A/N: Here we are again! Deadlines! Who knew, right? It doesn't end where I want it to, and I feel like I'm juggling too many things and they're all in the air at once and I'm just waiting for them to land, but if you REALLY want to hear me complain about it you can check my Tumblr! :D

Thank you guys SO MUCH for your reviews, they have been absolutely amazing and I appreciate them so much I can't even tell you. T_T

Here ya go!

The Shrine

The rock gave way to something else just beyond the lip of the cavern, a material I recognized from borrowed memory but had no name for. The mouth of the shrine. It was cool to the touch and perfectly smooth, forming a passage that descended beneath the tableland—a passage and stairs, covered in debris and dust from the path Link had blasted through 10,000 years worth of accumulated earth and stone, but otherwise undamaged. Tiny orange orbs embedded in the walls peeked through the shadows at the angles where rigid, clay-colored lines met, strung up on them like stars on constellations.

Daruk had to crouch to get his head into the tunnel, but it was wide enough for him so long as he didn't try to walk abreast anyone else. He took up the rear as the other Champions filed in behind us, shuffling noisily; he reached out to stroke the foreign surface once, grimaced at the silky texture, and now seemed intent on not having any contact with it at all. Revali shushed him once, but then seemed to realize it was as pointless as shushing an avalanche and gave up.

The descent leveled at a dead end. The wall where the passage ended was easily twice my height, and littered in emblems and snaking designs that were dizzyingly familiar. At its center, a Sheikah eye watched over the passage like a guardian, stationed there millennia ago and still at its forgotten post.

Link scanned the floor surrounding the obstruction and frowned, his expression turning disquiet. He whispered something as he reached out to touch the wall, something ancient. I vaguely recognized it as an archaic form of Hylian, rummaging through memory, through pieces of linguistics studies and half-remembered history lessons, grasping after a translation. The answer bubbled up from someplace much deeper, so untraceable I doubted its legitimacy. Forgive us.

He stepped back and curved his hands, gesturing forward, and then to the sides, and then upward, miming lifting something heavy. The tunnel shuddered, ancient mechanisms resisting his efforts, but with each movement pieces of the wall shifted. The eye shunted forward on one side and back on the other, releasing a lock beneath that swiveled open and then parted, and finally the massive columns that made up the bulk of the wall pulled from the floor and sank into the ceiling.

Link stepped into the antechamber, plowing forward where the rest of us hesitated. It was startlingly well preserved. More serpentine, clay-colored patterns spread up pillars at the room's extremities and littered the floor and molding, leading up a ramp that served as the centerpiece to yet another doorway. Sconces on the flanking walls bathed the hall in a soft blue glow, and a squat pedestal just beside the entry gleamed a contrasting amber, its face emblazoned with different sort of constellation—orange and circular, surrounding a single azure ring that stared yawningly at whoever dared approach. It struck me as a flat, lifeless mimicry of his eyes.

"Incredible," Mipha whispered, and Revali scowled.

Daruk still looked nervous, his great stony feet rolling beneath him like he couldn't get his toes to grip the floor. "Doesn't feel natural."

Standing at the landing atop the ramp, his arms crossed over his chest, Link loosed a frustrated sigh, and I left the others behind to drift closer.

"What is it?" I murmured warily.

"I can't force this door open like I did the other one."

"Oh," I breathed, at a loss. "Couldn't you just teleport us through?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It doesn't work that way."

"You said it bends spacetime," I recited.

He turned to glare at me, finally out of patience. "And the Shrines house extradimensional pockets of subspace. They're gateways. If we tried teleporting beyond this wall without activating it, we would just materialize inside solid rock. Understand?"

I didn't. But I nodded anyway. I touched the wall, reaching to confirm his claims. He was right. There was nothing beyond it but a pocket of stale air and more stone.

"It doesn't give off any heat," Urbosa mused, holding her hand up to one of the sconces, and then tapped at the iris on the pedestal. "How does this even work?"

