Morning in the mountains was a blissfully quiet affair. The sun soundlessly touched the tips of the rigid crags, sharpening shadows and chasing the mist down cliff sides like a cavalcade of white wraiths. Navi sat upon a nearby outcrop watching the pageantry of dawn without any noises. She was deep in study of the way the air constantly changed with the angle of the sun. No precipitation loomed, no clouds for any direction, just pure pastel sky touched in washes of apricot.
As they climbed the dry range. It was only a very slight anxiety that rattled in her brain earlier, worrying about snow and proper gear, with which they were not equipped. Impa's supplies only included heavy woolen cloaks, three full sets of tunics and breeches for Gerrard, and a spare pair of boots for both boys. Link still carried the packet of Lon linens, and she realized his emerald tunic was misplaced. In everything that conspired in the last three days, she hadn't even noticed the prized piece was gone. He must have left it behind when they pursued Gerrard through the Market the second time. It was not like the practical Kokiri to casually discard his possessions. Was there a way to get it back? There was no time, she reflected ruefully. Days were slipping by with haste, and no option for them to take any leisure. Would summer snowfalls impede them? Or was this part of the landscape really as arid as it appeared?
She then surmised the range of Death Mountains were either below the Hyrulean snowline, or the range was geologically active enough to keep snow from accumulating. Navi made her rough calculations. If the peaks she could see were, say, three or four thousand feet high, and that's being conservative, it was also fair to assume the edge of visibility is about five miles. And you figure that rocky land down there came up a sharp one or two thousand feet from the level fields…They should be seeing snow later in the year as they ventured further from the tectonic heart of the Goron territory.
Hopefully, they will be leaving the deep mountains before winter. The little fairy stood up, brushing dust from her legs, having seen enough of the sunrise and ready to wake the boys.
A trilling bird song, so out of place in the Death Mountains, shattered the silence of the dawn. What poor bird floundered out of the sky to land here? Grinning, the fairy looked about, hoping to catch sight of the visitor. But no avian friends could possibly find roost here, Navi realized as he jaw dropped.
It was Link's ocarina. From the tent poured the most jaunty, foot-tapping melody that seemed to stretch and curl into the air like vines on a tree. Like a friend reaching out, she couldn't help but bask in the unabashed offer of joviality…
Curiously, the phrase went unfinished, and the magic of the song faded into the morning air. The tent was illuminated by sunlight, and the black maw of the interior spat out a dusky lad and following him was a pale, blonde boy carrying something small.
"Why'd you leave? I only wanted-" Link dogged Gerrard's steps toward the boulders they designated as the latrine.
"What?" He spun to face Link, brow furrowed hard against his eyes. "You only wanted what? A friend? Well, looks like you got one back!"
Speechless for a response, Link could only frown, still clutching his ocarina and the gift from a dream.
Navi approached silently, fluttering among the rocks, hiding herself to better hear this conflict.
"I thought you didn't blame me," Link finally said.
"Yeah, well, I thought we were on equal footing, friend-wise," Gerrard spat, still trying to bypass the blonde.
"Saria-who I can only talk to through a song-is not going to replace you!" Link snarled.
"Is that what you're waiting for?" Gerrard accused. "What about that ranch kid, Mustard?"
"Mullick."
"Whatever. Point is, I bet you're looking for an opportunity to dump me for anyone better."
Stymied, and rigidly angry now, Link hissed, "That's ridiculous. Zelda appointed you! Impa has papers with your name on it. How is it my place to find someone else?"
"Yeah, but now your forest girl is the one-"
"Gerrard, I am not using the song to have casual chats!"
"Good! How do you know it's not a trick from the fairy who made you fall off a cliff and refused to heal your hand?"
Navi's confusion mounted. Link and Gerrard knew about the Old One? She waited for Link's response.
"I…I know Saria. Even if it were some kind of illusion, I can feel it's real. And there are conditions to meet before I can go back to the fairy."
He didn't know the half of it, Navi smirked. Assistance from this Old One was not due for a long while yet.
"Well, isn't that convenient!" It looked almost like Gerrard wanted to pat Link on the head. But imagining the Kokiri taking off a hand via tooth was deterrent enough. " What do you think she'll give you that time? A magical sword? Or maybe half a brain to think about deals with fairies."
Link growled. "Why are you being so obstinate about this?"
His dark lips twisted. Jealousy sparked in his eyes. "Why do you keep getting all the handouts?"
"I had my hand crushed and my jaw broken! Were those handouts?" He had to grit his teeth to hold worse words back.
