(Another Author's Note: In case some of you get a bit confused by the paragraph where Link reminisces about his father and a few parts of Ocarina of Time, lemmie esplain: I write my fics from a point of view where Zelda is a real thing Shingeru Miyamoto just borrows from. Therefore, things are a bit more "realistic:" some dungeons are downright puny, bad guys bleed and die some pretty violent deaths, and things happen in ways that are slightly different from they way they happen in the game. What Link is referring to in his thoughts is "the truth" about Zelda: how some things get played around with to make it more game-like. If you have really strong beliefs and/or theories that you protect like a big dog protecting a steak, now might be a good time to stop reading. But if you guard your theories as rabidly as I do and still wanna read on, kudos to you on not letting a little stubbornness(sorry, no offence anyone) get in the way of your enjoying fanfiction. 'S better'n I could ever do.)

(Oh, and don't worry. I'd NEVER make the chickens innocent.)

Spinning Slash, Chapter 7: Hot, Hot, Hot

She'd had about one too many choked refrains of "Hyrule, o'er the mist..." as it was, but this was just pathetic.

"If you're going to sing yourself to laryngitis, Elaine, could you at least do it in tune? I think poor Link's ears are turning red!"

"Navi, every PART of us is turning red," snarled Posie, whose flushed face was puckered in such a way it resembled a cheeky little rosebud. But the "dewdrops" that adorned the jowl-formed "petals" were sour and disgustingly clingy. "We could be walking through the Sacred Realm. I've never seen such huge waves in the air. And it's so parched, I could poor a bucket of sand down my throat to moisten it up. The sword on my back must weight a million pounds, and my hands are all sweaty beneath my gauntlets. I desperately want a rest. I want to find this Great Fairy person and get through this volcano crater and let that be over with it, but its not that simple is it? You've got your magic to keep you cool, Navi. I've got zilch." Her teeth clenched with a click and began to grate up against each other.

"Well, life's not all Lon Lon Cream," said Navi, quoting a popular Hylean proverb. "You have to take the good with the bad. Won't it all be worth it in the end? You'll get to show off to all the Kokiri, and your mother and Atahl, and your auntie and great-uncle and maybe even Princess Zelda. And won't you be a step closer to you dream?"

"Maybe, but that's really quite far-fetched. All the Kokiri are unimpressed by the slash now, and auntie Arril and my uncle and great uncle I hardly ever see. And Zelda? Pah. I wish. She's a fruit anyway." Posie's sigh was laden with her exhaustion. "Oh, look, a fork in the path," she looked up towards where Link plodded leadenly onward and peered two dark holes bored into the grayish brown cliffside and a large, kneeling boulder secured behind a small hill of stone. She blinked a bead of sweat off of her eyelash and swallowed a pocket of foul gas. She hacked roughly, expelling from her lungs the acrid sting of the burning sulfur air, eyes watering so far that her earlier eye-bats had been in vain.

"Alright back there, Posie?"

"Fine," came her constricted reply. "Just a bit of a mishap with the stench!"

And oh, what a stench! If the Goron City had been bad, this was ten times worse and steeped into the atmosphere. It was as if it had always been a presence there, which wasn't far from the truth, and initiated a gag reflex so powerful not even the sight of a dead Tektite, wound in its exoskeleton gushing fluids, could trigger it. The smell didn't seem to be quite as bad if you were standing behind Link, who seemed to have a halo of pure, sweet oxygen surrounding him to breathe, but when a horrifically fiery zephyr whirled passed, swathes of the suffocating odor enveloped Navi and the two girls. So they scuttled up against his legs as close as they could get, hoping the almost-yellow air would tickle past their noses and nothing more. Grimly displayed as well lingered something intoxicating and sweet, similar to the herbs that spiced Saria's little shop of potions. But it also had a clue of crushed flower petals swirled about in it, heavy like perfume. It was arguably the strangest pallet of smells ever combined. Unless you counted the grapefruit-Scent Seed experiment. But that was a different matter entirely.

"Don't worry, it'll clean up in a minute. Aside from protection against heat, these Goron Tunics are hand-dandy air scrubbers as well. They absorb most of the smells of sulfur, since the Dodongo skin from which these are crafted has evolved to do the same. Dodongos have sensitive sinuses you know... why feeding them bombs gets 'em. They literally have iron guts, but they become almost completely unable to breathe when their throats and lungs fill up with smoke. Remember that if you ever encounter a Dodongo, girls. Dodongo dislikes smoke."

Link chuckled. Was that supposed to be funny?

"So, uh... are we going in there or something?" asked a shaky Elaine, pointing a finger into the right crevasse, pulsing with a unappetizing glow.

"Well, eventually," Link answered, looking down. "Ipanajou's a long ways away, but there's supposedly a shortcut leading to some forgotten passage to Ruto's Cave, which we can follow to ANOTHER shortcut, which should lead us out right at Ipanajou's base. I figure we can shave a good week that way. But first, we take that way," and he indicated the left hole, emitting the meadowy scent. "That's where the Great Fairy of Power lives, an old buddy of Posie's grandpa. And mine. Her fountain of purification is just the ticket we're looking for to clean off your normal clothes... dried potion stains are awfully bovine to remove. You can ask your mother, Posie; you wouldn't believe how many good skirts she's lost!"

Posie, however, was not interested in skirts or the laundering of potion from Kokiri Tunics and Hylean Cotton, but in gawking about with her mouth wide open had revealed to her the Goron-colored boulder imposed delicately behind the counter-top arch encompassing it. It was downright curious... too sandy to be natural, and far too rough-hewn, but the patterns engraved upon its top looked typical enough. She put her hand on her chin, pondering the way she'd seen detective characters do in plays, craning her head like an owl to sum up the boulder's angles.

"Pose... what are you looking at?"

"That lump on the ridge... doesn't it look a bit odd to you?"

"Odd?" Elaine shrugged her shoulders. "It's just a rock!" Her arms coiled and uncoiled, starting with her limbs bent up at the elbows and slowly unfurling down in a wave motion that expanded to the joints in her fingers. "It's a part of the mountain. What is there to wonder about?"

Link silently turned around, looked down at the girls arguing, and absorbed a bemused mask. Slyly he derricked up his neck to gaze narrow-eyed at the stone that was causing all this commotion and mumbled, barely audible even to the girls, "Hello, Biggoron."

Stillness as the girls continued to yatter back and fourth. A few stones slid and clicked in a hollow, pumice sound as they cascaded, doomed, down the mountain and ricocheted off of the cliffs. This was enough to draw silence from the girls in mid-sentence, freezing their livid limbs tundra, eyes glassily forward. Slowly their heads contorted to force their eyes upon each other.

Yellow dust and brilliant, white ash shifted in a magically appearing cloud above the stone, while a quarry of brittle lava-foam rock clashed in a sweeping cascade over a ledge hidden by the upsweep of the rigidified liquid rock and the bloated earthy boulder. Hidden by the heavy mass had been a pair of identical, yet smaller slabs-no, wait, they were uncurling! They were limbs, stuffed to their seams with muscle and sinew. A familiarly teardrop-shaped face, with precious irises deep as the seas of their color, was latched on to the heavyset body. The Goron of a house's proportions had arms crafted like Darunia's, yet his body was as pampered and pudgy as those of the lower denizens in Goron City. His mouth, a cave nearly as great as those drilling into the mountain, howled open as he gave a gurgly yawn, blinked and rubbed the powder from his eyes, and clamped his hands to the ledge, giving an inquisitive peep over the edge of his little shelf.

"Goro, my eyesss are playing tricksss on me again... I sssee two Linksss, one very sssmall, one normal sssize... and another ssstrange one... goro. Isss that you who ssspoke, whichever of you isss the real Link?"

Link(the real one, in conformity with the Goron's suspicions) laughed. "Bi'gor'n," he said, giving the name by its Goron pronunciation, "It's me. I'm right here."

Biggoron didn't quite seem to catch the man's mouth moving and instead tilted his head at Posie and let out a groan that shook the mountain to its foundations. "Goro! I ssshouldn't have eaten all thossse rocksss... Look at me... I have gotten ssso big, look how sssmall you are compared to me!" He reached out and plucked the unfortunate child up delicately by the back of her shirt, looking woefully into her face the best he could. "I am ssso sssorry, Little Brother!"