"Most of it is powered by the Ichor," Link answered pensively, and when we all turned to blink at him owlishly, he puffed another impatient sigh. "It's an ancient energy source—a liquid harvested from reservoirs deep within Hyrule. Its power is…" he gestured pithily, grasping after the right word and not looking like he'd found it, "unfathomable. Only limited by our ability to harness it. Some say it's blood of the gods themselves."

Then he stopped, turning to look at me slowly in a way that had me taking a preemptive step backwards.

He tilted his head, considering. "Do you suppose it might respond to the real thing?"

He took my wrist before I could retreat, dragging me over to the pedestal over my squeaked objection, and put the terminal between us, holding my hand over the iris and stars. Then he pulled the hilt from his belt, and the Champions surged closer in collective protest when the blade ignited the same blue as the sconces.

Link sighed exasperatedly. "I just need a drop."

"It's not the amount I object to," Urbosa growled. "And even if I were fine with that, I have other concerns. I wouldn't put it past you to enjoy drawing a bit of blood."

He glared at her. "Do you want to be the one to do it?"

"It's fine, Urbosa," I said, not entirely sure I believed that but in a hurry to deescalate the situation. I took a breath and met his eyes. "Go on."

I braced myself, and before Urbosa could so much as breathe an objection he had sliced my palm clean open in one swift stroke. I bit back a cry, swallowing the urge to scream at him that this was definitely more than a drop as the wound oozed red. He turned my hand over, squeezing gently to urge the flow—not that it needed any urging—and I worked to school my expression as the stream trickled onto the face of the pedestal, hyperaware of the reflexive crackle of electricity sparking on Urbosa's fingertips. He turned my hand upright again when he was satisfied, drawing the pad of his thumb across the wound. It sealed painlessly, and I loosed a tense, stale breath.

"You see?" he said, eyes brimming with unexpected, quiet accusation that made breath stick in my throat. "No harm done."

Then the pedestal between us hummed, the amber constellation igniting blue to match the iris, and sang a chime that reverberated through the hall. The passage rumbled, dust dislodging from the seams as the columns shifted and then slid open, revealing a larger chamber. My heart sputtered, pushing me closer, but I tore my eyes away from the glow pouring through the shadows to gauge his expression. His eyes were still trained on me.

He murmured, "You must not be so mortal as I thought."

Mipha abandoned the standoff first, trotting up the ramp to peer beyond the threshold, and the rest of us disengaged in disjointed tandem, moving to follow.

The room was cavernous and gloomy, the air thick with dust and haze. At its center, a vat was enshrined beneath a tangle of modules suspended from the ceiling, casting off soft light. Urbosa gave an impressed whistle, and Link moved to inspect it, frowning. He crouched beside the pool and pried open a long panel running along its side, revealing a tangle of lights.

"It's hard to believe something like this has been buried for so long," she mused. "Makes you wonder what else is waiting to be discovered out there."

Revali hummed, still skeptical. "Don't get too excited. We're not even sure it still works."

"It's—" Daruk gestured vaguely, and then gave up and shrugged. "—glowing. That's gotta be a good sign."

But Link still hadn't said anything, even when the others ran out of observations. I swallowed my disappointment, my fears, the sudden claustrophobia at the prospect of yet another dead end and its consequences. I took a few cautious steps closer, hovering.

"The power source is depleted," he finally murmured. "Or it might not have ever been finished in the first place. It's running on emergency reserves. A single core."

"Can you fix it?" asked Mipha.

He frowned, dropping the word like a stone. "No."

Revali crossed his wings. "That's it then? We came all this way for nothing?"

I knelt next to him, staring into the strange snarl of azure and amber, opening my mind to suggestion, willing answers to the surface. But I couldn't make head nor tail of it. It did feel familiar, horribly so, but there was nothing tangible in it, nothing useful. If anything, it felt more like the device recognized me.

