender ears again. There was a void right there and she hadn't seen it! How deep did it go? How wide was the passage, truly? What lay beyond it?

She took a deep breath in and out. It was just another opening in the rock, like all the other ones she and Harry had been passing through in these razor-edged caves. The only difference was a lower concentration of plankton, causing the water to dip toward a more natural color for this level of depth and lack of sunlight. She was being irrational.

Hermione steeled herself and nodded. She was ready. They swam toward the deeper blue spot, which darkened to black as they approached. Hermione curled her hand in a tight fist around her wand. 'Just because the water is dark, that doesn't make it any less safe,' she reminded herself. Her diurnal human brain just preferred more brightly lit places, and had thus found false comfort in the glowing turquoise water. She whispered an Illumination Charm and held out her wand as they moved into the next area.

In contrast to where they just left, this place was nothing but cold, dark, and big. Miniscule lights—scattered plankton that had washed in from the previous set of caverns—dotted the water like stars. They were of no help in defining the dimensions or features of the room, seeming to extend into eternity. Hermione's eyes went as wide as they could, struggling to find details where there were none. No floor, no walls, no ceiling, only a soft turquoise glow at their backs. Ahead of them, there was nothing but…nothing.

Hermione was suddenly very aware of the exhaustion eating at her limbs. They had been swimming for a while now. Slowly, but still moving at an almost constant rate. They would have to sit down and rest somewhere soon. Did they have the time to, though? She didn't know the limits of their breathing apparatuses. All she knew was that she was freezing, trembling from both terror and the sunless chill, and running out of energy.

She and Harry swam back a ways to perch on the mercifully rounded opening between caverns. Hermione sat sideways along the ledge, wanting to look away from the shadowy cavern but unable to convince herself to put her back to the dark water. To distract herself while she recuperated, she watched the plankton instead. For whatever reason, they didn't flow freely between the turquoise water and the black. They shimmered like a mist at the edge of the honeycomb caverns, occasional wisps breaking off into the darkness. It put her in the mind of astronauts who'd lost their tethers, left adrift in space. With no way back, they would float helplessly away from safety until they died, their bodies becoming nothing more than unusually fragile pieces of space debris…

Harry waved his lit wand to get her attention. Hermione blinked and jerked back into awareness. She wasn't sure how long she'd been sat there, staring into the barrier between the living waters and space. Harry motioned for them to enter the next cavern, and Hermione couldn't find any reason to decline. The only other place for them to go was back in the hostile glowing caves, where they could easily wind up lost forever among those knife-sharp turns. At least going into the new "room" felt like making progress.

She and Harry swam in. The glow of the plankton-brightened waters was their guide. They swam opposite the light, deeper into the vast, icy void. So long as they kept going in one direction, they had to be going somewhere, right?

Aside from the glow of the plankton an increasing distance behind them, their other directional cue was the gradual change in color toward what Hermione assumed was the bottom of the cave. She still couldn't tell how big it was, other than "probably large enough to fit a city", but the pale cyan plankton at the bottom were a vibrant violet. The purple tint crept upward a ways, making some of the plankton around them an odd sort of periwinkle color. She had to assume it was something in the water—

Hermione bit down hard on her lip. A bright spark of pain lit up where her teeth caused it to split. She would not panic about possible contaminants in the water. There were plenty of things that could tint it purple. Even smaller plankton, for example, or perhaps algae.

'Or even toxic bacteria,' her traitorous imagination supplied. 'Cyanobacteria is only a few shades darker than that water you just left, isn't it? Out of the pan and into the fire.'

She shook her head hard. 'Shut up, shut up, shut up!' Right now was not the time for her to be coming up with smart ideas.

Something shifted at the edge of her vision, giving her a new source of panic. The "stars" rippled. She released a hoarse choking noise into her soundproofed little bubble and swam on. If it was nothing, it was nothing. If it was something, she wasn't going to shoot until she saw what it was. There was no telling what she might hit, otherwise. Not that she wanted to see anything. She knew a brighter variation of the Illumination Charm. In fact, she could conjure up a small sun if she so desired—one bright enough that even Hyrule's magic wouldn't be able to douse it. But then, what might appear? Stripping away the ambiguity of the room would remove her ability to pretend there was nothing to worry about.