"I'm done with this. I thought I might show….You know what, forget it. Enjoy talking to your long distance little forest whore-"
Link dove at him, tackling Gerrard to the ground and unthinking, plowed his right hand into the beaky nose. They both howled in pain. Gerrard scrambled to eel his way out of Link's pinning pose. The slippery urchin twisted from beneath the stockier boy.
"You can't make me stay! I'm outta here, and back to the Market-" He took two deliberate steps-
Navi was waiting for him to turn to her. Gerrard stopped short at the blue fairy floating before his face.
"Leaving so soon? Oh Gerrard, what a rookie mistake." The fairy was purring with rife condescension, slowly flapping in place. "Deals with fairies. You don't know half the impact that underthought statement has made on your friend." She and Link shared a moment of connection, and let it fade. "I'm the very symbol of all he was forced to forsake. Leave me and the Old Ones out of your tantrum." She dimmed herself to get even closer to his now perspiring face.
"Tell me, Gerrard. Where would you go so that you could go back to a normal life? Where could you go, that Impa and Zelda would not find you? Ganondorf knows your name, I'm sure. Do you think the King's killer wouldn't hunt you? You said yourself, you've never lived outside the city.
"Do you think you could survive without us?"
The dusky skinned lad paled. His eyes widened. He felt like the mountains around him sat on his chest, and he felt the impact of this Hero business. It was hard to draw breath. He needed to think it through. If those were the prices Link paid, and considering his losses, and the net gain…But no, that wasn't all. His brain was trying to reignite something.
For days since their first introduction, the thief and street-smart in him were dampened. Blankets wedged between his ears hadn't let the full import of his situation land. Now, the pain from Link's punch had fanned some embers back to life. Clarity rocked him, and there was no choice but to acknowledge the demon before him.
The dangers were not just from the environment. The danger right now…was him, and his dissent.
"Will I at least get something cool at some point?"
Navi sighed, hanging her head. "A quest for an item of destiny isn't cool enough?...Eventually, but that's not up to either of us, or you.." She surveyed both boys evenly. "Now go break down the tent. We have a long way to go, and we can't slow down time."
"Yet," Link quipped, and felt a peculiar twinge of deja vu. It faded as quickly as it flashed through his brain, and he and Navi left Gerrard to do his business in a pensieve silence.
"We had that argument, once," Link said to her alone.
"I'm so proud of you, Link," Navi congratulated.
"For what?"
"For understanding. You saw through him immediately. He's going to be a strong ally. Once you break his brain a little more."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"He doesn't even know how weird things are going to get. Think about your own journey, and the things you've seen, and how you changed. Mullick was your helper, once upon a time."
"...I am going to get him seriously injured, aren't I?"
"I'd say damaged is way more likely. Again, look at yourself so far."
"...He's as good as dead."
"Keep your head. Your punch was well warranted, by the way. Don't make it a regular thing, but sometimes, the best wake up call is a solid hit."
"Or fairy light in your eyes," Link smiled sideways.
"Yeah, you've changed, alright, Dragon breath. Go wash your mouth. Jerky and biscuits aren't doing you any favors."
"Whatever you say, Navi," Link said soberly.
"Don't forget to shake out the dew."
"I know how to break down a tent!"
They had a timeline, and it was not going to be easy nor strolling. If she were a lesser fairy, well, she would still just be a healing sprite. Those born to the mossy forest pools who stayed and bopped around in lolling pleasure were there to help travelers, lost or injured.
Navi was born to the life of a pool fairy, and lived it fully until her thirst for what lay beyond the spring became too great. She left the safety of her birthright, and sought knowledge. Her sisters shied away from her boldness, for venturing beyond the ferns and mushrooms ringing the spring. That alone called her to the Deku Tree as his messenger.
She dared to study and investigate when her sisters, aside from the Kokiri companions, were content to live in predictable leisure. As messenger, she was sent to all the forest pools and major spirits to convey funny happenings in the Sacred Meadow, to propose seasonal ideals or to inspect with eyes outside of the Deku Tree's senses. Her life had been changed, and prepared her for the change that eventually took her, and Link, from the forest.
Funny how life builds you into exactly who you need to be, she pontificated while watching Link wrangle the tent one-handedly, still cradling his twinging arm to his chest. Gerrard exultantly stood back until the blonde reluctantly requested assistance.
Breakfast was biscuits and jerky, munched upon while they let the dew dry from the tent before folding it into Link's pack.
Lunch on the go was biscuits and jerky.