I sighed. "Is there really nothing you can do? Can't you just…?" I wiggled my fingers in a pithy suggestion of powers beyond mortal reckoning.

That pulled a small, reluctant smirk out of him. "You can't solve everything with magic."

"It seems to be how you tackle most of your problems," Urbosa breathed, still put out. He ignored her.

"I don't have an Interface, or a way to harvest more Ichor. Even if I did, I'm not familiar with this design." He frowned, thinking, and sighed, "The only one who might know what to do with it is a Sheikah."

"Sheikah," I repeated, the gears in my head turning rapidly, and he gave me an odd look.

"They were a shadow tribe who served—"

"I know who they are," I interrupted, mirroring his odd expression back at him.

Revali sighed dramatically. "Don't tell me you're going to drag us all to Kakariko."

"It's not far," Daruk mused. "We could be there before dark if we were quick about it."

"It's not the distance I object to. It's the endless twists and turns that are quickly turning this lofty quest of ours into a colossal waste of time!"

But Link's jaw set as they argued, something fearsome flickering through those storm-ravaged eyes.

"Are you?" he asked me, so quietly the others would be hard pressed to hear.

"Am I what?"

"Going to insist we go to Kakariko?"

I pursed my lips, whispered, "Would you come?"

He arched a tired brow at me. "Do I have a choice?"

Behind us, Urbosa had let herself get dragged into the debate—initially only as a referee, it sounded like, but had since graduated to putting Revali and his bad attitude in their place.

"Please," I entreated him gently. "Daruk is right. We can be there in a few hours."

"And when the Sheikah don't have the answers you want?" he growled. "Then what?"

I sighed, dreading his inevitable rebuttal. "Then I'll do what you ask."

"That's what you said about the Shrine. And Thyphlo Ruins before that."

"I know. I know I did. But I didn't know—"

"Oh please," Revali horned in, scoffing. "Don't let him bully you, Princess. He obviously wants a tidy solution for himself as much as you do. Otherwise he would have plunged that sword into his chest long ago and forced your hand. You could hardly stand by and let the Calamity claw its way out without intervening like he says he wants." He glanced skyward, as though struck. "In fact, if he really had Hyrule's best interests at heart—"

"Stop speaking," Link interrupted with an understated wave of his hand, and suddenly Revali was choking on words that wouldn't come loose, flustered and confused and furious—

And curiously, pleasantly silent.

Urbosa raised an eyebrow at him. "You could have done that this whole time?"

Mipha moved to inspect his throat, but it was more of a formality than anything else. She couldn't repair damage that wasn't really there. I pressed my lips into a line, hoping I could get him to agree before he let himself be goaded into something stupid.

But Revali wasn't exactly wrong, was he?

"Give me until tomorrow to find a solution," I said, shoving his accusations aside. "One more day."

"Nightfall," he countered, so cuttingly I reflexively swallowed the argument that wanted to bubble up in my throat. "And goddesses help you if you go back on your word again."

My stomach twisted, my thoughts involuntarily drifting toward where his allowance-turned-ultimatum would end: with answers that would save his life, or with his blood on my hands.

"I won't," I sighed, getting to my feet. But even I was getting tired of making promises I wasn't sure I could keep. I tucked my arms into each other and made for the tunnel, my stomach sinking as I abandoned the Shrine, and hope with it, carefully avoiding eye contact with Revali—or Link, or any of them. "Let's get a move on. We have a lot of ground to cover."

Link replaced the panel without ceremony, turning to leave the device and the cavernous room that housed it behind, and I strained to hear Mipha's inquiry as she fell in step with him.

"What makes you think the Sheikah will know what to do?"

"They were the shrine-builders," he murmured, "and they have a long memory."

How long? I wondered. Could they possibly remember building what the rest of the world had forgotten? Reason told me their shrines and beasts couldn't have been more than a blip in their collective memory, a smattering of patterns on a tapestry that hinted at a buried past. But I had to hope there would be more: that they would remember beyond form, beyond fuel, into how they had actually worked. Enough that they could repair what Link had found.

