A Link to the Past
Chapter Forty Eight: Fair Trade
It took a moment for the beam of… whatever that magic was that came out of the eye to erupt each time it opened, not enough time to move to another position, but maybe just enough for Link to try something desperate. Waiting until this one broke some of the stone floor with its blast, the young man waited until the next eye was just starting to appear, before turning his shield arm so that the freezing rod was exposed, and releasing the silvery mist. Leaving a trail of cold through the heated air, the whole cavern seemed to roar in pain and anger when the stone eye was struck just to the right of the pupil just as it was opening, giving Link the few moments of distraction that he needed in order to run for the exit.
No, from where he had landed after taking that tumble down the cavern wall, so the young man ran for the tunnel that was closest, hoping that somehow it would be a bit harder now for the eyes to find him. At first the passage curved with the cavern, but then the young man was filled with dread when the smooth stone floor arched downward… no, it was too late to go back and try another way. Even if the freezing rod had left the creature of Turtle Rock blinded, the effects were not going to last forever, so heading back the way he came was a bad idea. Another junction appeared, allowing him to see that the magma down below was bubbling and shaking even more than it had been, so Link just kept running even though now he could feel the gradually heating stone through the bottom of his boots.
"Where do you think you are running to?" The voice asked, coming from the next mouth statue he passed. "The great mouth is the only way back to the surface, and it has been sealed… you're trapped in here with me for the rest of your life… shouldn't be long, though."
"You'd think I was used to the Dark World by now, but I just can't believe it." The young man replied between breaths of heated air. "All of you, everyone in this place is from Hyrule, but you're all traitors. No matter how much power Ganondorf's wish gave you, you're all nothing but cowards and traitors!"
Suddenly another eye opened in the wall next to him, interrupting his attempt to catch his breath, and forcing him to keep running down the next tunnel to avoid the beam that put a large crack in the rock wall upon impact. The tunnel finally curved back upward just in time for Link to come to another junction, but there was already an open eye waiting for him in the center of the wall, the beam already erupting right toward him. Try as he might to move the red and gold shield in the way, the young man's arm wasn't fast enough, allowing the orange blast to strike him right in the chest, throwing him backwards so fast that he didn't even realize that he had slammed into the edge of the previous tunnel's entrance until he had already fallen onto the heated floor.
The wind had been knocked out of him, coughing and gagging on the hot dry air while something was moving underneath his shirt… and then the first few links of chainmail began to fall onto the stone floor. Somehow the beam must've hit him so hard that not only had the undershirt Link had gotten from the Tower of Hera become released from his body, but now the whole thing had come unraveled, spilling hundred of separated links onto the floor while the young man tried to get up. That last hit had hurt a lot, leaving his whole body in a partially numb, throbbing pain, but there was no time to rest… the eye was already closing, meaning that another one was about to attack, leaving him to try another desperate plan.
As soon as the next eye started to form, a pule of power from the glove was enough to send Link sort of, stumble/running as well as kind of leaping right toward it while he drew the Master Sword. Aiming the blue blade down and thrusting forward as hard as he could, the legendary weapon buried itself right into the stone eye's pupil just as it was erupting, causing the beam to be neatly split in two so that it struck two separate parts of the cavern instead. The cavern roared as the eye tried to close, but the young man kept pushing and twisting the blue blade deeper so that it couldn't, and luckily for him it seemed that each eye had to close before the next one could attack.
"Stop this! Stop fighting me!" Link yelled, having to push the sword again. "I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to hurt anyone, but I can't let Ganondorf conquer Hyrule. Give me the Princess, and I can stop it… don't you see? I can save our home, and swear when this is all over I will get you out of this place."
"Sure… sure you will, sure." The mouth statue growled, sounding heavily pained as well. "What are you going to do, spend a year moving me back into Hyrule brick by brick like some ancestral castle? You expect me to believe that you would do that instead of just abandoning me here as soon as you get what you want? I'll boil you like a stew for this insult!"