"Owwwww!" Posie kicked and flailed her tiny fists. "Lemmie down! Lemmie down!"

The startled Goron suddenly released his grip, then shot out another padded hand to catch the fluttering child. She hit his fleshly palm and rebounded up almost her full height, then came back down with a jolting bounce. Whupped about by the slipstream her hair was eccentric, and most of her stomach had leapt up into her throat. She righted herself out on the springy surface, looked up at the Goron, and gave a stupidly improvised grin and a mild "Ehheheh" to compensate for the awkward silence.

"Sssorry, little sssissster," Biggoron hissed. "I missstook you for brother Link. And what would your name be, petite Link?"

"Ah..." She blew an offending bang from her eyes with a small whiff of breath. "I'm Posie. Posie Cassandra Blade. But most folks don't call me all of that. Just Posie. Or Pose. If you're my friend. Which I guess you could be. Maybe. But you aren't yet."

It was only too obvious she was embarrassed; her distressing ad libbing and fractured speech was proof. Curse her horrible way with strangers! But at least there was no need to read the so-adorable-it-should- have-been-a-sin act! If her father was friendly with this mountainous Goron, all was safe. In fact, his accent was terribly amusing, even if she was scared stiff. It warmed her nerves considerably to know at least she sounded fairly intelligent compared to this droll creature.

"P'sssie! What a sssilly sssort of name." Then again, this giant probably found her quite a sight as well, just as Goro-Link had. Humans had to be even scarcer near the entrance to a volcano crater! "Mine isss Bi'gor'n. Or Biggoron, as humansss call me. Casss'ndra Blade. Isss that all your sssurname or isss there more to it?"

"Well, Cassandra is my middle name, actually. Blade isss-er, is my last."

"Mussst be quite common," Big dimly wondered. "It isss the sssame one as brother Link'sss and the Ssspirit of the Volcano."

"Erm, Spirit of the Volcano?"

"Yesss," he nodded in reply. "The Ssspirit lives inside the volcano. He knowsss a lot of sssword lore. I have ssseen him only once, when I went inssside to melt down iron ore-he took a look at the blade I wasss crafting and told me it wasss of the finest quality he had ssseen in a long time. But I hear him talking to himssself, all the time..."

"Cool!" Posie wiggled over on to her stomach and peeped over the edge of the Goron's massive index finger. "Didja hear that, Daddy? There's a Spirit that lives inside the volcano and he knows all about swords! Maybe he'll know what to do about finding the Sword of Obedience!"

"The Sssword of Obedience!" Biggoron stuffed a laugh, for it was a tale all sword-crafters knew well, or at least, those trained by the old masters such as the Great Fairies. So Link was out looking for the Sword of Obedience... likely heard about its power to give the "ability to control all swords" to the first to touch it. Big only hoped Link knew exactly what that meant, for it was quite literally a two-edged sword in the truth department that could be misinterpreted very easily unless this power of its was explained in its entirety. One who held the Sword of Obedience wouldn't need an army to take over the world, they could simply call upon their battalion of deathless and deadly soldiers of steel...

But he shook his gargantuan head. Of course Link knew that. In fact, he was probably going on this quest to stop the sword from falling into the wrong hands by destroying the ghastly tool. It didn't take a genius to figure out Link's intentions. And luckily(or perhaps not) for Biggoron, he was no genius.

"Down, then, Little Sssissster," and he lowered his hands to let Posie hop off and pop back onto the ground. After walking on the spongy Goron tissue, the earth felt strange and fixed to the soles of her feet. Now that the golem was curling back up into a lumpy ball behind her, she had no extra passengers to distract her train of thought and could consciously notice the smell had all but disappeared.

She had plucked off onto the pinnacle of the stone wave and stood proud above her friends for a few minutes, feeling taller than she ever had before, with her chest out, shoulders swayed, and fists clenched. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine herself looking out over the field, where there had just been staged a battle she had won... steel rang as her sword was drawn, her shield clicked from its clasps and hung in front of her, and with a deep breath she began to really feel intoxicated with the excitement of everything she was about to undertake. It was not unlike what you might experience before going on an exciting ride at a theme park for the first time-especially one that has just opened. With a jaunty slide down the slope that blew dust out from beneath her like a crest of water, she stood in front of a more than slightly awestruck Link and Elaine and said, in a voice pumped with confidence, "Let's go."



If all the balefire in hell had been cranked up to maximum burning capacity it probably wouldn't have been quite as hot as the inside of Death Mountain, much to the distress of the girls. They had more than likely been expecting the Goron tunics to act as miracle air conditioners that would prodigiously keep them cool as a pair of reddish cucumbers as the gaily frolicked above the lava pits in complete comfort. Naturally they did no such thing-while they protected their fragile young human bodies from nasty conditions like heat stroke, it could do nothing to stop the frying feeling they got with every step they took. Even inside the Great Fairy's Fountain the temperature had been at least a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the silver and holy fountain steaming as if it were a tub of bath water.

Indeed, the Fairy had been reluctant to let a couple of potion-stained tunics go to laundering in the clearer-than-crystal pool. But just a small sopping in the liquid and all the offensive substances dissipated instantly leaving no trace of their ever being there. Pulling them out, and you couldn't even tell they had been wet! Still, if they hoped to survive through the mountain, there was no donning them over again.

Link had his eyes peeled, sweeping over the pits of lava to the exactitude of someone searching for something, while making quick jerks back now and then to allow the panting girls to keep up. Navi slugged alongside them snarling every now and then; "Stay away from that edge! What if it crumbled and you fell in?" Cinder cones spewed clouds of ash that obscured the sky above; the sun was no more than an aureate blot just barely visible in a heaven of smog. Navi wanted to know, smugly, where all of the smoke was coming from if there was no fire burning within the volcano. Link replied, even more snootily, that she was the genius and shouldn't have to ask. She opened her mouth to snap that she had been asking the girls to see if they knew it was ash and not smoke, but a rumbling retort from the floor caused a temporary panic that shut her up. The gang broke the knotty huddle they'd formed and were on.

Silently Link cursed the tremor. He didn't like the way the smell of sulfur was temporarily strong enough to take over his Dodongan defenses. It meant a deep fissure had opened somewhere, and that could mean that either an eruption or an earthquake was eminent. A quake they could stand, they'd just have to rush for the cover of a small cove in the walls of the crimson cavern-but if the magma began to ooze to the surface, it'd take more than a little cave to keep them safe...

Impulsively his hand shot to his belt, closing around the Ocarina that was a gift to him from Zelda. If he couldn't find what he was looking for, it would be their only hope. But would the molten sea overtake them too quickly? Softly he mumbled to himself, "C'mon, Dad, where are you?" He know the spirit's ethereal aegis would be enough to guard the three of them from the cauldron of doom, as it had protected him when he had fallen in once before. And it was also what had let him wade across the sloshing red pit(though he first attributed it to his Goron Tunic) separating him from Volvagia on the first adventure of his, the one thrown into the dustbin of Hyrule's history by the Triforce's power. But the one he was least likely to forget. Come to think of it, it'd been thrown into the dustbin of the rest of the world's history as well. It was all Mr. M, who always had to play around with the events in his life to make that "game" more entertaining. He who turned a small, yet eerie corridor into a sprawling dungeon, sprung Rupees from grass and a felled beast, and generally distorted the truth a little more with every adventure he adapted. Some of Link's outworld fans might be fairly surprised at the real, bloody reality of it all, where the brigs were mercifully smaller, most of them, but the situations were stranger, the battles full of whipping gore, and no cheep cash could be made in real life from simply weed-whacking.

Something fiery and hard made Link flinch as it grazed passed his cheek. His arm jerked up from his torso and pressed against the gash on his face. A small pumice stone lay at his feet. With his free hand he bent double and scooped it up, rolling it around in his palm with a curious mask.

A mass the size of a softball slammed into his back, something covered in jagged spines that cut into the fibers of his tunic and knocked the breath from his body and made him drop the rock in shock. He coughed; gasped for breath; wiped the irritated drops from his eyes and gave his head a quick throw-back to shake away his bangs from his face.