A slightly thicker cluster of plankton went dark, then light again. Had something passed in front of it? Had they flickered upon encountering a minute current in the water? Were her eyes playing tricks on her as she slowly went mad from the lack of sensory input? She didn't know, nor did she want to. Knowledge had stopped being a comfort in this place.

Hermione drew in a slow breath and let it out in a controlled exhale. Her hand still gripped Harry's. His wand still glowed along with hers. He was real. She wasn't alone in this.

Hermione watched Harry's shaggy hair drift around his head and occasionally poke through the glowing bubble around it. Strange, that their bodies felt uniformly immersed from head to toe, and yet she didn't feel perceive any water invading her nose and mouth. It was dry within the magical air bubbles, and yet not.

She watched Harry's hair drift, starved for any sight that wasn't star-studded darkness, and turned her mind to puzzling over how the Zora Earrings worked. Those were safe thoughts.

In the distance, a speck of sapphire blue light drifted down into view. Then another. They glowed, then went out. Then glowed, and went out.

"The jellyfish," she breathed. They hadn't come across any of Shadow Harry's creatures since leaving the central column of the caverns. There was a chance she and Harry had just gone in a big circle and were going to emerge back where they'd come. She didn't care if that meant all their efforts for the past however long were fruitless. Soon, they'd be back where they could see sunlight again.

They continued swimming and Hermione kept time by the blinks of the jellyfish. Ten seconds on, ten seconds off, on the dot. One minute went by. Two. Her legs were screaming at her to stop. She kept kicking. Five minutes went by, and the jellyfish were finally looking like they weren't an impossible distance away—maybe thirty meters off.

Then, five seconds into blinking on, the jellyfish vanished. The stars ahead of Hermione and Harry became drastically fewer, the ones remaining swinging upward. She felt a current—the first she'd noticed since descending into the sinkhole—tug at her body. Though her eyes only caught the movements of the plankton, her brain sketched an image of something vast sliding through the water, sucking her miniscule form into its wake. She had never felt so small.

Hermione didn't think about what it might be, nor did she stop moving forward. She just screamed, her hand locked tightly around Harry's, and kept going.

The stars returned. After a delay, the jellyfish resumed glowing. Harry and Hermione didn't stop swimming until they were close enough to feel the tingle of electricity. Hermione looked up and saw a distant circle of rippling sunlight through a column of peacefully floating jellyfish.

She burst into tears, beyond caring that it might seem childish, and clutched Harry like a security blanket. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in the crook of her neck, shaking just as badly as her. They were alive, they were in one piece, and they would be able to surface again. That was all that mattered.

Draco stopped swimming, sat down on the bottom of the tunnel he'd been swimming through for the last eternity, and summoned his Zora Earring just so he'd have the air needed to sigh.

He was…so tired. The feeling of the darkness pressing on him had been frightening at first, but now it was just irritating background noise. It was the lead weight on his mind, dragging at every thought and taxing his energy reserves. His body could still move just fine, but he lacked the motivation needed to do so.

Laying his head against the wall, Draco looked up forlornly at a ceiling he could barely see. Between his creature-sight and the Lenses of Truth, he could only just make out things three meters away. One would think an Illumination Charm would help, but really it just dulled his night vision and not much else. This water had to be cursed. What other explanation was there for why it seemed to gobble up his magic?

The tiredness pulling at Draco briefly turned to lightheadedness, and he sat up abruptly. Was this water cursed, and that was why he felt so odd? Was it more than simply the darkness and monotony of these tunnels?

He lit his wand and waved it around, squinting to see anything suspicious. Were there monsters contaminating the area? Some form of evil plant life? He'd come across some luminous flora earlier on, closer to the main sinkhole.

Nothing. There was just his Illumination Charm, made a tad gray by the hostile Hylian waters. He cursed and doused it, then waited impatiently for his night vision to return.

"And so the world's dullest spelunking expedition continues," he muttered to himself as he resumed following the tunnel. He kept the Zora Earring on, just so he could commentate on how dull and dreary this was. Talking required air, after all.

