Author's Note: This fic is...a bit of a homecoming for me. I used to be in the Zelda fandom back in the early '10s, when I first got into fandom. There's no evidence of it now, unfortunately-I deleted those old fics back in '16, maybe earlier (and for good reason, they were terrible). There are some fandoms you never grow out of, though, and I'm really glad to be coming back.
In Faron's misty forests deep
From whence the springs of courage seep
There doth the Flame of Farore sleep.
"Can you get the door now?" Zelda asked, hefting her torch as high as she could.
Link grunted in response, and she watched his shoulders strain as he braced more firmly against the door and pushed again. She sighed, adjusting her grip and moving to try and cast a little more light on the matter.
Fully half the doors in the Temple of Farore's Flame had been like this— the ancient Sheikah technology that was supposed to keep it operational seemed to have met its match in the pervasive damp of the Faronese jungle. It had been almost unbelievable at first; that the same mechanisms that withstood incredible cold and equally punishing heat— that could be buried underground for millennia and still function when unearthed— would succumb to a little water, but the deeper they'd pressed into the temple, the fewer doors would respond to the Slate on Link's hip.
"Do you want me to give you a hand?" she asked, edging a little closer.
Link paused in his pushing, glancing up at her through his shaggy bangs, his fair hair darkened with sweat and humidity. "It's fine," he said, then paused and shoved again. "I think— give me another minute, it moved on the last one."
Zelda retreated a pace, adjusting her grip on the torch again. The wood under her palm felt slick, and she eyed the guttering flame. There was no telling, if it went out, if they'd be able to light it again.
Link growled and heaved, and the door shuddered, then groaned and began to slide back along its track into the wall as whatever debris had blocked its path dislodged itself. It vanished almost seamlessly into the frame, only slightly off-kilter from the shoving, and Link sighed and slumped against the wall. His chest heaved with each breath.
"Are you alright?" Zelda asked. She took a step towards him, wincing at the way her leather boots creaked with damp.
"Fine," Link huffed, then straightened. "Could have been worse. At least we didn't have to blow that one up."
"True," Zelda said, biting back a grin.
She paused on the threshold, taking a moment to study the door's construction as Link brushed past her into the room beyond. If they'd had more time she'd have lingered to sketch it in her field journal and make notes on it, but as it was— well, they had a more important task at hand, and as far as she could tell it was virtually the same as every other door in the temple had been: smooth, rounded, moving along invisible tracks in the floor and top of the frame and powered by some hidden mechanism. Some part of her yearned for the time and tools to deconstruct it and see how it worked.
The rest propelled her over the threshold and into the room beyond, the Chamber of Farore's Flame, if she'd translated the map they had downloaded into the Slate in the first hall of the temple accurately. She tilted her head back, gazing up and up to where the vaulted ceiling was all but lost in darkness, and stifled a gasp.
Every inch of the walls were covered in carvings. Or, at least, they should have been— water sluiced down them in places, wearing old tracks in the bas-relief and erasing the details. Other stretches of the walls were draped in moss and lichen, vibrant green and orange splashes across the pale, smooth stone. She tore her gaze away, scanning the room a moment, only to find them drawn to the low brazier running the length of the far wall, and to the mural of the Triforce over it. A second symbol rested in the empty center space— Farore's symbol, a full moon cupped within a half-moon within a crescent, dappled over with verdant mosses. The patterns around it seemed abstracted until Zelda's eyes caught on the shape of a face, half obscured by a fall of crimson lichen, and the swirling forms resolved themselves into the shapes of three women, each touching one piece of the Triforce. Their eyes were inlaid with gemstones, ruby and sapphire and emerald, and Zelda whistled low under her breath.
"This place must have been incredible when it was new," she said softly.
Link only hummed in response, and she let her eyes drop from the mural to him, where he knelt in front of the brazier, careful to keep his knees out of the sheet of water covering the floor. He held the Slate out in front of him, running it over the mossy face of it, and when she moved around to the side his scowl was obvious.
"It's not registering anything to dock with," he said, and looked up at her. "There's nothing in this room that registers at all."
"That's...odd," she said. Even the doors that refused to operate had panels in the wall beside them for the Slate.