Another pebble made a sharp, almost metallic sound and it shattered on the floor just a few inches away from Elaine's feet; she leapt to the side, fell on the floor and rolled over in an almost knight- esque style as another one streaked past where her head would have been a second earlier. Posie, terrified out of her wits, simply hit the deck right then and there and cowered with her shield helmeting her head. A wise move, actually. A few pieces of loose, volcanic gravel would certainly give her head a rattling, but a good-sized chunk of the scouring stone would shatter her small skull like brittle eggshell.

"Girls!" he called out, trying to keep his voice as free from panic as possible. "We've got trouble!" Not like they needed to be told, anyone huddling beneath a rain of burning foamy rocks could probably figure that much out for themselves. "The volcano doesn't appear to like us much! We'd better find shelter under a ledge before one of us gets beaned!"

Trembling, Posie pulled herself to her feet and sprinted for Link's side, her shield still held over her head in a life-guarding steel umbrella. Link knelt as she came and straightened up as soon as she was safely snuggled up into his chest; in a gesture of true innocence for once, she asked, "Did we make the Spirit of the Volcano mad, Daddy?"

"No, love, in fact, if he knows we're here, he's probably doing all he can to make sure we're all OK. But I think we might have upset it a little... there must've been a gas explosion that caused this shower of rock. There're no more tremors or rising magma levels to suggest that the volcano could be erupting. You alright there, Elaine?"

Just as she pulled herself up to her feet, she shot away to avoid a few loose piece of stony shrapnel. "A-O-K, Mr. B! Juuuust a few minor... nyueh!"

A large lump pegged her in the backside and pinned her to the floor.

"Elaine!" Link's grip tightened just as Posie began to thrust against him with all her might, pulling free, dropping her shield aside, and rushing over to aid Elaine. The piece of lava rock that plugged her was small enough for her to shove aside without much assistance, but so was the tendency of small children to either under- or over-exaggerate. So Posie was simply riveted through with gruesome mental images of Elaine, being crushed to death beneath a gigantic boulder in a predicament somehow only she could have remedied. She was bracing her back to the stone now, skidding her feet backwards into the ocher soil but barely finding any give in the rock.

Elaine wasn't in the mood for that sort of clowning around, and arched up her back like a cat. The stone rolled off easily.

"Posie! You nutcase, you're going to get yourself killed! C'mon, grab your shield we gotta get out of here! On second thought, I'll grab it; you just concentrate on getting yourself to cover!"

Link's earlier observations were now proving to be wrong-at least, one of them was, the crater now buzzed with geo-thermal shifting. In layman's terms, an earthquake! More and more volcanic bullets rattled and bounced on the floor, much smaller but in greater quantities. Link had hunched over to shelter the girls in his arms, a steady cascade of pebbles clattering off his back but leaving him generally unfazed. Posie was hiding behind her shield again. In contrast to her father, bravery was not one of her strong points. She was positively terrified.

Just as abruptly as it had started, the rumbling stopped. Posie peeked cautiously out from behind her metal dome. Link glanced skyward just long enough to see something small and dark hovering just beyond the volcano's cloud cover, before he blinked and missed it. Elaine gaped silently around. Link gazed forward... the cost seemed clear enough...

A great flash of brilliant red light erupted behind Link, and he impulsively hunched forward even farther and squinted his eyes shut tight. The tremendous ball of fire, if that's what it was, exploded in a hail of stinging embers and terrific shards of rock blasted in all directions.

Run now, his mind told him, run or you'll never make it out of here alive.

He didn't stop to think a second longer. He wailed at the top of his lungs to sprint as far as possible from the wall behind them, and it was dèja vu all over again. Elaine went Link's way while Posie stood, petrified, barely able to move. Noticing a shadow just her size squeezed precariously between the walls, she took a perilous chance and dove for it. Link and Elaine never noticed her slip out of sight down a dark lava tube- they just heard her yelp as her soles lost their footing on the slick, obsidian path.

"Posie!" Link sprawled his legs to break and whirled around on his hips, but it was far too late. Screaming debris from the fiery blast deluged over the sharp overhang from which they were borne and cluttered the well-hidden entrance, piling up almost to the height they'd started at. Elaine, behind from the start, was now several inches ahead, and read Link's mind as she started to heave rocks away from the stack.

It was dangerous work, as the wall were still shaking and rocks bounced down the hill from time to time. Over the deafening roar, Elaine shouted, "Posie! Can you hear me down there? ...If you're down there?"

In a small hollow in the mountainside, barely half the size of Posie's own room back home, Posie had somersaulted into a pitch-black grotto, inflated with stale air that made her gag is disgust. She took a few deep breaths and waited for her tunic to scrub away the sour smells, and paused for her eyes to adjust, but either they were doing a very bad job of it or the entire place was made out of cold, glassy obsidian. Not a single fleck of light danced anywhere on the slick walls.

Suddenly the entire place went jade, as green as the view from a pair of night-vision goggles, and Posie irritably glanced right and left, expecting that annoying pest Navi to have followed. Instead, she gaped, almost happily surprised, to see following a curious orb of viridian light behind her. Mage-light had a funny habit of popping up exactly when you needed it most, even if you weren't even trying to summon it. Just as well, anyway, it was the only piece of her magic she had even menial control over.

The walls glinted, reflecting the little sphere's luminance. Obsidian indeed it was. But the floor felt more powdery, and she looked down to see, what would have been were her mage-light white, gray dust. In the current filter of color, it was blackish teal. It was nowhere near as packed as most of the soil around the mountain, and what was fairly solid felt... hollow. Like she was standing upon some sort of tunnel. She gazed around... despite it being carved into the brimstone, it felt very cold inside that small cave... physically and spiritually. Mumbling to no one in particular except herself, she said, "Let's get out of here..."

Something shifted.

The scratching and scrabbling was minute, but Posie's sensitive Hylean ears could pick it up; little grains of sand falling and scattering. The tips of her ears quivered and looked fuzzy at the edges, and she made no point of trying to hide(who was there to see?) the way the rest of her body fell into the pattern. A pothole was now forming in front of her... her breathing ricocheted around in the polished room... something mottled, translucent, and green was starting to poke up out of the hole... her mage- light flickered and everything went dark...

There was a horrible, hoarse squelching sound, and the next thing she knew something had rammed into her stomach. She coughed as it knocked her back into a wall, pounding her head painfully. Her vision seemed to be swimming, but then again, it was hard to tell because it was so dark. She did feel awfully dizzy, though. She made an attempt to stand, only to have a thick, sinewy stalk of some sort sweep beneath her feet and knock her to the left. She groaned, cast her eyes right and left, and propped herself up on her arms. She could hear whatever-it-was squirming around on the floor, making those squealing sounds and occasionally making a "fumph" sound and creating small eddies in the normally still climate. It was about as big as she was, she could tell... but whether it had it in for her or just happened to be knocking her around in its crazy flailing was uncertain.

No. It was trying to attack her, whatever it was. This was its space. She was an intruder. She had to be dealt with. The logic flowed into her mind so effortlessly that she was surprised she hadn't thought of it in the first place. Well, then, the answer seemed simple enough. Get out of there.

She shuffled as quickly as possible along the wall, her back glued flat against it. Arms outstretched, she felt in front of her for the portal she'd fallen through.

Not much luck there! She'd left her stomach exposed, and doubled over when again the creature slammed into her. Apparently it could see in the dark. Goodie. Well, no use trying to lie low, then-just had to run for it. But her feet sank in the peppery land. Already fumbling, a solid blow to her back gave her a mouthful of bitter ash-gravel.

Grr, her brain howled at her, you've been training since you were two, dimwit! You just gonna let this little thing push you around? Fight, stupid, fight!

She could feel the treacherous body heat slinking closer. But she was ready this time around. On a second's twitch, she bowled over to the right and heard the monster quite satisfactorily scrape in the dirt. She used her spare second to clench up and vault to her feet, springing her shield in front of her to guard against the beast. She felt the recoil when it hammered against her barricade and slumped away.

Her mage-light reappeared and she saw her adversary for the first time: A pale and clear-skinned creature resembling a cross between a worm and a lizard. It had a wedge-shaped, crested head, faceted milky pink eyes, and its muscular tail wiggled to propel itself across the floor. With a whip like that, it was no wonder it'd leapt from the ground to quickly- this creature was clearly built for digging and most likely lived underground. And that's certainly a lot for a single five-year-old to deduce.

