My third moment. It didn't take as long as I thought it might.

I'm less confident about this one because I've never felt that I wrote combat particularly well. But it's a part of my story that I felt needed to be told; I hope you'll forgive my clumsiness. It's a bit on the bloody side, and slightly bleaker than my previous entries.

On with the story!

Moments: Lot's Wife

"What are they cooking?"

"Looks like… boar."

"Why do I bother asking?"

"Maybe we'll have time to hew off a steak in passing. Boar meat is actually quite tasty."

"When did you eat boar?"

"I disremember the details. Before your time, certainly. Of course it might have just been the novelty- when you spend your entire life on goat products, the occasional boar is a delicacy."

"Are you ready?"

"Yes. Oh, well, no. Pass the bombs, would you?"

Midna pushed herself up on her elbows and shot Link a glance. "That seems a tad excessive."

The Gerudo Desert was a kiln, baking the pair of them into something new, something refined. They had been tracking one of the last holdout bands of bokoblins across the hardpan for three days now and had caught up with them not far from the Arbiter's Grounds. The goddesses only knew what the bokoblins thought they were turning into.

Midna was hot and itchy, exquisitely sensitive to the movements of fine sand trickling underneath her. There had been no deserts in Twilight, and the last time she had been here she had rode Link's shadow as a thief rides another man's horse. She would have done the same had Link not got the fool idea in his head that he'd need an extra set of hands setting up the ambush. Lying on her belly in the sand, Midna realized how little idea she had of the capabilities of this body- even in the days after the fall of Ganondorf it was new to her. She had scarcely experienced the sunlit world. Only a few achingly strange moments of exposure, half-remembered sense memories from the back of a wolf.

Link appeared to be giving what she had said serious thought. "You know," he said finally, easing his pull on the bowstring, "I don't know that I believe there's any such thing."

Her curiosity was piqued, despite herself. "You don't believe there's such a thing as 'excessive'?"

"Well. Maybe if you have limited resources. But we really don't- I mean, we're not going to run out of bombs anytime soon. Even if we did we could warp to Kakariko and buy more. Saving Hyrule has made me unbelievably wealthy- why shouldn't I be generous with my bomb arrows?" Link loosened the string entirely. "When you have a clear objective and no risk of escalation, why not go the extra mile?"

Midna bared her mismatched fangs. "I've got sand in places I never knew I had in this body, Link. Quit wasting time or I'll hide scorpions in your bedroll tonight, I swear I will."

Link grinned- goddesses, he was beautiful- and turned back to their quarry, a sixteenth of a mile away down a shallow embankment. Sighting down the shaft of the arrow, he let fly.

A hundred yards away one boar erupted into flames with a deafening crack and the rest of them wisely chose that moment to seek better fortunes and more generous climes elsewhere. The bokoblin camp erupted into exactly the sort of chaos they had been hoping for as four very unhappy swine came barreling through it, whipping their great shaggy heads from side to side and smashing tents and campfires into splinters with their tusks.

Midna let the powers granted her by her station flow through her body, felt the magic as a heaviness at the pit of her stomach. Sand pattered from the curves of her body as she rose, weightless, into the thin desert air. Link looked up at her with mild curiosity. Midna flashed him a toothy grin, shrugged, and bulleted along down the hill.

She heard Link curse behind her, heard him stagger to his feet and take off after her; let him worry. She was the Twilight Princess, after all, and no bokoblin arrow could pierce the thickness of a shadow. Three days she had been agonizingly conscious of the sensitivities and frailties of her new-formed flesh; now she would see what it was capable of.

If Link was too slow to keep up, all the better; it would serve him right for making her lie in the sand.

Link exploded to his feet and immediately fell as the sand shifted under his boots; after skidding ten feet down the slope he was able to roll into a jerky, precarious run. He didn't remember drawing his sword but there it was, undeniably drawn. The familiar heft of it failed to comfort him. With a blade in his hand he was invincible, but there was Midna, fifty feet ahead and gaining, and fifty bokoblins who had no means of escape and no options left to them. He should have given them time to fold tents and run; he should have chased them until their boars dropped dead of exhaustion and they were too tired to put up much resistance. Now they were hungry, and cornered, and dangerous; a rat in the trap will bite your finger nine times out of ten.

A flight of flaming arrows arched through the cloudless sky; Midna evaded them with queenly disdain and they buried themselves in the gritty sand. Link simply bashed them out of the air with the flat of his sword and kept running. It was too late, of course. Midna had broken through the front lines.

The twisted little goblins flinched away from her and she reveled in their fear; gods, it had been so long. With a flip of the great glowing arm that sprung from her crown of stone she snatched up an archer and tossed him with casual force into a cluster of macemen, paused to watch the effect before sending another high into the air with a precise burst of magic, raveled the arm into spiked tendrils and piercing a third, a fourth, a fifth, not seeing the sixth as it sprang from cover with a curved sword and the pitted steel bit into the virgin meat of her shoulder. The agonized pitch of Midna's howl almost, but did not quite, eclipse Link's rage.

There was a seething blackness on the edges of his vision. There was a roar of blood in his ears. Link abandoned caution and flung himself down the slope, so fast it felt like flying, and when he hit the mob he swung his sword like a woodsman swings his axe. His shield lay forgotten in the sand; his posture did not lend itself to defense. Link knew only that they had hurt Midna, and so each and every one of them was going to die in blood and terror. His own safety was entirely irrelevant. Against the frenzy of his wrath no foe could stand.

Wielding the Master Sword in both hands he hacked through the bokoblin waves, splintering ribs and sating the desert's thirst with the thick blood of his enemies. A mace thudded against his arm; he spun and thrust the blade into a scawny green chest. An arrow cut his cheek and he decapitated the archer with a clean backhand. Bokoblins on the edges cut and run; he barely noticed them as he fought his way to her side, leaving a trail of bodies and a chorus of agonized cries in his wake. There was no finesse in this, no subtlety. There was only Link and the bokoblins, dead men walking, and what came into his path he killed.

Half of them were dead or dying by the time the last dedicated knot of defenders decided they had had enough and made for the parched safety of the deeper desert. Link, staggering from a slash to his calf, cut two of them down even as they turned to run and would have charged after them if the bokoblin who had hurt Midna had not slipped in behind him and drew a line of fire down his back with his rusted sword. Link came around with a boar's madness in his eyes and did not stop to think before he smashed his fist, wrapped around the heavy tang of the Master Sword, into the bokoblin's jaw. He went down hard and Link thrust the blade into his quivering body, drew it out, thrust it in again, drew it out, and was about to drive it home a third time when Midna seized his sword arm with her one good hand and tugged frantically at him.

"Link, stop!" she was saying. "He's dead! They're all dead!"

He turned to her with his sword in his hand and when he saw the fear in her eyes the anger left him. Dully he knelt beside the bokoblin he had killed, still staring up at the sky. The flames that ruled them went out when they were dead; only a faint glow behind the eyes betrayed them for the once-living. With a curious gentleness Link reached down and closed his eyes.

Midna nursed her wounded shoulder. "Gods, Link," she said wonderingly, "I mean, I know you don't believe in excess, but wasn't all that a little bit-"

The rage boiled up in him again and his fingers clenched tight as a secret on the grip of his sword. "You stupid-" he cried, "What the hell did you think you were doing? They could have killed you!" Midna was staring up at him with an unreadable look in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a long silence. "I surely didn't mean to shout. It was just- I didn't know what I would have done- if- I'm sorry."

"Midna?" he said, a while on. "Midna, will you not talk to me?"

Silence poured in to fill the emptiness of the desert as they started out along the long road back.

. . .