But if they could remember all that, would they remember what I had done, as well? The thought made my feet heavier, made my stomach twist. But I couldn't change the past. Only try to make up for it.

We climbed out of the shrine into daylight. Behind me, Link drew an illusion across the entrance like a curtain, shrouding the mouth of the cave in rock. I turned my attention towards the Duelling Peaks and frowned.

"My father has an advisor—a young Sheikah historian," I schemed aloud. "If anyone could help us find the answers we're looking for, she would."

Urbosa hummed in agreement. "We just need a way to get a message to the castle."

"How about courier pigeon?" Link suggested, smiling wickedly, and Revali shot him a withering look that said plenty in spite of his condition.

"He can hardly deliver a message if he can't speak," I pointed out.

He met my eyes, that swirl of azure and amber almost aflame in the sunlight. "It's temporary."

Urbosa planted a hand on her hip, sending Revali a wry smirk. "Pity."

I turned, asked him more quietly, "Would you?"

He opened his beak, the expression on his face betraying the start of a self-indulgent tirade, but then his feathers puffed and his eyes rolled at his involuntary silence, and he gave me a curt nod. He whipped away from us with an astounding amount of dignity, kneeling to beat his wingtips against the earth.

"Revali," Mipha said, and her soft, unexpected voice was enough to pull his attention. He met her eyes over his shoulder and she urged him, "Be swift."

He nodded grimly before calling up a gale as if from nothing, riding its currents skyward in sudden billow of cyclone that left the rest of us windswept. His wings spread to catch the last dregs of lift, and then he tore across the sky headed north.

"That takes care of that problem," Urbosa mused, with wry, purposeful ambiguity, and then passed her glistering gaze over Link. "Now what are we going to do about this one?"

"She's right," Daruk said, leathery lips twisting. "There's more people between us and Kakariko than there were between us and the Plateau this morning."

"They'll teleport," Mipha said simply, in that soft, startling voice, and set off without waiting for confirmation, using her trident like a walking stick.

Daruk followed, glancing back nervously like an unsure puppy pulled along on a leash, but Urbosa stayed rooted to the spot, crossing her arms. She turned those fearsome eyes on me.

"Teleport? Just the two of you?"

"You won't be far behind," I reasoned, trying on one of her daring smirks for size as convincingly as I could. "I can handle him for that long."

She sighed, stomping down maternal instincts and violent reprisals and who knew what else. Mipha and Daruk were already halfway down the hillside, his big head still swiveling worriedly.

"We need to have another talk," she finally said. "A long one."

"In Kakariko," I promised, more than happy to have an excuse to put that off, and turned to face the Calamity. "Ready?"

He offered me his hand. "Can you handle another jump?"

"Can you?" I countered, taking it.

"That depends," he breathed wearily. "Are you going to behave yourself?"

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

And then the Plateau whisked out from under us, moss-green and stone-gray and aqua-blue blurring and stretching and bending, and then giving way to a jarring, slick bank of sand and stone and the chilly cover of shadow as we emerged in the shade of the crags, moist from the spray of the river.

I plunged mindlessly towards power, reaching deep into buried reservoirs to counter the ill effects that rushed up in the wake of the jump. I dredged up enough to keep them at bay, standing very still and holding very tight. I slowly opened my eyes, wary of the vertigo. But it never came.

My hands were clinging to his arms, and his hands were holding me aloft at the elbows. My skin was glowing radiant gold. I pinched my eyes closed again.

"Zelda."

I couldn't answer him. I was afraid. Afraid that if I opened my mouth golden light would pour out and level half of Necluda. Afraid that if I dared to breathe I would inhale the sky and the sun and the moon and leave the world in darkness. Afraid that if I tried to take a step closer both my feet would leave the ground, and I would spiral out of reach and towards some kind of fearsome divinity, when all I wanted was to stay here, and stay Hylian, and stay Zelda.