He wiggled through the water like Ruka had insisted he should. While he was loath to admit it, this method was admittedly much faster than any of the human swimming strokes he knew. The Zora strangeness in his feet had set in quickly since he'd first noticed it, and now he practically had flippers. Instead of his toes growing out, it was like they'd worked their way deeper into his feet, becoming longer and turning the meat between them into webbing without actually increasing the size of his feet. It meant all this shoes still fit, but it had also given Draco a strong aversion to removing his socks. The trade-off was that his swimming speed had improved greatly, though like all of the benefits that came with no longer being human, Draco would have gladly done without.

A faint circle opened ahead of him after he swam around a vertical turn, and Draco regarded it with cautious hope. Was that really the end of the tunnel? He could see the ovular shapes of glowing fish flicking through the water through the opening. The only living things he'd come across in the tunnel had been glowing plants.

He eagerly swam toward the exit. Enough with the blind turns and branching corridors! He wanted to be in a room, for once!

Draco sat down on the edge of the tunnel to survey the large cavern he'd entered. Though he was glad to be somewhere new, there was still caution to be had. He was quite a long ways below the surface of the ocean in an ancient cave system, after all.

The egg-shaped cavern appeared to be some kind of hive, scaled up to something a little larger than human size. He saw a multitude of carved-out doorways rimmed in myriad painted shades of blue, engraved with interpretations of fish and other sea creatures. Many of them hosted a white design composed of three crescents and three circles. It seemed to be the symbol of the Zora themselves.

Small glowing fish populated the long-abandoned housing area. Their color varied. Near the room's ceiling, they were a pale turquoise, while the ones around the bottom were more of a lilac color. Draco had never done much diving before he'd begun swimming in the Black Lake, so the sight of such creatures was novel to him. He was tempted to swim after one and catch it—maybe see what it tasted like…

Draco mentally slapped himself. No! That was a Zora thought, not his! People didn't think about snatching fish out of the water and chowing down! It was uncivilized.

He dragged his eyes away from the fish and looked for any more useful or notable features of the room instead. He counted a sparse handful of black metal fixtures mounted on the walls that seemed to be ugly, ocean-themed lamps. They were shaped like clamshells holding oversized pearls that he assumed were meant to glow. Some of them still held a faint flicker of sickly yellow light, which helped him see the edges of the room.

While he had quickly gotten accustomed to the deep green fog that started at about thirty meters deep in the Black Lake, the lack of light in these caverns went beyond anything he could familiarize himself with. It was absolute and impenetrable. The feeling of having his eyes open and yet being told by his senses that he had his eyes closed in a dark room had kept the back of his neck constantly prickling with nerves. Even with the Lenses of Truth boosting his sight (i.e. making him just slightly able to see), the deep unease hadn't gone away. He had to guess that either he wasn't inhuman enough to comfortably subject himself to pure darkness, or that Flying Zoras were more sun-loving than the Hylian merpeople that had once dwelled here. Even if those lamps were at full power, he doubted they would have filled this large cavern with more than faint mood-lighting. Was there a strain of Zoras entirely different from any variations he'd heard of so far? One with senses specially adapted for such places, or one that perhaps glowed like the fish flitting around this mysteriously abandoned civilization?

Draco spied a few open doorways and pushed off of his seat. He was here on a mission, and it was hardly going to complete itself. The Golden Trio might have had a talent for throwing themselves into the center of any trouble that happened at Hogwarts, but darkness and water had always been Draco's element, even before he'd started losing his humanity.

He swam across the cavern toward a bank of doors. Partway there, he took a moment to puzzle over the fact that he was crossing a room without his feet touching the floor. Not only that, but the room wasn't even designed with walking in mind! Those doors were unreachable only by walking, and the floor was carved out to be just as round as the walls. Doorways were all over the place, including in the floor and ceiling. Gravity hadn't had any part in this room's architectural priorities. How bizarre.

Approaching an open doorway in the wall, Draco lit his wand and peered in. What was in here? Some merperson furniture, perhaps?

A large round eye reflected the light back at him. Pale tentacles swirled into view.

Draco screamed, doused his wand, and darted away like a spooked fish. A giant squid?! He wasn't picking a fight with that, magic or no magic! Especially not down here, where it had every advantage! He flitted over to an opening in the floor, looking up worriedly at the room he'd just left. Would the squid chase him? If so, he needed to find a place to hide.