Dinner turned out to be jerky and dried fruit and the dry, dry, crumbly but nourishing and tasteless Hylian travel biscuits. Their only water was that of the two spare canteens, now. The wind was greedy too, and stole any moisture in their lips and around their eyes. The boys were cracking and peeling, and squinting, with no energy to snipe at each other. All they could do was doggedly plod ahead and make camp for the night. Day one had passed quietly, and all parties were relieved to slip into sleep between stray boulders and canvas tarping after a solitudinous, physical day.
Day two proved to be, despite the most breath-taking views either boy and the fairy had even experienced, the most monotonous, repetitive, unremarkable slog over slag any of them would come to remember. Slumber at the end of the daylight was a welcome diversion.
Giant thrusts of gray and brown granite lined the ancient, wrinkled, volcanic land in ridges and razor valleys that plunged to bedrock and below. While the climate was not inhospitable, the lack of water, the vertical nature of the landscape and absence of viable trees, they believed this stretch of terrain between Hyrule's Castle Town and Kakariko was as rugged as Din could manage. Roads came at a cost in this tectonically active land: sometimes entire sections of road would break away from the cliffs, or rock slides from above filled the gullies. They encountered the latter first.
Every surface Link surveyed was sheer. The walls of the rock around them, the somehow solid and precarious pile of stone and rubble in front of them and the sky that offered neither clouds nor birds. He couldn't bring himself to try to shift the rocks, lest it slide right down on top of them. Even though his hand only tingled slightly instead of throbbed, it meant he really didn't want to scale the granite walls, either.
He pinched his nose where it met the forehead, flaking some paint off, and trying to abate the headache coming on.
"This isn't good," Link rasped. "Can you please survey for us, Navi?"
"Of course," she answered. She floated up, and up, and finally over the rubble. She stopped on the top stone. She looked down, turned around and Link looked into her eyes.
"There's nothing on the other side." His heart sank painfully.
"Nothing? What does that mean, nothing? Like, no path or-" Gerrard blurted as the meaning sunk in, gripping the sides of his face. "But we came this far."
"Din had other plans, then," Link said morosely, setting down his pack on the stone. "We'll have to turn back. There's no way we can get over this, and then the gap."
"Gap? How big is the gap?" Gerrard began rifling through his pack and pulling out rope.
"Gerrard, I promise, there's no way to get across fifty feet of utter death and straight granite walls," Navi explained as she came down. "This rubble sits on a shelf up here, and I don't know how. Within the last few years, maybe months, most of that peak-" She pointed above to their right, where a track of destruction swiped down to their current position. "Crumbled and tore down the ledge where the road sat. Now, it's just a drop of a thousand feet. We are literally walking on the tips of mountains."
"But I can still see other mountains and peaks around us." Apparently, geography or topography were not the areas of scholarship in the Shadow's Guild.
"Is there going to be enough breathable air on the top of Death Mountain for us to survive?" Link posed the question to Navi privately along their silent connection.
Navi said aloud: "We've come up at least four or five thousand feet, and Goriyo said the highest elevation measured by the Gorons is at 27,000 feet. But we won't need to go up that high, most likely. Cor Darun is mostly underground. Or inside the mountain, and I'm not sure which is more favorable.
"We don't have the supplies to go back. I was hoping we would find assistance closer to Kakariko." The only voice was that of the wind through stony teeth.
"How close are we to Kakariko?" Gerrard asked. "We never looked at a map."
"It was a singular path, I thought…" Link trailed off. The Kokiri blinked once. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose, hanging his head. "Let's look at the damn map Malon sent with me."
He fetched a packet from his own backframe. He unwound the waxed cord holding the envelope closed in a watertight set of flaps, and sorted between missives and a fair number of credit slips for specific merchants, before pulling out a linen-reinforced parchment map. Link gasped.
There were new markings all over it. Trails were detailed where there had been blank beige, names for tiny hamlets tucked into the north and east were labeled and even his additions to Kokiri Forest were expanded to denote sections of the Lost Woods. The sting of subtle betrayal made his heart clench. And then the logical part of his brain kicked the emotional part. More information on a map couldn't be the worst thing.
"There's a way around," Gerrard supplied immediately. "How did we not look at this sooner?"
"I hate to say it, but I think the altitude, the sudden shock of a quest and the stress of a coup are all pretty fair excuses," Navi said unapologetically, but with empathy. "I knew this first part was going to be a challenge, but I thought we would find people, the closer we got to Kakariko."