"Look at me."

I dared to open my eyes again, biting down to keep my jaw still. But he wasn't afraid. Not at all. He looked like he'd seen this light burning out of me a thousand times before. And he probably had.

"That's enough," he murmured.

I loosed a breath held too long. My shoulders sagged, and the light faded, receding back into secret places so bright it hurt to look at them. I let go of his arms, clenching my fists awkwardly in the air above them, and swallowed.

"I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me."

"You overcompensated," he said, his voice still low, calming, like he knew too loud a noise might send me searing back into lightning, and then reached, mouth twisting gently, to tuck an unruly lock of hair behind my ear. "Like you always do."

I whispered again, trembling, "Sorry. Let me just—"

I meandered to the water's edge and sat down, reaching to touch the river's chilly surface, and then peeled off my boots in a sudden, adrenaline-driven fury to dip my feet in. The coolness washed away the last of the glow I could feel burning just under my skin, and when I followed where I thought it must have gone I found something like it reflecting in diamonds where the sun struck the water. I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my head.

"You'll never learn to control that power if you're terrified of it."

I pursed my lips, propping my elbows against my knees and sinking into my wrists. "I should be terrified of it," I muttered, "considering what the last princess who used it did to you with it."

He sighed, the sound pouring out of some unadulterated place in his soul, some human place. He moved, stepping into the shallows so I couldn't avoid his eyes anymore, and knelt at my feet on the shore.

"You can't be afraid of that, Zelda," he insisted, eyes torn between fury and something much more gentle, something desperate and tired. "You can't. Your power exists for one reason: to counter something much worse. Whatever you might do—whatever you might have to do—will pale in comparison to what I'll end up doing if you don't stop me. I don't want—"

He stopped, the muscles in his face jumping rigidly to catch a slip, and I felt thrown back to the night before, when the armor fell away and left me alone with a trembling, deformed creature of light and shadow, splitting at the seams and trying to hold on for one more night, one more hour, one more breath. He closed his eyes, opened them again slowly, like it would swallow down whatever was trying to burst out of him.

"I don't want to be a monster," he said. "I don't want to destroy you. But that's exactly what will come to pass if you let it. Believe me when I say that whatever crimes you have to commit to keep that from happening will be a mercy."

I nodded minutely, jerkily, my fingers itching with the phantom sensation of his splintered soul threaded and strung taught on a needle.

"Maybe the Sheikah can save us both," I hoped quietly. "I don't want to destroy you, either."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But we're running out of daylight to find out."

I bobbed another nod, reaching with a sigh towards my boots and dreading shoving wet, sandy feet inside. "Right. We should move on."

I stared at the dark void inside my shoes for a half-second before I decided to forgo them entirely. I got to my feet, my boots dangling from one hand by the laces, and started down the riverbank barefoot. He was leveling a disapproving glare at my ankles.

"You didn't think there were any Sheikah left," I prompted before he could scold me for my childishness, and he grunted a pithy agreement.

"You didn't have a Sheikah Champion. When we found the Shrine locked up and buried, I thought they had been forced to run. I thought they had been blamed."

I saw their civilization rise and fall with the centuries like a dream between the grains of sand: towers and shimmering stalactite stones and shrines, heat wafting off forges burning with azure fires, flickers of terrible beasts glowing with Ichor and warriors pounding across Hyrule on clawed, kinematically redundant arms, and an image, much more crisp, of a man standing at a forgotten doorway, speaking a forgotten tongue, petitioning a dead race for their forgiveness.

"Maybe they did run," I frowned, watching ghosts of great, glowing cities with spires that reached the clouds slip behind my eyes. "Maybe the Sheikah we know are all that's left."

"It wouldn't be the first time," he said, the sand beneath us giving way to stone that was warm on the bottom of my feet. "I've seen the world reborn more times than I can count. Hyrule is always different. Always in flux—rotting and sprouting anew in barely recognizable shapes." He offered me his hand when the rock ended abruptly, helping me take the yawning step back onto the bank, and met my eyes. "The only constant is us."