He peeked cautiously around the edge of the dark hole. Nothing but glowing purple fish and a lone jellyfish. He breathed a sigh of relief and then ducked inside.

Ooh, his head was starting to feel strange. The heavy feeling from before was stronger than ever. It was definitely more than simple exhaustion; there was something more sinister dragging him down. He still couldn't see anything wrong, though! The water was clear, the fish were fine, and he didn't see anything strange coming out of that jellyfish. Why were his limbs so heavy? Why did he feel like he wasn't getting enough air? He could have sworn he was breathing deeply enough, although his lungs were complaining of strain. He didn't know what that was about.

Was it the switch to air that was slowing him down? Did his body want him to use his gills instead?

He rubbed at his temples. Wouldn't there be less oxygen in the water this far down, though? He hadn't understood…well, most of Granger's Muggle babble when she'd decided to sit him down some days ago and give him a long talk about how his gills worked, but he'd picked up that isolated or deep places with few fish didn't have as much air in the water as the kinds of shallow areas that Ruka (and presumably Flying Zoras in general) favored. So, since he was part Flying Zora, breathing in this water would be harder for him, right? But he'd only started getting dizzy after he'd switched to air, so he wasn't sure—

A soft groan echoed through the water. It sent an icy chill through him, raising goosebumps for the first time since his sense of temperature had changed. The sound had been almost human; it certainly hadn't come from the squid.

He looked around wildly. Was there someone else down here?

His eyes snagged on something his brain recognized as humanoid. As he'd been thinking to himself, Draco had been drifting lower in the water, putting him at a lower viewing angle.

Whatever that thing in the middle of the room was, it couldn't be a jellyfish.

What he'd mistaken for a column of little fish were luminous fins. From this angle, he could now see their true shapes and length. Some were fringed in wormy lines of lilac that waved listlessly in the water as the flesh they were attached to gave an occasional twitch. What had initially caught his eye was the negative space between the fins. The object was dark—darker than the stone in the cavern—but it was in the shape of a human skeleton. The bright jellyfish bell was attached to the dark ball topping the collection of slim black lines, its hanging tentacles forming…hair.

Draco sat there, petrified by fear and muzzy-headed confusion. He still wasn't sure what he was looking at until it slowly revolved to face him. Glowing ribs shone through thin, painfully stretched charcoal skin, radiating from the exposed bone of a bright turquoise sternum. A humanoid skull was silhouetted within the bright bell and tentacles of the creature's jellyfish "hair". Shining white dots formed a horrifically familiar outline along its brow-line and long nose. Needle-like teeth glowed in a familiar lipless grimace. This wasn't just a Zora; it was a ReDead.

A jolt of terror gave him the energy he needed to move, but it was too late. Bulbous eyes, shining with the same internal glow as the rest of the reanimated corpse, focused their vague white centers on him. The creature's skeletal mouth dropped open and Malfoy lassoed his wand with the speed of muscle memory. At the same time a chilling shriek rent the silent waters, a jet of white fire shot into the cavern. For a moment, it lit the room brighter than his Lumos had. Briefly, he caught sight of the stick-like limbs and jutting pelvis of a creature that couldn't possibly be alive. The undead abomination caught the spell to the chest and arced back gracefully through the water before hanging there with unnatural stillness. He swam away before it could recover.

He stopped at the mouth of the tunnel in the side of the first cavern, cast an Illumination Charm, and curled up around it in a trembling ball. Were there more of those things down here? What would happen if he ran into one and he couldn't stun it in time? That ReDead hadn't just been a dead Zora; it had been the reanimated corpse of a Zora that was better-adapted to this pit of horrors than he was. He could be certain now that this wasn't a place where he belonged, either as a human or as a creature. Humans were meant to stay on land and Flying Zoras kept to waters warmed and brightly lit by the sun. Just because he could swim this far down, that didn't mean he should.

A sickening wave of disorientation swept over him, making a frightened sob well up in his throat. Something was terribly wrong with this place. The water was cursed, there were aquatic Inferi probably waiting around every turn, and it was so dark that he'd surely go mad if he spent another hour down here!