"Remember Gruse and what Jessel said at Caravan Flats? They said the North Gate was a joke, full of sheer cliffs and the deadliest traps the magicians could imagine," Link once again felt the hard wooden seat of the wagon beneath him, and smelled horse and woman in his memory. Gruse, nattering away about something, and the sergeant's warning. "There isn't anyone around here to help until we come down into…" Link studied the map on the rocks. "Hackwater. Huh. The province is called Kakariko, but there's Hackwater, and Millsvale, and Roc's Royal Cemetery is beyond it, and then on the other side is Kakariko Village."
The boy with matted hair looked up when Link stopped. "Why tell us to go so far?"
"Will we not find assistance in the smaller towns?" Navi was pacing through the air like only a fairy could. "Do we avoid them? And we have to come back to Roc's Perch anyhow to enter the trail up Death Mountain."
"Maybe that's why we're going to Kakariko. Maybe there'll be an easier way up to the Gorons," Gerrard suggested.
"We also have very little money, and the credit slips are all for people in the Village," Link's forty-some rupees weren't going to go very far at all. Too bad Magda had been the one to hold the purse of Madame Viscena. Another new idea occurred to Link: they had a thief with them.
Navi's voice behind his eyes sounded immediately. "Nope. Not happening. We are putting those skills to good use, not for our comfort or ease. Forget it."
But he could stay unseen-
"Absolutely not. There's no arguing. We will make our way by honesty or death. Am I clear, Hero?"
This sudden moralistic approach reminded him of their half-asleep conversation about healing, and practices around cliff sides. Why won't you let me do anything?
Navi mentally giggled. "You are such a teenager. Are you really getting steamed about not being able to attempt healing, or cavorting on sheer rock faces, and not being able to steal village folk blind?"
When she put it that way, it sounded horrible. Well, you've spoiled that, thanks. Link had at least enough self-awareness to put a smirk on his lips.
"Why don't I just steal what we need?" Gerrard suggested. He was shocked at Link and Navi's simultaneous laughs, and then embarrassed. "Is that what you two went all blank over?"
Link rolled up the map, knowing now to go back maybe a mile or so to find the hidden split of the trail. "Malon and Gerrick always said we look like the world exists just for us two when we communicate. It's the Kokiri's legacy, to speak privately with their conscience."
"I am so much more than your moral compass," Navi said with mock affront.
"I am so glad you are," Link returned with as much seriousness.
"Seriously, I can't wait to get some of these benefits."
The Kokiri and the fairy laughed again. Link extended his left hand and placed it on Gerrard's shoulder.
"This is the sign of siblinghood and understanding in the forest." He waited until the import settled on the boy from the Market. "You and Navi and I are on the same path, and we are tied together by the Web of Life." Link felt like the Wisest on a ceremony night. "My skills are yours, and I promise to help you overcome any barriers that come before us. We will help you find appropriate uses for your skills."
Gerrard sniffed, congested by emotion, and trying hard to pretend it wasn't that. "Fancy words. But I think I'm starting to get it. I'll do the same. My skills, and blah blah. Yeah. Thanks, Link."
"You're welcome, Gerrard."
The sky was blue as ever, nothing had changed, and yet, Gerrard felt like everything changed. Wind from the south was still as scouring, the grit in his eyes was just as itchy, but it felt like time fractured between Then, and Now.
Now, he could access who he truly might be, and not what someone told him he must be.
Half a league back on the trail, Navi felt a tingle in her neck. She turned to the east in time to see four spidery beasts silently gripping the edges of the rock above the boys. "Hey!"
Link swiveled to look at her, and through her instant prompting, he turned eastward as well. He had just shed his pack and was grabbing the sword from his sheath when the nearest spider jumped at him. It knocked him down to the rocks and forced his breath out of his lungs. Arm pinned back, totally exposed, he kicked his legs against its carapace, but his boots only skimmed along the shiny chitin. It pulled back slightly, and then it slammed its body down on top of Link's chest. He had no air to expel, and felt the distinct cracking sensation in his sternum. Tears streamed from his eyes, disgusted with the shame of dying to a mountain bug…
"Rrraaaah!" Came a feral cry, and the weight of insect legs alleviated.
Link tried to roll over, but a searing flash of agony tightened his chest. He could turn his head, and saw Gerrard, wielding his spear like a long blade, whacking and poking at the one-eyed mountain spiders. The obsidian point of Hido's spear found the last of the living things, right into its singular eye, popping like a heavy grape. Gerrard kicked them aside, out of the way of the path, favoring his left arm as he did so. Smiling blindingly, he opened his mouth to say something, and fainted. Link watched his skull bounce on the rocks.
He was still.
Link closed his eyes. "See? Told you we'd get him killed."
A/N: Don't lose hope, my readers. I may never abandon this rock. Just call me Sisyphus...