The cavern shook again, and the young man gasped, seeing over his shoulder that now instead of just bubbling and causing more heat, the very lowest levels of tunnel were slowly being covered as the molten rock was starting to rise. He was really in a bad spot now, since even if Link wasn't hopelessly lost inside Turtle Rock, he couldn't move from this spot without giving the creature the ability to start attacking him again… and he couldn't just stay in this position forever, since either the heat or the rising magma would get him eventually. Just like with Venus in the swamps, it seemed like the only way out was to risk the Moon Pearl, but even more so than the risk of something happening to the protective gem, what would happen to the cavern if Turtle Rock itself was suddenly just gone?
"I'm telling the truth, and I can prove it." The young man said, letting go of the sword with one hand to get the gem out. "This is one of the Moon Pearls that Agahnim made to keep himself from transforming, and… and I'll give it to you right now if you give me Princess Zelda."
Even if his plan had been to cheat the creature and escape with both, there was no way to leave the cavern with the great mouth sealed, so there was no choice but to take the risk. Link even set the gem down for a second so that the creature could watch him change back into the pink rabbit creature… just before the nearest mouth statue opened to reveal the crystalline prison containing Zelda. The cavern groaned as the Master Sword was removed from its eye, but then another one opened so that it could watch him make the exchange. There were no tricks planned, so the young man placed the Moon Pearl into the mouth statue at the same time that he removed the crystal, or rather had to quickly push it into his hat since it was still hot from the air, and then the cavern shook violently.
The creature roared as the floor and tunnels around them began to vibrate and distort, and suddenly Link fell to his hands and knees as the junction he was standing on disappeared, leaving him to catch himself on some of the larger, more jagged rocks and… and who was that? The mouth statue and eye were the last things to vanish, replaced by a short, kind of fat man with a long beard… who yelped as he slipped on the cavern rocks, and if the young man hadn't grabbed his arm the fat man probably would've gone right over the edge. He seemed disoriented; eyes swimming in his head while trying to move his arms and legs in a way that was not effective at all, but hey maybe decades as a rock dungeon made things a bit difficult.
"I… it… the truth?" He said, his mouth and lips moving the wrong way a bit, making the words hard to understand. "I… me… no rocks?"
Link was about to say something, but stopped when a resounding crash echoed throughout the empty cavern, the source being a very large piece of rock that had… oh no, it had broken off from the ceiling high above, with… with cracks beginning to form from that original break. It was as he feared, without all that creature's tunnels and statues this whole cavern was beginning to break apart, and… and the magma down below was still rising! Slowly but steadily the molten rock was filling the cavern, undeterred by the larger chunks of rock falling into it from above, and now the two of them needed to get out of there by… by what? Climbing straight up the cavern?
"Come on, we need to go!" The young man shouted, grabbing the fat man by the hand. "Come on, climb!"
Even without the tunnels and platforms there anymore, the Turtle Rock cavern still kept their impressions in the rock where they sat for decades, and now it was a lot easier to climb up without beams of magical energy erupting at him from all directions, but this fat man's uncooperative arms and legs were slowing them right back down. Basically pulling him up over each of the rocks, there were only a couple of levels to go until they would reach the surface, but Link was getting so tired, and this man was really heavy. Sure, he kept trying to help, but that only made it more difficult for the young man to get him up over the next rock where one of the final levels had been, with Link bracing his foot on a large rock and pulling while turning around to see…
"Trueno!" A voice called just before all the orange light was drowned out by blueish-white.
The lightning bolt had come without warning, striking the rocky ground between them, and throwing the young man and the recently transformed fat man in separate directions. Link managed to catch hold of some rocks that stuck out underneath a slight overhang… his feet dangling over the slowly rising magma while the fat man wasn't so lucky. The echoing crash from that thunderbolt drowned out all but the last second or two of the fat man's scream before that was cut off by a muffled splash in the molten rock… that was it… the man that he had worked so hard to free from being Turtle Rock was just gone… his company replaced by a familiar wizard standing up where the tunnel junction used to be.
"Throw me the crystal, boy." Agahnim ordered, a ball of flame gathering in his hand. "The Princess and the one you got from Misery Mire… you couldn't have found your way here without it. The crystal now, or that magma down there becomes a rabbit stew."