She thought she knew what this creature was... she was positive she'd seen it in pictures... but the name taunted her. If only she could remember-it might trigger the memory of some of her father's briefing on the bestiary of Hyrule. It was a larvae of some kind... what creature looked like a twisted land-borne tadpole after hatching? No time, no time! She almost forgot to dodge when the baby lunged at her.

Incidentally she leapt right up the path she'd fallen down-its sheer slickness told her that. A difficult climb to be sure, but if she backed up slowly she could make it. One little baby step at a time... the earth-tadpole seemed almost afraid to follow... she grinned in a bout of victorious smugness as the whimpering little snake dove headfirst back into the sand.

"Ha ha! That's right, and don't you forget it, you slimy little-"

She backed up into a wall of solid rock.

She was so taken by surprised that she lost her footing and slid down into the crumbly cavern again, green orb pulsing wildly in an attempt to follow her head. She was tempted to cry. But a ray of hope that almost destroyed the wall as it was wafted down to her ears, causing them to tremble even more than the reptile's scratching had! "Posie! Is that you?"

A smile that almost outshone the mage-light swum her face. "Daddy! Daddy, it's me! I'm OK! I'm down here!" She jumped up and waved her arms, even though Link couldn't see her.

"Elaine and I are having a little trouble with the rocks! We don't want to bomb it because we don't want to hurt you, but the going by hand is awfully slow! Can you hold on down in there?"

"Yes! Yes! I can hold on as long as you can keep digging!"

"OK! We'll have you out as fast as we can!"

Things were finally starting to look up. Link and Elaine were burrowing to her slowly but steadily, she had her magic flame, and best of all she'd frightened off that horrible sea-green thing.

Well, two out of three wasn't terrible...

"Not you agaiiiiin!" she wailed when a blow from the side sent her crumbling. She flung out her arms to brace herself, not really necessary when the ground was so airy, but a reflex anyway. This time it didn't just draw back after the first blow, it leapt on top of her and began to jump like it was using her for a trampoline. Summing up as much of her strength as she could, she cracked upward like a whip and flung the surprised creature back a few inches. She attempted to sprint through the soft earth again, doing her best to stay ahead. How long would she have to hold out like this? Please hurry, she sent a mental message to her busy comrades.

For a good ten minutes, it must have been, she dodged and parried and blocked. She'd learned now the ways in which the creature attacked, and how each was best avoided. The jumps were easy to guard against with her shield, she could quickly bound away from its whipping tail, and if it put chase too quickly, it didn't appear to like getting earth in its eyes. Was "See my dust" a greater insult than eating it? The point was, though, she knew its every trick. There was nothing it could pull that she couldn't counter.

Or so she thought...

It was busy, for a moment, shaking sand out of its eyes when Posie stopped to rest. It was a safe bet it was preoccupied in clearing its line of sight, so, after what had been another tiring lap around the room, she stopped and took a few deep breaths.

"Posie," she sighed to herself, "I reckon that if you tire yourself out now, then you're not fit for the rest of this venture." She sighed. "After all, this can't possibly be the worst it'll get. You've heard about some of those monsters... Gleeoks as big as houses, mobs of Gels a mile wide, big thick-skinned Dodongos with mouths full of..."

That was when it hit her... and it bit her. The snake sunk its undeveloped(but still painful) fangs into her leg, and the bolt of realization bit into her brain. A Dodongo. A baby Dodongo! That's what it was! Dodongos were like frogs-after hatching they lived underground until they grew legs and could breathe fire, then they stuck to their caves and eventually migrated to lava pits after getting their second pair of limbs. It was all coming back, and rather quickly at that-but there was something about this juvenile Dodongos that she just didn't seem to be remembering...

She shrieked as she shook the beast from her leg, and limped over away from it. She sat down in the dirt and checked the wound-small, shallow, nothing major punctured. Still, it'd be a hindrance. She couldn't run anymore. Not until she got out of here and slapped on some of Saria's salve, anyway; that would close up the lesion and take away a lot of the pain with its magic. Small medical miracle, that stuff was, one of her most common and simplest mixes, and Posie was without it. She could be fairly positive she'd inherited some of her mother's talent for straight healing, but you couldn't just summon any sort of magic you wanted by snapping your fingers. It took months of practice just to master a single spell. What options were left to her?

She knew, of course, but she tried not to think about it. She hadn't been given that sword because she'd been any better at practice than usual as of late, but simply because it was a rough world out here(and boy, was she learning it the hard way) and you couldn't always defend yourself with a twig or a stone. There was nothing in this hollow that she could even throw at the Dodongo, and she'd lent her bow to Elaine. Thankfully. She didn't want any excuse to have to gore its insides out. She wanted to be as humane as possible... despite her reluctance to listen, she took her father's words very gravely, only wanting to wield the sword when it was really, truly, most desperate. Besides, there were plenty of things she wanted to see now more than Dodongo blood... Link and Elaine's faces, for instance...

The Dodongo beat into her from the side, and she could feel her ankle twist most uncomfortably as she rocketed to the left. She groaned-now she would need a liberal application of bruise balm as well as bleeding salve on that leg. She wouldn't say no to just chugging a Dragon Potion and letting all the damage just fade away. But there wouldn't be any Dragon Potion; despite its astounding healing properties it made folks(her, in particular) incredibly sleepy. And there was no place for extreme drowsiness during an adventure, in the middle of the day... she was feeling rather tired now, anyway... she was being clobbered far too well... she had to stand and fight, there was nothing more left...

There was a ringing as the sword flew from her back and, with a lightning-fast swipe, the blade tasted flesh for the first time.

Droplets of a thick, gooey purple liquid splashed over her from the gash, acrid and hot and singeing the red Goron tunic she wore. Instantly she recoiled from the abhorrence of what she'd done. The thing squealed in panic and pain, twisting and knotting every heartstring Posie owned. How very unlike her, that last outburst had been! She was a loathsome murderer now... but now that it writhed in agony, Posie knew she had to put the Dodongo out of its misery...

Why did I have to pick such a grisly occupation, she asked herself? Why, why, why? The "injustice" of it all sickened her, even if it had been about to KO her in the first place. She had a sharp, dangerous stick and it didn't. Rage burned in its eyes now as, painfully limping, she approached- rage such as a sort she'd only seen once before in any eyes. About a year ago it had been, back before she'd started attending real school and was at a daycare in Hyrule Castle Town with Elaine. The man who looked after all of the children had been reading through an encyclopedia, heaven knows why, but nevertheless one kid managed to knock it off his table. It fell open, and when Elaine had turned it over, there lay upon the page a horrible, horrible picture of the cruelest face Posie had ever laid eyes on. Sunken, slitted eyes, rimmed in greasy fur and crowned by thorny horns, balancing on a hog's nose above a pit bull's jowls. Fangs as long and sharp as daggers rose from that black hole of a mouth, opened in a roar of triumph.

It had frightened her, but she'd thought nothing of it until that creature appeared in her dreams. She had been wandering alone at night, trekking a foggy, deserted moor, wandering until a pair of voices caught her attention and she ducked into the nearest bush. She'd spotted two dumpy little figures running around a pile of something white, chanting arcane phrases and passing something small and blue between them. While one spoke the spell, the other played a few notes of an unusual riff, and slowly the dust hill formed itself with a strange clicking: First, they stacked into bones, high, stark and white, into a rough-chiseled skeleton... then, sickly pink organs and muscles puffed into being and started to pulse... the thick, mottled gray and scabby skin slushed over it from the ground up... and there was the terrible thing, bald and weak, but those eyes were as cold as ever. She'd woken up then in fright and ran to her mother, who comforted her with: "There now, sweetie, it was only a dream. It's just a bunch of nonsense your brain puts together! Now, go to sleep, and don't worry about any ten-foot zombies. Your father and I are MORE than a match for anything you'll find in this forest."

It was funny, as she'd never told her mother about having seen the thing in the book beforehand. Perhaps if she had, Saria would have become more worried... for any Hylean with even the smallest knowledge would become worried if a four-year-old who had never even heard the word "Ganon" saw the former Evil King rising from his ashes in a dream. Even though she knew his image now, from every story Link had told her, she didn't feel the dream to be especially significant. Just the frightened subconscious ramblings of her younger self. Still, she thought of those eyes just now, and began to wonder...

