Once safely on the ledge and un-concussed, Aradia lowered her whip and the other two climbed up it. Squeezing through a narrow crack in the wall, they found themselves in an area open to the sky and the elements, but labyrinthine with high, jagged stones. "This way!" she said, running off ahead.
The way was not dangerous, but certainly circuitous. From her body language, Aradia clearly knew where she was going, but the path seemed not to, and John quickly stopped bothering trying to remember the way. Once, they had to turn back, having encountered a massive, pearly-white, insectoid creature with moth's wings, horns, and perfect pouty lips. It looked at them with something like stern, motherly disapproval, and began scraping its pointed, spear-like feet on the ground like a bull, lowering its bulbous head. Aradia, smiling nervously, said, "Back up, don't act disrespectful, definitely don't run or try to fly."
"We can't fly—" John began to say, before Aradia covered his mouth with an audible pop. "Well then don't try it anyway," she said, about as snappishly as John imagined she could say anything.
They finally backed their way around a corner, and Aradia led them as quickly as possible without running through a highly roundabout route until John was more lost than he'd been previously. "The mother grubs are let out every few days," she explained, red-faced from tense exertion, "to get exercise. They're not used to anyone except the Dolorosas—"
"When you say mother grubs…" Roxy began, and then trailed off, not entirely sure if she wanted to know.
Aradia smiled radiantly. "That grub might have actually been my mom! I mean, the one that laid my egg at least. Who knows? It's exciting isn't it?" she said. Seeming to draw strength from the thought, she fairly bounced away down the path. The Hylians looked at each other, shrugged, and followed. "But hey," she said, calling from up ahead, "if you see a bright white glow, like a star walking around on Earth, and especially if it's woman-shaped, run."
Only once, and that from a great height, did they see a member of the ascetic order that tended the mother grubs. As the three sidled along the edge of the stony labyrinth, a stately figure in black and green robes ushered three of the huge creatures into a cave with a wave of something like a shepherd's crook. The shepherdess had her hood drawn down over her face, and brilliant white light spilled from inside, as well as from her voluminous sleeves. Her wings were huge, velvety black and neon-green, gently folding and opening in idleness. Aradia looked terrified, but led them on all the same.
Eventually, they reached a cave entrance. It was so dark inside that it seemed like a solid barrier of black between the intestines of Dragonroost and the world of light. "Normally we'd go through a big entryway near where that Dolorosa was," she explained. "Carved dragons and depictions of the famous ancestors, a blessing from the Prince, a funeral dirge in case you don't come back," her smile widened. "It's a really beautiful ceremony!" She stepped through the cavern mouth and disappeared from view, the slightest gleam of light shining off her smile before it disappeared, just a fraction of a second after the rest of her. "Come on!"
John and Roxy stepped through, and were immediately blinded as Aradia lit a torch. She laughed at them, staggering in the gloom. "Okay, that was a decent prank," said John, raising a finger as he rubbed the stars out of his eyes, "but your buildup was lacking. And you didn't even get off a one-liner! You could have waited for us to ask for a light, then sparked the torch really nearby. The surprise factor wouldn't have been as high I'll grant you that, but it would have been more timely and therefore funnier. I guess I'll rank this prankster's gambit something like—"
Roxy meanwhile, was bent double with laughter. "Oh wow, you really got us! That was good! I'm gonna get you back though Rae-Rae, you'll see!"
"I can't wait!" exclaimed Aradia.
John frowned, irked that his sagely expertise on pranking and its subtle nuances was being ignored. He took the time to look around the chamber. It was fairly small, but there was a lot to see. Ancient pottery along the far walls, cave paintings depicting an enormous serpent snaking across the walls and ceiling, painted in deep red and tinged with blue, mad spiraling eyes wreaking havoc on scurrying figures. They lacked wings and horns, but were too oddly shaped to be human, he thought. What's more, they were painted dull ochre. He spied little painted flowers that must have been the bomb plants from earlier, but like everything else, they were done in blue and red and ochre. This painting depicted a world without green.
Against the far wall were sitting a trio of ancient statues, squat toadlike figures with huge lips and beady little eyes, round bellies like drums and spikes rising from their heads and backs like horned lizards. It was odd. The trolls were the oldest recorded civilization, next to mythical Hyrule, but the people who'd painted this cavern and built the statues seemed even older than either of those. And yet, John had never heard of anything like this.