'Why must I suffer all this? Why haven't I left already?' he thought. He could easily just go back home. All he had to do was follow the tunnel back where it came, swim out of the sinkhole, and fell around for that portal he couldn't see. With all the jellyfish marking its general area, he'd be able to find it eventually. The tunnels that had taken him here had been peacefully dull, and nothing in the warm, shallow waters beyond these caves could possibly be as terrifying as what he'd just seen. He could do with some sun right now. Or even the luminous plants by the sinkhole. Those had been nice.

'What if I'm the only one who can save Potter, though?' he wondered. If they didn't find the spell scroll hidden in these caves, Potter was likely going to die. Even if Shadow Harry wasn't a trustworthy source, the Potters' symptoms were enough evidence to make it a possibility. And if the Potters died, who knew how long it would take before another person capable of wielding the Four Sword might come along? Besides, lately Potter had been…nice. Draco couldn't think of any other word for it. Potter had been nice, like the foolishly generous ice cream man in magical Paris who had seen four-year-old Draco's cherubic face and sacrificed some of his profits to give him an extra scoop for free. Potter was nice like Hagrid, who helped any student who asked even though he could barely help himself. It was a kind of behavior his parents had drummed out of Draco when he was young and taught him to take advantage of in others. He didn't know if he wanted to do that to Potter, though. Despite knowing such "niceness" was a fickle resource when not properly taken control of, Draco liked having it given to him without him having to take it. He didn't Potter to die, and to watch everything return to how it had been last year—if not ten times worse. While Draco would never admit it aloud, he kind of…liked having Potter around.

Draco was the best swimmer among the group and best suited to the mental pressure of staying underwater for sustained lengths of time. Ruka had had to talk him down from a panic several times while he'd been struggling to get accustomed to the stress of going without air, or not being able to see as well. Weasley, Granger, and Potter didn't come from seafaring backgrounds, were relying on an untested trinket to keep them alive, and were doing their first ever dive in a place that unnerved even Draco. Assuming they hadn't gotten themselves eaten, they had to be gibbering messes right now! He couldn't imagine them being in any useful state after a mere half-hour in the cold, lightless depths of the caves, let alone however long they'd been down here.

With dread sinking claws into his hammering heart, Draco looked for another opening in the side of the cavern. There was only one open door left; if this one didn't pan out, he'd have to start testing to see whether anyone had forgotten to lock their home before migrating out of this place. He swam down from his perch and hovered in front of it. 'Oh, Merlin, please don't let there be another ReDead,' he thought, taking a shuddering breath. The first room had contained a deadly deep-sea predator and the other had contained...something that was essentially the same thing, but worse. What would be through the last doorway? A cave-dwelling aquatic dragon?

He pressed himself against the wall, took a few more deep breaths to prepare himself, and then slowly leaned around the corner. 'Don't be a dragon, don't be a dragon!'

The light of his wand crept across the room as he offered his arm to the mouth of the cavern. It hit something that shone dully, and he flinched. Then he recognized the material. It was smooth polished stone. Lifting his wand higher, he illuminated the square shape of an L-shaped counter. A blue-painted sign with white Hylian runes was mounted on the front.

Something in the darkness sparkled in the light of his wand. "Lumos Maxima," he said to strengthen his fading spell, and the room flooded with light.

He was in the primitive stone skeleton of a shop. Shelves were carved into the walls and divots in the counter appeared to be designed for merchandise. A narrow doorway behind the counter led to another section of the room-sized cave. Though he was mildly reassured to be in recognizable surroundings, he didn't drop his guard as he approached the ovular void in the wall. He peered around the edge from a distance, letting the blazing glow of his wand fill the space ahead.

Turquoise lights caught his eye. He reeled back and would have screamed if there were any air in his lungs. Draco heart hammered in his chest as he whipped his wand up, prepared to launch purifying fire. But no, it wasn't another ReDead, just a handful of glowing fish.

'Merlin help me. I almost had a heart-attack from some bloody fish,' he thought, clutching at his chest. This amount of fright, one surprise after another, was making him worry his heart might stop at any second. 'Father would think it pitiful.' Of course, his father would also keel over from the thought of Draco being able to breathe water, being in another world, and diving down…somewhere around two-hundred meters, at this point. Any one of those notions would probably do him in, actually. Maybe Draco had thicker skin than his father thought.