That Dodongo still had some leap left in it, and it lunged at her. She jumped back and started to skitter in reverse. Back up the slope... oh, it was really angry now. It was following her... She waggled her sword in front of its face, but it wasn't discouraged. It snapped at the tip of the knife, missing a clamp down but getting its left cheek ripped open for its risk. Posie's stomach did a double take, but she really had to put the poor thing down. It was cruel to kill it, but it was even crueler to let it suffer. She was backed up against the wall now; it was as good a time as any to strike the finishing blow. Tired from loss of blood, the Dodongo waggled up but slumped down at her feet, panting heavily. It would die soon regardless of what she did now, but best make it quick for the poor thing, whose lungs seemed to be clogging up with the blood it inhaled from its face wound as it gasped. I'm going to be a disturbed child later on, I just know it, she thought, but with a heavy soul she grasped her hilt in both hands and knelt her forehead in it, silently wishing for the Goddesses to accept this little thing somewhere in the Sacred Realm-

Flinging her head away the instant she started the dive, she plunged the filthy weapon into the distressed animal, driving into its heart. For what was almost four seconds, only one pair of lungs huffed into the now almost silence.

Without warning Link felt a blast of steaming energy plug into his chest, and he and Elaine flew back several yards, most of the rock becoming airborne with them. An especially pungent surge of sulfur gas hit them full in the face, and Link felt his arms becoming smattered with little flecks of yellow ash.(Of course, it was not the fact that the pieces were yellow that he felt, simply their being there, as no human the author personally knows of is capable of feeling color through their skin.) Elaine choked on the particularly offensive pocket of air at the same time she fell to a stop on her back, meaning it was quite difficult for her to catch her breath for several seconds. She noticed Link shield his eyes with his arm and did the same; the explosion left the area with a stinging feeling. Somehow Link managed a sputtering mouthful of words: "What the heck was that?! Posie?"

A significantly worse-for-the-wear child rolled over on her stomach just beneath the visible entrance to the Dodongo larvae's cavern, not too sure she had legs anymore, let alone a physical body at all. It had all happened in such a sudden fireburst and spontaneous tremor she wasn't too sure what all had happened... but from what she could gather, the creature, upon dying, had exploded, giving her a good singeing that would certainly leave a few marks later on and subsequently freeing her from her impoundment down below. It had done a surprisingly small amount of damage to her, nothing a bit of Red Potion wouldn't fix-a few minor burns on her limbs, nothing worse than first, not even second degree, and she still had all her hair. A normal child should have been seriously injured, perhaps slaughtered by that explosion. She'd escaped with barely a scratch! Perhaps more standing evidence that she wasn't exactly a normal child, and that someone, somewhere, was looking after her. Was Farore sweet on the heir to her piece? Did Nayru's love reach that far? Did Din have a cooler center than her outside suggested? Maybe it was a little bit of Saria's "natural"(and that's quite a literal phrase) endurance that had rubbed off on her. Then, of course, there was the fact that she was wearing a Goron Tunic...

Neither Link nor Elaine had felt the incinerating surge that had given Posie most of her troubles, but both had gotten the kinetic punch. Link had numerous scratches salting his face, and Elaine seemed to be bearing a twisted wrist as well as numerous bruises. Navi was flying around chaotically, screaming "Hey hey HEY!" at the top of her lungs and zigzagging rapidly in front of the two's faces. The fairy magic of which she was possessed had caused the living bomb's pyrotechnics to glide right over her, without moving her and inch.

Posie groaned. Yes, she was still in one piece. Yep, her travelling buddies looked awful punch-drunk. And of course, Navi was having greater kittens over it all than a politician that had just been handed a new bill awaiting ratification. She attempted to haul herself to her feet: bad plan, better wait until she'd had a couple swigs of potion before she tried walking again. Something on the front of her outfit stung intensely; at first she'd thought she'd landed on her sword, but another swing about revealed that all down the front of her borrowed tunic was a thick, clotted mass of acerbic fluid that flamed through a rip in the material but wasn't able to penetrate much of the outfit itself. She tried touching it, only to reel back in horror-it was hotter than a pan that had sat on the stove for half an hour. Her finger was flightily in her mouth in less than a second, and, for the record, the worst-burned part of her body.

Speaking of her sword, where was that darned thing? Ahh, she spotted it just to her left, about three yards from where Link was looking about dazedly. It was covered in the same mauve gunk as her clothes were, or more accurately, coated in it. Barely a silver glimmer was left untouched, and that slime certainly hadn't been there earlier. It dawned on her that the sticky substance with the tendencies of napalm probably had come from the Dodongo, and the reason she was sludged over with its blood was due to her unfortunate business of thrashing it, though it was a grisly thought that she wished wouldn't occur to her. She was not particularly proud of her first battle; unlike many young warriors who would be gloating for weeks about their conquest over this meager lizard, she felt horrified that she had turned to her sword at all. She's always thought monsters were huge things she'd only be stabbing at to distract, not wriggling grubs her own size trying to impale her into the ground. She just wanted to get that awful thing back on her back where she wouldn't have to look at it, but to do that, Link had to notice that she was there and come...

She chanced an outburst. "Daddy!"

"Posie?" Link wheezed hoarsely, trying to expel the rest of the saffron cloud from his lungs. Then, more enthusiastically, when he saw her moping about in the acute gap, "Posie!" Despite all the little spikes of pain stroking along his muscles, he was thrown on his feet in and instant and crying maudlin words as he rushed to be near her.

"Oh, Posie," he wept, embracing her tightly near his chest, "you look terrible. But I thought you'd look a lot worse. Thank every god that ever was that you're OK," and his voice was drowned out in a flood of oncoming blubbering. His eyes became glossy, though those crystalline drops didn't quite seem to have the nerve to spill over his eyelids. Those who knew him wouldn't be bothered by this anyway, as it really took quite a lot to get him this upset-subsequently, no one, not even Saria, could say that they'd honestly seen him cry before.

"Daddy, Daddy," wailed Posie, "I didn't mean to! I'm sorry! I didn't want to kill it, but it was trying to hurt me, it bit me, it was jumping, and I couldn't stop it, and-oh Daddy, I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry..."

Link had one hand behind her head and the other supporting the rest, rocking her gently back and forth in an attempt to calm her down. "It's OK. It's OK, my love, tell me everything that ails you and I promise I'll make it better."

"Yeah! It's alright, Posie, we'll listen!" Quite achingly, Elaine had dragged herself over to Link, barely managing to catch her balance and currently clasping Link's leg for an extra bit of support. "What happened down there? And what was that explosion?"

Posie took a few deep breaths and began. She told them both how, in a state of panic, she had fled into the crack for safety when the rocks fell. She hadn't known that it lead to an underground cave, where a baby Dodongo dug up out of the ground and began to leap at her. She dodged and blocked until it took a bite out of her leg, then she had to lash out at it with her maladroit sword techniques. When she had defeated it, it had blown up, releasing her and burning her at the same time. Many of the later descriptions were lachrymose, involving a good deal of self-loathing descriptions on how rash and barbarian she had been. Practicing to slay dangerous creatures was one thing, actually doing it was another...

"Pshhhhh. It's alright." Link slicked back her bangs from her eyes, and looked into her salt-streaked face. "It was only a Dodongo. You did what you had to do, and by golly, you sounds like you did it very well. I had my doubts on how you would face off against some of these things as, well, you've always been a little bit wobbly when actually handling a sword, but if you could pull this off then you demand kudos, kid. Even if you did forget about the youngsters of 'em combusting after they get taken down... ahh, but thanks to Darunia, you're safe."

"Thanks to Darunia, we're all safe," said Elaine. "It's because of his tunics that we're here in the first place."

Link nodded. "Right you are, Elaine. And I think, to insure we stay safe, we'd better rest up a bit before we proceed. I don't think we're too far from the entrance to the pass, but better not chance it. We're well up near the brim of the volcano, and this is about the safest part of it."

"I'll drink to that," buzzed Navi. "You all'd better too. Red Potion! Red Potion! Where is the Red Potion?"

Everyone laughed, including Navi herself.



"Confounded rock slide! It's all your fault for not aiming, Kotake!"

"Shut your trap, Koume! This was your blasted idea in the first place! I don't see why we bothered. We should have just let the lava finish him off! 'No,' you said, 'He's protected against the lava,' you said! 'Finish him off with a shower of stone!' I don't know why I even bother to listen to you! You're the one that nearly dropped the urn!"