"Yeah," Link said. He stood, wincing slightly, and Zelda's eyes dropped to the ginger way he held his right leg— where the gatekeeper had struck him in the previous room. "So how do you propose we light it?"
Zelda hummed and stepped back, looking over the brazier again, and then back up to the murals on the wall. "Well...somehow I doubt a mortal flame would be suited to light a sacred one," she said thoughtfully, hefting her torch again. "But if the Slate doesn't register…"
"No fuel in the brazier either," Link said, and shook his head.
Zelda stepped back again, turning slowly to study the carvings. The water-worn mural of the Sacred Flame on the wall to the right of the brazier caught her eye immediately, but she turned away from it— later , she reminded herself, she could study it later . The left wall was more damaged, and mostly covered in moss, rendering the carvings indistinguishable from the wall itself, and she turned further, facing the door they had entered through. The lintel was covered in abstract patterns, but the space above it was muraled with the familiar motif of a youth with his sword held over his head, as if to cleave the skull of an absent foe.
"—That's it!" she said, and turned back to Link, bouncing up onto the balls of her feet. "The carving over the door— the one of the First Hero. It's been theorized that particular stance, the Hero with the Sword upraised to the heavens like a ray of light, is meant to evoke the blessings of Hylia—" her grandmother, who had fought Calamity to a standstill for a century, had been the one to propose that theory— "so I think that perhaps if you emulate that pose yourself it might provoke a response."
One of Link's heavy golden brows arched skeptically. "...Not gonna lie, I think that's one of your crazier theories," he said, and Zelda's cheeks heated with embarrassment. "...But it's also not like we really have any other options, so I guess it's worth a shot."
Zelda shot him a dirty look, but she took a few steps back and to the side anyway— if something did happen, she didn't particularly want to be in close proximity, and even if nothing happened it wouldn't hurt to have given Link space.
Link reached up and back, unsheathing the Sword that Seals the Darkness from its scabbard at his back. The naked blade glimmered in the light, reflecting and refracting them across its edge as he raised it overhead as if to cleave the skull of an absent foe. Zelda found her eyes drawn upwards, from the bunch of his tunic where his upraised shoulders pressed it against his neck, up the length of one corded arm to his gauntleted wrist, and further up, all the way to the point of the sword.
For a moment, nothing happened. Zelda bit her lip, nearly called out to him to lower the sword and not worry about it, and perhaps they could look the room over for a hidden place to use the Slate—
Something on the front of the brazier lit up blue. A crest, water-worn and hardly visible under a coating of teal lichens and dirt, which burned away even as she watched to reveal wide stylized wings, spread like the wings beneath the royal family's coat of arms. Like the ones on the Sword's hilt.
The unfamiliar pattern at the center of the Triforce on the wall above began to glow a brilliant green, the mosses covering it falling away, and in an instant a flame leapt from the brazier. It, too, was emerald, burning without fuel or heat, though Link stumbled away from it regardless, lowering the Sword to shield his face from its light.
"Now?" Link asked, glancing back over his shoulder at her, and Zelda nodded.
Link stepped forward and thrust the blade into the heart of the emerald flame up to its hilt. Zelda cried out in shock, but he ignored her, holding it steady with both hands. She watched his shoulders tense, the muscles in his arms locking in place like he held the sword against some great force, his whole frame shuddering as if blows rained against the blade in his hands.
And then the Sword itself flared with light, drowning out the green flame and the rest of the room, and when Zelda's vision cleared the flame was gone as if it had never been. The air rang strangely, like a thousand bells had been struck and the echoes left to fade.
The Sword in Link's hands, lowered from its position in front of him nearly to parade rest, was glowing. The edge shone a faint, luminescent blue, which faded away to its normal sheen as Zelda watched, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something about it had changed.
"...Well, then," Link said.
"...Agreed," Zelda said, and padded over to join him, her boots splashing in the pool.
She reached out, pausing a few inches above the blade, tilting her head to study it more closely. With the glow faded, there was no obvious difference to the Sword itself— no, not quite. The yellow gem set into the guard was now emerald green. The air under her palm shivered with energy, a rhythmic pulsing almost like a heartbeat. She looked up and met Link's eyes, and the expression he wore was as unsettled as she felt.