Aradia noticed him looking and sidled up to John without him noticing. "The stone-men carved the tunnels," she said, a little louder than her usual tone, spooking him out of his contemplation, "by eating away at the rocks. Their shovel-like nails could scoop through the stuff like softest mud, and they washed it down with hot lava. The whole city is just what they didn't bother eating," she finished, nodding smartly.
John chuckled. "Yeah sure," he said. "Let me tell you about the Great Fairy on Outset Island while we're telling tall tales." Aradia laughed.
"Well," she said, "they may or may not have been real, but they definitely had secrets." She pressed her shoulder against one of the stone-men and with surprising strength considering her size but not her species, shoved it off to the side. Behind it was a carved slot, presumably where a stone block would have been placed during a construction.
"Found this place when my time came to climb the mountain," said Aradia, sounding very self-satisfied. "Everyone thought I'd died because I spent a couple of days exploring the ruins instead of, well, my rite of passage."
The kids crawled through the opening while Aradia told them about the pottery in the previous room; "it's in the same style as trollish pottery from the third century but carved from stone and painted instead of fired and enameled and it seems this culture didn't have the means of producing the color green because I have found no green artifacts and all depictions of plant life are blue for some reason and I was only joking a little bit when I said they ate rocks because judging from other cave paintings I found at base camp 04—" eventually stepping into a much larger cavern where the stone was oddly terraced, as if layered by the cooled magma of several different eruptions, each flow having stopped at different times. But this room was lit by big, bright braziers at the corners. It had been used recently.
No, the room was being used right now, by a pair of green-skinned Bokoblins, one armed with a Bokowood torch and the other with a machete and shield, standing guard over a door at the topmost tier of hardened magma. John immediately drew his hammer and shield while Roxy produced a pair of knives. Aradia however, rushed forward and made a polite bow. "Hi," she said, "I'm Aradia Megido. Bokoblins eh? That makes us distant cousins!" She extended her hand. "Pleased to meet you!"
The Bokoblins were so stunned that it took them a full minute to react. The one on the left bent towards Aradia and screamed in her face, that high pitched warbling screech echoing painfully in the small chamber. He immediately cut off as a half-dozen knives sprouted from his chest. His partner turned to run, and almost made it to the door, only to be brained by John's hammer. "Aradia, what the hell?" he said, turning around to face her.
"I'm sorry," said Aradia, "I thought I might be able to talk our way through this. I don't really like fighting," she said with an embarrassed grin. John's jaw dropped. She snickered. "I know, I know, you got saddled with the only pacifist on the island!"
Roxy rolled over the first corpse to retrieve her knives. "You can't really…reason with Bokoblins sweetie," she explained as she plucked them out of the cadaver's chest.
Aradia sighed. "I know, but you always have to try." She spread her arms. "Who knows? Maybe one day I'll meet a monster who's willing to listen." She twirled around in a slow circle, the hems of her coat and loose red top flapping around her. "Anyway, welcome to base camp 01! I set it up during my first trip up the mountain." John noted that the chamber featured a single tent and a fairly new cookpot as well as several wooden structures that had clearly been built within the last few years; the braziers, some railings over the higher ledges, wooden supports for the ceiling. Aradia walked into the tent and came back with three canteens. "Drink up," she said, "there's plenty more. The Bokoblins must have just gotten here. Once you're ready I'll get you some fresh ones and we'll move on."
John took a sip and sealed it back up. "No seriously," Aradia said warningly, "things are about to get really hot. You want to finish that." John felt a sense of impending dread and did as asked.
The three of them walked up to the door. It was made of a solid sheet of metal and seemed to radiate heat. There were no knobs, handles, or hinges visible. "How do we get through?" asked Roxy. "How does this thing even work?"
"I'm not sure how it works," said Aradia. "The only time I tried to take one apart I caused a huge cave-in. But you can open them like this," and she gave it a deft, unceremonious kick. It slid upwards with surprisingly swift and easy movement. John decided there and then to stop being impressed with ancient technology, because he was probably going to see a lot of it.
That was an instant before the wave of blazing heat smashed into him like a hammer as the cavern filled with an ominous orange glow. Shielding their eyes, the kids made their way into the next chamber. It was massive; the problem was the lack of ground that wasn't molten. Standing on a narrow ledge, they could look across a cavern that was as wide as the entirety of Dragonroost. Far below, a sea of magma bubbles with blazing heat, almost too bright to look at. "There are some great updrafts here," said Aradia, looking down into the blaze. "I could probably glide all the way to the top," she trailed off, sounding very hesitant. "Probably." Otherwise it was great spiraling path across narrow ledges to yet another door set in a recess that someone, somehow, and for some reason, had taken the time and effort to carve into the shape of a massive demon's face, stalactites and stalagmites reshaped into hideous tusks.