"You've been sitting on your broom too long!" raged the ice witch Koume, a sickly looking hag with a hawk's nose, popping fish eyeballs and a putrid grin full of crooked yellow teeth. "Keep in mind that if you weren't listening to me, the older and more mature one, we'd still be officially dead! And we couldn't be out here, helping our poor baby." She spat the last in a caustically saccharine tone.

"We're twins, you moron, we've had this discussion before!" razed back Kotake, her identical counterpart with wisps of fire enmeshed in her grizzled white hair. In her four-hundred-plus years of magic, she had learned to ignite and recede these at a fancy. "You cannot be older than me unless by a couple of minutes!"

"And I am! By eleven!" The squat little figure would be hopping up and down now, were she not suspended hundreds of feet over a boiling lake of magma.

"You turkey, it is I who is older!" Kotake's eyes were narrowed menacingly.

"Codswallop! It's me, you retching pot-bellied pig!"

"Nonsense, you filthy bilge rat!"

"Yellow-livered toadstool!"

"Slack-spined hack!"

"CUUUUCCCCCCCCO!"

"Oooh! Don't EVEN go there!" Kotake grasped her broom with her left hand, holding up her right and filling it full of fire. She flung the flame-ball at Koume, who did a quick nose dive to avoid it.

"See? What did I tell you? You couldn't hit your way out of a paper bag!" Koume vaulted out her wand, knocking it on her broom's tail to get it to spark, then shot a few bolts of icicles at her sister.

Kotake did a barrel roll. "Maybe not out of one, but I can thwack a 'paper bag' any day!" Completely abandoning all her spell work and witchly protocol(assuming such a thing existed), she gave Koume a solid whump on the head with her staff.

"Look! You are a Cucco! I never saw such a short temper!" In a bizarre airborne game of Whap-A-Witch, the two were clubbing each other back and forth every other second. In the occasional chance when a little ember of a blaze or flicker of a blizzard puffed out of the scepters, one could witness such humorous occurrences as Koume being the one with a fiery hairdo or Kotake wearing a cold crystal headband. Eventually, when one of the witches was missing half of her cloak(lost in a mushroom-shaped poof) and the other had no feeling in almost the entire lower half of her body, Kotake lowered her pole.

"Oh, what's the use? Fiduss, Koume, see where your little distractions has gotten us? I can't find the unfathomably blonde pain-in- the-butt anywhere down in that abysmal cove. Lucky thing we caught him off at the pass, though, ehh?" Kotake grinned dubiously, strains over her halitosis leaking out between the gaps in her mossy teeth. "He'll not find out what we're up too, this time. I have just the thing for dealing with our Little Red Riding Cap down there. I've been saving these two for something special." She let out a hideous cackle.

"More of your creatures of the night and fire? Listen, all I felt when you sent out that last call was an itty bitty baby Dodongo, and that kicked the bucket awfully quick." Because they were much smaller than Link and their clothes blended in with their surroundings, neither harridan had taken notice of Posie or Elaine. The thought Link was trudging around in the volcano all by himself. Even when they'd set out their little Tektite bootlickers to capture and harass anyone unfortunate to be taking a hike up that day, it had been from far away. They hadn't even been expecting Link in the first place. "It better be something good this time, something that won't give up the ghost in less than a half hour. Or I'm getting my Yeti to do it."

"Your Yeti wouldn't last five minutes in that environment and you know it, sister. And don't worry. This time it is good. A pair of Lizafos warriors, specially hand-trained by the Moblin King in all of the fencing arts. Those swords they carry are sharp. Ooh, won't it be grand, once we have our baby back, to present him with a lovely Link-kabob?"

Koume gave back a sickly giggle. "You're making his mouth water just talking about it!" Under what remained of her old hood, one branched claw cuddled a heavy iron urn, malicious paint long chipped and faded. Jokingly she gave it a small jiggle, causing its loose contents to shift and hum.

"Stop it! We can't loose a one of those, Koume. Keep it up, and I'll carry it." She glared back at her sister, one hand severely held behind her back and crooked over the jeweled hold of her wand. "I'm warning you..."

"Oh al-riiiight!" The ice gorgon was tart. "I was just funning."

"Save your fun for Link," cackled Kotake. "Boy, won't he be surprised!"



The last few drops of florid pink elixir slipped out of sight down the neck of the bottle and into Link's throat, and he sighed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He turned to look at the girls-they looked almost completely fit now, having each chugged half a bottle of Red Potion apiece(which amounted to one whole bottle among them) and done away with a good amount of bruise balm and burn salve from their respective wooden tubs. You couldn't even begin to tell where a little lizard had clamped into Posie's calf half an hour before, and all that was left of Elaine's pummeling were a few stagnant yellowing marks among her otherwise unmarked self. (Save, of course, for her mocha-colored birthmark, which wasn't a birthmark at all... but ah, we'll get to all that soon.) Link himself had gotten a few scrapes and lesions, but a couple coats of the bleeding ointment and some bruise balm for himself had him looking as good as new. Or as close to new as he could ever look, anyway-there were scars cur deep into that flesh, scars that would never go away. Including one long, gruesome one on his left arm, residue from Ganon himself. It was the Minotaur demon's favorite method of disarming his opponents: cutting a long, deep slit along their dominant arm, causing them too much pain to use their weapon, and making them bleed even more fiercely if they tried. He was the only living person to bear that sort of tattoo, as he was the only person(other than Zelda) to ever come back from Ganon alive. Perhaps why he liked to wear long sleeved shirts under his tunic-so other's could view his mark.

It was a funny group to look down upon-a warrior, a girl who though she was one, and a passive lass who seemed to serve no other purpose than to cheer, gall, and be cheerfully galvanizing. (She would serve her prospect as a thief, too, but that's yet another thing we must set aside for now.) But it was one steeped in what it had set out to do, so Link was feeling brave, Posie self-satisfied(now that some of her initial distress had worn off), and Elaine particularly prodding. They weren't too far from their destination now, as it were-though the last leg of their trip through the volcano was the most dangerous, as it involved shimmying down a crumbly, narrow slab of rock that, if swung over right, would drop off onto a little ledge leading into the cave-and if not, into the crimson sea. But of course, Link wasn't worried. They did have their tunics, after all, and the ghost of Link's father would be more than willing to let them paddle about in the magma.

He'd set aside most of his own treatment to nurse the girls back to a flushing state, and as a consequence they were a good deal more lively than he at the time. They tugged at Link's legs, urging him forward. "Come on!" they rallied, Elaine making uncomfortable jerks at the kilt of his tunic, Posie at the fold-over part of his boots. "Let's go!"

"Alright, kids," he laughed, "let's swallow our courage and tackle the wall." He shook his head and his bangs flung off of his forehead, previously glued there by sweat. He reached behind his neck and straightened the band holding the rest of his wild locks in a pony-tail, combing through a knot with his fingers and reaching to the pocket where his mismatched hat was being held. (In another quirk those games wouldn't have you believing, Link had no hats matching any of his tunics, red, blue or purplish white. Kokiri got quite angry if anyone stole their signature clothing style.)

"I'll go first," offered Posie, the smallest, lightest and one would likely have the least trouble. "Show me the way." Link pointed off to the right, off a shelf that appeared to drop right off into the pit. The trail they needed to take was not directly connected to any large jetty they could safely rest on, nor were the jumps small. It was a fair sized jump from their cliff to the little lip, and a tricky move was required for the cave entrance. But of course, Posie wasn't frightened, because nothing fazed her. How very like a five-year-old for her to testify later that "That Dodongo wasn't so bad... I could have beaten it with my left hand!" An ironic statement, to be sure, so she'd see when it was all too late...

She crept to the edge of the bluff, peeped over the escarpment to find her landing point, and readied herself. She clenched up her arms, swung them back and forth, and hurled herself over the trembling stone with a small yelp as she pawed at air for a moment and a smaller whuff when she managed to land on her feet without stumbling too greatly.