"And that will end," I mused, frowning, "won't it?"

He smirked gently. "Only for me."

He hadn't dropped my hand, so I didn't drop his. Our fingers tangled as he guided me along, icy and alight and familiar, my toes dipping into the lapping water and padding in the sand. I wondered if he was right. There was a certain logic to it: I was a descendant of a divine being, her blood seeded in my mother and her mother before her. That would only end with the bloodline. But the Calamity was a curse locked in a cycle, and the Hero was a spirit reborn to challenge it. With the one destroyed, would that mean the end of the other?

I didn't care for that rationale at all. It reduced him to little more than a tool. Someone to be used up, and then discarded when he had no use left.

And maybe there was more truth to that than I wanted to believe.

"Are you hungry?" I asked quietly, grazing for distraction. He scoffed.

"Always."

"You seem better," I said, which was a silly observation really. He could barely stand on his own for hunger the night before, and now he was traipsing across Hyrule and casting magic, strong as he had ever been. But I still didn't understand why. And I suspected the answers lay dangerously close to our interactions in that field. He didn't answer. I pushed a little harder. "Mipha said you'd improved."

"Did she?" he droned.

I ignored his insouciance, moving to confront him. Daring to force an issue he seemed intent on circumventing. "Do you have any theories as to why that might be?"

The look he gave me was unmistakable: part frustration, and part knowing, and all warning.

"Does it matter?"

He tried to leave it at that, tried to slough off the topic like a layer of skin and abandon it on the riverbank. But I dug in my heels, letting my toes sink into the sand, heart pounding in my throat, and closed my snarled fingers over his, drawing him to a stop. He turned, glaring, and I swallowed.

"It matters," I whispered.

His jaw set, eyes burning with stubborn, undirected fury, and then he raked his fingers through his hair and growled half-answers between his teeth.

"I don't—I don't know. Maybe it was dreaming again. Like a reminder of what I was, of what I'm trying to hold onto—of what it feels like to be human. Maybe it was—maybe it was you," he admitted, more quietly, and his eyes said the rest.

I wet parched lips, pulse fluttering. "That could be useful. If there's a way to control it—"

"Zelda," he sighed hotly, grasping after patience. "It doesn't matter. If all goes well, I'll be dead in a few hours."

"Stop willing this to fail," I snapped, hurt. "I can't help you if you won't trust me!"

"I do trust you."

"Just not where you're concerned."

"Would you?" he demanded. "You've been inside my head. You know I'm fighting a losing battle."

"Which is exactly why you can't do this alone."

He scowled. "That's where you're wrong. It's exactly why I must."

The river undulated noisily beside us, punctuating the lull as I grasped for words, for reason.

"You keep trying to protect me," I murmured, shaking my head. "But we have to do this together. We're meant to. Calamity in you or no Calamity, we're connected. Can't you feel that?"

"No," he spat, too quickly, to vehemently, and I plunged headlong into his fury.

"Not even last night," I pressed, breathless, "in the dream?"

"Don't ask me that," he growled, jabbing an accusatory finger at me, and it was that voice, the final, unchallengeable word that meant the discussion was over.

He turned again with purpose and I didn't resist, letting him lead me out of shadow and into the heat of the sun beating on the boggy plain. The air was thick with it, summery and moist, like the discontent wrapping around my ribs.

"You can't keep avoiding this forever," I muttered, and he deigned to reply.

"I don't need to avoid it forever. Just until nightfall."

Frustration rose up in my throat and stung my eyes, and I didn't answer. We marched along the road in hot, vexed silence, dust caking on the bottoms of my feet. Somewhere in the midst of our short-lived argument his hold on my hand had tightened, our haphazard snarl of fingers shifting into a deathgrip. And as the sun began its long descent over Ash Swamp, neither of us let go.