He crept forward, only to stop at a buzz of electricity prickling against his scalp. Scowling, he thrust his head into the next room. The stupid jellyfish were back. He hadn't seen any since leaving the sinkhole's main column, which he'd been glad for. Two of them now hovered around the ceiling like living light fixtures, throwing invisible nets of electricity through the water beyond their cracking tentacles. Draco knew from experience that they wouldn't knock him out unless he made the mistake of touching them, but their broadcasted lightning made his limbs inexplicably twitch and lock up. Maneuvering underwater was difficult enough without those nuisances complicating things further.

Gritting his teeth against the intermittent buzz of the blinking jellyfish, he studied the room. Shelves, a few pots, and…something both shiny and red. Looking preposterously out-of-place in its environment of dull gray stone and blue-painted ceramics was a gold-accented red treasure-chest. He could have wept at the sight of that color. Red! After all this monotonous blue!

He swam to it, the jellyfish by the ceiling the last things on his mind. He'd found it! They could leave!

The metal caused a hot, stabbing tingle in his hands as he wrenched the lid open. He ignored the feeling and snatched up the scroll that floated up from the belly of the chest with numb, twitching fingers. When the overwhelming mental rush of knowledge stabbed into his mind and made his muscles seize, he froze as a smiling statue.

Loud splashing and a drastic dimming of Yellow's migraine heralded the successful return of Green and his rescuers. Yellow sat up, breathing a relieved sigh at his suddenly much more manageable headache. "You're back!" he greeted happily, leaning over to help people out of the pond. He gripped Hermione's wrist and tugged her onto land, then did the same for Ron. "What was Hyrule like?"

His joy at seeing everyone's return was sucked away when he saw the looks on their faces.

They were terrified. Pale, shaking, and hollow-eyed, they looked away at his question. Even Malfoy, usually loud and confident, appeared to have found a level of quiet reserve.

"It wasn't fun," Malfoy said simply. "They're going to need some help getting back to the castle, I think." He looked around at the others, who seemed barely aware of where they were. Green had his knees tucked to his chest and his arms tightly wrapped around his folded legs. His body was wracked with shivers and his eyes were glassy as he stared desperately at the sky.

"What happened?" Yellow asked softly. He had never seen Green so scared before. Himself, sure, but not Green. "Are they okay?" Hermione and Green had blood spots staining their clothing and half-scabbed wounds showing through the holes. Ron's fingers were covered in oozing cuts.

"I haven't had the chance to ask yet," Malfoy said. "There were sea caves. They were so dark." A shudder went through him. "Shadow Harry gave us something that let them go down deep enough to explore them, but…" He shook his head. "Humans weren't meant to be in that place. Not that deep, or so far into those caves."

"Why did you explore the caves, if they were so scary?"

Malfoy squeezed his eyes shut. He took a deep, shaky breath and then said, "Shadow Harry blocked the way back. It was a choice between finding the spell scroll and letting all of you die. I…we had to do something."

Fear and relief panged in Yellow's heart. He had come so close to death, and yet…He put a hand on Malfoy's shoulder, making the Slytherin look at him in surprise. "Thank you," Yellow said. Tears blurred his vision. "You didn't have to help us, but you did. Thank you so much." He gave Malfoy a tight hug and then let the boy go quickly, just in case he'd been rude. "Sorry, I just—" He sniffled and wiped at his eyes. Everyone was back, but everyone was broken, but at least everyone was alive? A sea of confusing emotions roiled within him. "Let's get everyone back to the castle," he said, standing up. "I want to make sure they feel safe again."

Item Get: Zora Earring

Notes:

-Whoops, I forgot to mention last chapter that those jellyfish are Blue Bari! You don't see them named often in Zelda games, but they're usually blue electric jellyfish of some sort. These ones look close to the version in Oracle of Ages.

-Draco had a hard time noticing the poison because it's designed for Zoras not to notice it strangling them until it's too late. He can see it because he has mostly human eyes, but he couldn't feel it until he switched to air.

-Vaati didn't put the ReDead down there. The way I headcanon it, certain monsters can form spontaneously if enough ill intent, negative emotion, or malicious magic lingers in an area for a while. ReDeads sometimes haunt the scenes of massacres, Deku Babas form if people destroy forests or desecrate sacred natural areas, deceased evil mages can sometimes rise as Wizzrobes, etc.