"...I suppose we can worry about it later," she said. She hefted her torch again, then pointed it towards the flame mural. "I wanted to get a look at that before we leave— there's an inscription below the Flame, and I'd like to try my hand at a field translation."
Link nodded, and she stepped back as he twirled the Sword as if testing its balance before sheathing it again at his back. The violet wings on the guard shimmered, and Zelda's eyes were once again drawn to the gem set between them before she could look away. She offered Link the torch, which he took, and pulled her field journal from its pouch at her waist, then turned to the mural of the Sacred Flame.
The carvings began at roughly the height of her chest— a rounded base, flowing up in smooth, stylized curves. The left side was partially worn away, the edges faded where at some point a stream of water had flowed over it, but most of the rest of the mural was clear, as was the crest in the center of the mural. She recognized Din's symbol immediately: three curved lines, the lowermost beginning and uppermost terminating in circles. Her gaze slid lower to the inscription below the flame, where Ancient Sheikah lettering poked through crumbled yellow lichens, and she crouched and brushed them aside, then opened her field journal and pulled her charcoal stick from its holster on the side, carefully copying them down.
"Can you read it?" Link asked from behind her. He shifted the torch a little higher, and Zelda frowned and brushed away another clump of lichen.
"It's very worn," she said. "The first words of each of these lines are too damaged to be legible, but...I believe this is the same inscription as the one below the Temple of Time…"
Her grip tightened momentarily on her charcoal stick, and she hastily relaxed her hand to keep from crumbling it. She'd been on that expedition, three years prior— the one that had discovered a second temple beneath the foundations of the abandoned Temple of Time on the Great Plateau. The one that had found an enormous, and badly defaced, mural describing an ancient battle with the Calamity on a crumbling wall, centered around a stylized Triforce— the most damaged section of all. Only the inscription on the Triforce of Courage had been clear, and a few lines of a poem at the base of the mural.
Calamity waxes, Calamity wanes,
The Sealing Sword holds tides the same;
When light within grows dim and weak
The Goddess-Fires thou shall seek—
She shook her head, snapping herself out of it. "Lost my trail of thought a moment. Sorry, Link."
"It's fine," he said. "Is there enough there to read?"
"Yes," Zelda said, hastily transcribing the final line into her journal. It always took her a minute to decipher Ancient Sheikah, though she'd been learning to read the language since she was a young girl, particularly poetry like this piece. "It's a rhyming triplet, like the one that guided us here in the first place. ...Lies within the land… the verb on the second line is gone, and I can't get the lichen off the last few words, but it's something about a prince … 'Where Din's Flame sleeps beneath the sand.' At least, I think that's what the final line says…"
"So...the Gerudo Desert," Link said.
"I think so," Zelda said, biting back a grimace.
The Gerudo often did not appreciate the incursion of Hylian royalty on their territory, and her father had allowed the relationship to disintegrate when he took the throne after her mother's passing. It wouldn't be nearly so simple to gain passage into the desert as it had been to enter the Faronese jungle— though the territory was officially controlled by the Faron Confederation, the union of a number of isolated villages who had refused to rejoin the kingdom of Hyrule during reunification, their borders were notoriously lax and she and Link had slipped past without so much as a question of identity. Odds were slim they would be able to do the same with the desert, and Zelda doubted her favorite false identity— Hilda, the apprentice of a Hyrulean archaeologist— would pass muster.
"I will need to speak with my father," Zelda said finally, brushing scraps of lichen from her trousers as she straightened. "We'll need the permission of the Gerudo chief if we're to go together, and—"
"Going separately isn't an option," Link said, shaking his head hard enough that his shaggy blond hair obscured his face a moment. "There's no way I would have made it here without you."
Zelda felt heat rush to her face, and she looked away, pretending to study the carvings again to hide her blush.
"We'll contact my father," she said again. "You don't get to have that adventure all to yourself."
The sound Link made in response was nearly indescribable, and Zelda smiled privately and stepped past him, studying the left wall of the temple.
"Now, come help me look," she commanded. "All my research says temples often have concealed passages from the innermost sanctum to an exit, and I don't know about you, but I don't care to go out the way we came in and risk another encounter with those rotting bokoblins."
"No, thank you," Link bit back, and a moment later he was at her side again, hoisting his torch as high as he could to cast more light on the wall.