She turned back, grinned and waved, and took a few steps backwards. The ground held staunch beneath her. Elaine went next, a bit floppier, like a volleyball that was only half inflated. She struck terra firma at an odd angle on her heel, and collapsed sideways too close to the rim for comfort. Posie's face blanked and her arms were out on impulse, but gingerly her friend pulled herself to her feet without much strain. Link very carefully eased himself down from the ledge, dangling a foot or so above the hold below. He released his grip and fell, but had overestimated the strength of the narrow strip of stone. Several brittle bits deteriorated, and he had to make quite quickly with his feet to safely stumble onward. There wasn't much to stumble into either; though wide enough for the girls to travel comfortably it was almost extreme enough to him that he had to walk like a person on a balance beam.

Below, a few scraping sandstone shards knocked into the cranium of one of Kotake's Lizafos lackeys. A creature with acid green skin, a wedge-shaped head, piercing red eyes, and a heavily fleshy tail, it wielded a serpentine rusty dagger like many of the "Fos" clan and was clad in a rended leather vest. Its slimy pink gecko's tongue lashed out to lick the bruise, and it peered up in annoyance.

"'Ey, loozzza," it hissed in its primitive accent at its partner, "Link izzz cum'n', get yuu tayzzz readeh."

"Who yuuzzz call'n' a loozzza, buzzztar?" The Lizafos's partner and mate had a higher, scuffier voice, and her body was thinner and longer, making her resemble more a true lizard. Her throat clicked when she finished her sentence, and she spat on the ground in front of the male's feet. "Ah ayent gunna duu nut'n' fuu zzzum 'uul 'oo tinkzzz 'eezzz gunna push me 'urund."

"Yu membehzzz wuh zzz' buzzzezzz sezzz," he glucked back. "Geh zzz' Link, mukem scream, mukem blud flu. Kill Link. Get hud, fuud fuu muster G'n'n wun 'ee buck."

The female Lizafos seethed. "Ah nuu wuh buzzzezzz sezzz, buu Ah du wuh Ah wull," she replied.

Their accentuation made them hard enough to understand at close range, and the fact that their grammar was often muddled made it worse. From far above, where Link and crew teetered between a fiery dive and a razor-edged path of cankered gravel, their voices were nothing more than the burble of lava as it bubbled up and burst on a vermilion-tongued surface. Their minds were too preoccupied as it were with staying straight, and not tripping over any number of flecks jutting out of the surface.

Half of the sweat on Link's face wasn't from the heat. He was highly unwisely traveling in back. If he tripped, and he'd come very close on two occasions, it spelt doom for them all. Well, doom assuming Jeremiah Emilio Blade wasn't watching. Link's father had been hurled to a premature death when an old friend of his father's, now turned turncoat, bathed his lance in the flesh of Jerry's chest and shoved the burly young warrior into the hellpit from which there was no escape. Because the ashes of his bones rested here, so did his ghost, except for the Wild Spirit Night known as Halloween. Now the bereaved gentleman saw it his personal duty to be the saint of all those souls who took a dare with the volcano, and earning him a place in lore even in death.

Surely old Miah B. wouldn't let Link die if he fell. Surely he knew the importance of those two children to his son, and would treat them with equal verity. And surely the man held open his phantom arms even now, ready to brace for the first to misplace a foot.

Surely, Link thought pessimistically, they were all doomed.

Posie, who could patter along with a decisive bit more of speed than the others, reached the dangerous overhang first. She waved her hands, stamped her feet, and did everything in her power to call the attention to her. She even dragged out her sword and waved it about, trying to pull in their faces with its glint, but it was still too submersed in (now dried) Dodongo blood to do much besides make the space that was her seem bigger. Link called out, "Hold your horses! We're coming!" and knelt down to a crawl to prepare himself for what he had to do. They needed to be careful, so Link had to go first and show his juvenile companions what was to be done.

Link sat down and dangled his feet over the edge, Navi hovering nearby in her Navish way. She knew what lurked down in that red froth(she'd been there when Link learned Hyrule's second most famous hero had been his father) and knew they had little to fear, but was still uneasy. "Watch me, girls," he said, "and don't be afraid if you fall in. The Spirit of the Volcano lurks here, and will let you safely pass the lava." They clearly thought he was just saying that to make them feel less afraid of the loop they had to go through, but seemed at least a bit grateful for the encouragement.

Link slipped himself down so he hung over the edge by his hands, kicking and swinging his feet to throw his weight over to the rock ledge bobbing below. He let out a sigh of relief, not knowing what awaited him ahead.

One of the Lizafos snarled and dragged its partner into the cave they guarded, eavesdropping from around the ledge, ducking out of sight when Link looked their way. The female hissed, "Th's uuur bunty, yuu 'uul, nuu lezzz mukem bug fuu m'cey. Link-kabob."

Her partner cackled hysterically. "Yuu loozzza, bu' yuu nuu ha- ha. Guud ha-ha p'son. Mukmee ha-ha muu uf'n."

At that moment, Posie flung herself around and was caught by Link .

"WUUUU?!?!" screeched the pair. "Bi'Link, Li'Link? Buzzezzz nuu sezzz th' be two 'vem! Wuu we gunna duu now?"

Link set Posie down and captured Elaine as she clumsily came out of her fall.

"'REE? 'REE? Th's nuu in jub duzzz'crip'n!"

"Nuumine. 'Ree come, 'ree muzzzt kill! 'Ree muzzzt nuu gut 'nto cuvvv!"

Far in front of the lizard warriors, Link sighed. "That wasn't so hard now, was it?"

Elaine looked fine, but Posie, shaking fitfully, had her own opinion. "Speak for yourself!"

Elaine shook her head, clicked her tongue, and looked back up at them. Or at least, she looked up at one of them. "It wasn't the most pleasant thing I've ever done, but, then again, I've never met a Goron, hiked a mountain, dived inside a volcano, or been in an avalanche before," she nodded, shrugging her shoulders. "Really, Posie," and she looked at the pixie of a child, "I don't know what the state of my life would be if I'd never met you. Probably really really boring." Both of them smirked.

"Speak for yourself," she repeated. "I daresay you're weird enough in your own way, and you'll find a little bit of madness to cure even the most dull day. Linè rick?"

Link looked at his daughter strangely while Elaine doubled over at the pair of nonsense words. "Indeed! Uh, just an inside joke, Mr. B," she crunched his eyes. "Maybe one day we'll explain it, ehh?"

"Hyat feron iirip lawuasha ryu g'xor!"

Elaine began to laugh again, but her face suddenly went tense and morbid, and she slowly gazed up, giving Posie a dark look.

"What? I'm just sayin'..."

Curtly Elaine turned around, saying softly(but seriously): "And I could say the same of the Great Deku Sprout and you." She turned her nose up and held her arms down stiffly, and was the first to be sauntering at the cave extension.

Posie made the face of one offered a particularly repugnant piece of sulfur crystal by a Goron, curling her hands into claws. A move that couldn't have been too happily welcomed by her fingers, wrapped in stiff gauntlets. "Look, uhh, I'm really sorry about that remark... I wasn't thinking... really... please..." She dashed up, profusely apologizing.

Elaine snuffled. "That was really crude, Posie-"-she crossed her arms-"-but I suppose it doesn't matter. You do kinda have a point..." She gazed aimlessly to the side. "Lawu-lawu probably isn't ever coming back. I envy you for your... Lawu-lawu, you know-I know it's so selfish though, and... maybe I'm a bit to blame for being overly touchy."

"It's OK." Posie would've patted her friend on the back were she comfortably able to reach high enough, but settled for a simple leg squeeze. "You too, my best bud forever," replied Elaine, and she actually lifted her almost a foot off the ground. She was, after all, only as tall as a doll. She still weighed a good deal heavier, but it wasn't any great task.

Link mumbled, confused. "Heme heme heh? All this over a bunch of garbled nonsense? Is this part of the joke?"

Elaine set Posie down. "Not quite nonsense, katen giri sensei. My dad's bilingual, from his old job, and he kinda-well-taught me how to speak the Lingo of the people who call themselves the Linguists. And I, in turn, passed the knowledge on to my good pal, Posie. She's still in- training, of course, but I daresay she's quite adept in it now! Yes?"

"Zum," said Posie.

"Whatever," groaned Link. "Well, at least if we happen to meet any Linguists, whoever they are, I know who to turn to."

"Not likely," said Elaine, swinging her arms back and forth with her gaping stride. "They live in a very specific area and rarely ever leave it, and our route skirts around it quite nicely if I do say so myself. Luckily too-they're, uh, not too happy about getting visitors."

"KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Something lime flew past Elaine. "What was that?!" she shrieked, just as another voice howled, "AMMBUUUUUUUUZZZ!"

Link dived down and did a forward roll, the spiky ground a headache on his skull. The ugly chartreuse blurs paused for a moment, standing relative to each other behind the girls, mouths agape and tongues flickering to taste the air as their sharp, slitted eyes watched Link tumble ahead of them. Posie's brain didn't stall this time. "Lizafos!" she whined, and grabbed a handful of Elaine's garments and accidentally tugged her down as she attempted to urge her forward, doing more damage than good.

On her sleek, raptor legs, agile and made for amazing leaps and sprints, the female bounded over the fallen duo and made straight for Link, whose hand was already making for his sword. She tried to stab him in the back, a wound sure to be fatal with a Lizafos's deadly accuracy, but Link had his lightning-quick feet and reflexes. Steel clamored on rusty steel, sparks flowing freely from the gash ripped in the air. Blades echoed like thunder in the cavernous space and every crash was accompanied by a necessary explosion of lightning. Posie knew how to defend herself, but this was fencing at its finest, between a creature whose very instincts were that of war, and the greatest knight known to Ebridane. The male dragon stepped forward, sprawled over an awestruck Posie and Elaine, heckling Link and cheering his mate.

"Hey!" snarled Posie when the Lizafos called Link a string of particularly nasty names, some that would put a sailor to shame. "That's my daddy you're talking about!" She slung her sword at the creature's ankles, inwardly regretting her second battle today. Yet lessons had to be taught to foul beasts who even when their was no soap at hand to wash their mouths out with.

Elaine sensed that she was now in a perilous position and scrambled upward, feinting deeper inward. Posie wanted to shout at her for leaving her to deal with the scaly fiend alone, and chanced a peer into the cave as she circled around the Lizafos and between his legs, when she saw- Elaine, grinning madly with a silken scabbard in her hands, its rusted(but still formidable) dagger glinting out just slightly. The little thief! It was another glorious inside joke. The look on the thing's face when it found its weapon missing!

"Hey! Lizard lips! Looking for this?"

It was a precious look indeed; half ogle, half gasp, part rage sat too long on percolate. It turned furiously on Posie, who still fought with her own weapon(now tinged even sicker with red blood-red was all too human a color), then to Elaine, who didn't notice the pair of rubies reaming her soul. The demon's heart locked on to the gilded sheath the little girl was waving about so recklessly, and dived.

Displaying lightning reflexes Posie certainly never knew she had, Elaine whipped out the knife as quick as the Lizafos itself might, and parried to the left. The lizard tried to grasp her in a deadly embrace, and, for its trouble, got a knick in its shoulder. It cursed loudly and saltily, and Posie made a face. If it wasn't a silly one. "Go on, Elaine!" she shouted. "Let's see you fight!"

Elaine's long limbs served more of a purpose than simply making her look like a rainforest monkey. She could whirl and dance past rending claws in the fashion of a Gerudo ducking behind her double blades. With her craftily stolen weapon, she would scamper around, waiting for just the right moment to strike. It would be when the creature stumbled... there! He fell flat on his face, long, lizardy snout digging in dust. Then she would dash up and make a somewhat struggling cut into his scales. She, too, fell short on courage when it came to battle. Odd, though it might seem natural of what of her was Hylean, the part of her that wasn't was known for the way its members learned war from an early age.

The gash she had made was into his back, long and deep. As deep as she had dared to go. The back of his jacket was frayed and ugly, precious crimson fluid sinking into the fibers. He twitched spasmodically-had his spinal cord been hit? Elaine couldn't bear the thought of having killed the creature, especially not by damaging his nerves. She had seen those before, who had had similar injuries occur to them-it was an ugly sight, the way whole sections of their body were seized up an paralyzed. Even uglier was the way he had taken the blow-not a sound, not even a whimper. He just laid there, in the dust.

Apparently his partner was not so well at keeping mum. A shriek echoed throughout the crater, and the female Lizafos keeled over and slumped to her knees, taloned hand plastered over a dripping wound in her stomach. She looked up at Link, his face wholly serious and cold, and whispered: "'Ave merzzzy..."

His upper lip twitched. Posie felt as if she were staring into the face of a complete stranger. In a monotonous, chilling voice, he drawled, "I may spare you and your partner if you tell us something." He took a heavy breath. "Who sent you here?"

"'T-t-twazzz T-T-Twinrova..." hissed the male, ground around him a sticky fire color. "Pleezzz, ivvv yuu 'ave any kindnezzz 'n yuu 'art, keel uzzz... 'uut uzzz uut ovvv uur mizzz'ry..."

Link shook his head. "No. Death is too good for you. I will give you medicine-bandage your wounds, rest as long as you need too, then get far away from Hyrule, and never return to Twinrova. Do you understand?"

The female nodded. The male gave a cough that might have been a highly slurred "Yes."

"And tell me-what is Twinrova doing?"

"We 'uunezz'ly dunno," gurgled the male. His tone was earnest.

"Fine." Link knelt down and said in the same voice, to both girls, "Help me find the right poultices." Noting that his temper was particularly high, they meekly shuffled over as he set down his pack and rummaged inside to find a container of the proper herbs. Posie unearthed the jar, and Link handed it to the Lizafos in front of him. She graciously took it with her spare claw and set it down, while Elaine gave her a roll of gauze.

"We weel nev'r fuuget yuur grayzzz," said the female constrictedly. "Yuu 'ave sayved uzzz frum death 'nd pain. Yuu are truly great..."

"Just shut up," Link growled. "I'm not in a good mood. You need help with that or what?" Angrily he offered his services, to the beast who was struggling to apply the paste to the bleed in her gut.

While he helped her fix her problems, her partner turned his clouding eye up to Elaine. Link would have to hurry, there was not much life left in the Lizafos now. "Yuu fight well," he sighed to her. "Yuu are queek uzzz a Leever, 'nd yuu are wily uzzz a Dud 'And," he purled.

Elaine was a little muddled when her mind managed to churn out what he was saying in Hylean. Was that supposed to be a compliment? "Ummm... thanks. I guess that's a good thing..."

"Pleezzz, keep my weeponnn... yuu uuzzz eet better 'n ah deed..." He began to pant.

"Uhh, hey, Mr. B... uhh, we kinda have a situation here? This guy's almost dead!"

Link tore off the last strap from his roll of gauze, leaving the first 'Fos perfectly patched. "Coming!" he shouted, a much sweeter and softened hark. Without the weight of his pack he rose quicker, hurrying over to the failing creature and hastily starting to pour a patching potion into the gap in his back. "I'm afraid I'm no medic, or member of the Forest Guild," he told him, "but this is the best I can do. This will help heal the wound, as well as drive out microbes and glue the skin together so it can grow together again. It's part magic, part good old fashioned ointment, so you'll be in good hands. Roll over, if you can."

Painfully the Lizafos curled over on his side. Link laid down the bandage, then, with continuing help from the dragon, wrapped up the creature's gash almost entirely. A small metal clasp kept the dressing in place, and the creature was surprised at how much better he felt. He even attempted to stand up, with his partner supporting him on the side.

"Garn 'nd Ah tank yuu, tank yuu we duu. We 'member, ah'ways." And with that, the two of them began to limp off, chugging up the slope.

Link seemed satisfied and proud with himself. He got up and brushed his hands together, then gazed eagerly into the cave. "Glad this leg of our journey's over, aren't you, girls? Come on, we have Ruto's Cave to conquer!"

"Yeah!" they cried back.



High above...

"YOU IDIOT!" squawked Koume. "YOUR LIZAFOS LET HIM GET AWAY!" She was taking her chances with her broom, balancing upon it and literally hopping mad. The aged wood shuddered every time she thudded upon it. One stray gust of wind, and she was history.

Kotake circled around her. "Don't worry! I anticipated this!"

"What could you possibly do?"

"Oh, just play around with the spells," she told her sister, letting her words fall like big dollops of syrup. "I placed a Dislocation in there, I did. Once he steps into it, he'll be whisked far away, from where he thinks he's going to someplace else entirely!"

"Oh yeah?" she taunted, fists on her hips. "And what would this someplace be, precisely?"

Kotake crowed evilly. Then, in a soft, cloying voice: "Why, to the Gerudo Valley, of course."