"Why would they do that?" asked Roxy, scratching her chin. "Who would even see it in here? What would they need to scare people away from?"
Aradia shrugged, wooly curls bouncing. "I don't know why, but I know what's in there. It's a volcanic sill!"
Roxy nodded her head as if she understood, and then spoke, tone irritated and slightly menacing. "I hope we don't have the same problem with you as we have with our boat. He never explains things that would be useful to know."
Aradia bit her lower lip as she thought. "Okay," she said. "Pressure pushes the magma up through the throat of the volcano until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes it gathers in hollows in the rock, bubbles left by previous flows. That's called a sill." She pointed at the demon face. "There's a big sill inside the demon's mouth, and it's so hot I can barely stand it in there, but I've explored it a little. Base camp 05 is just behind the teeth, but I only used it once after setting it up. There's some kind of pagan shrine in there, probably built by the stone-men I told you about. I call it the forge," she finished, "because it's shaped kind of like a huge furnace."
Wordlessly, they trudged on along the gently spiraling path. Halfway up another recess in the wall hid a door leading off to who knew where, but they ignored it. The path grew steep with time, and narrowed to the point that they had to sidle. "Should we link arms in case someone falls," said Roxy, "or not, so they don't drag down the rest of us?" Aradia laughed. Roxy muttered something about being serious.
Eventually, they found a place where the path had crumbled away entirely. Someone had bridged it with some flimsy wooden boards, not even securing them to the floor. "I'm not crossing that," snapped John, stamping his foot. A bit of the brittle ledge crumbled and fell into the magma far below. "There's brave and there's stupid, and this is bum-fucking retarded," he declared authoritatively.
The girls laughed at him. "Look ahead Johnny," said Roxy. An enormous boulder had fallen onto the next ledge. The path was completely blocked off.
"This is such bullshit," John muttered, as he began the long, trudging path back.
Through the second door, John was pleased to find that it was significantly cooler. Aradia fumbled in her pocket for a second until she produced a playing card, the one of pentacles. She flicked it and it transformed into a lit torch. "How'd you do that?" John asked, looking around the new chamber. It was essentially a hallway, with a few large doorways that had been blocked off by wooden boards. At the far end was another metal sliding door.
"My brawlsoleum," Aradia muttered, seemingly concerned about something. "It's a…tomby-thing that turns into a deck of cards." She pointed at the boards. "Those weren't there before," she said, sounding happy at having figured out what was bothering her. "The Bokoblins sealed off the alcoves in here for some reason."
John immediately pulled out his own deck and dumped the cards out into his hand. Nearly all of them were blank except for three. He chose the two of stars and flicked it like Aradia had, spilling the sail all over cave floor. "How do I make it turn back?" he asked eagerly.
She snickered. "You get out your magical inventory and put it back inside." John frowned. That meant folding the damn thing up again.
While he was doing that, the girls went off into the corner and started muttering to themselves. He supposed this was a girlish thing, because he and Dave had never gone off and giggled in corners while Jade did something, that was for damn sure. Aradia looked up and focused her big eyes on him, smiling. John almost smiled back, but then she covered her mouth to restrain a high-pitched giggle. She turned back to Roxy and said something, and Roxy went as far as to laugh out loud. Were they…talking about him? John's ears drooped as his face burned and he wondered if someone had opened the goddamned door because of how hot it suddenly was.
"So basketball is played entirely on the ground?" Aradia asked.
Roxy laughed, ears pricking up. "Well duh, we don't have wings!" Aradia laughed at her own slip-up. Briefly, she looked over at John, checking up on his progress. Presumably his lack of experience with sailing is what was causing him trouble. She was about to say something encouraging when the image of trolls playing the game jumped into her mind. "Can you imagine Karkat playing," she said, whispering so as not to distract John, "and just flying from one end of the court to the other because he cares so little about the rules?" She snickered.
Roxy laughed. "That grumpy mailman? He'd probably drop the ball right through the hoop and argue that it counts as a dunk!" The two girls snickered.
John muttered something to himself and went on with his folding until he finally had the thing stowed away safely. "Stop gossiping or whatever and come on," he said, taking the lead. As he passed in front of one of the sealed doorways, there was a sound of smashing pottery an instant before the boards exploded outwards, a common Bokoblin leaping through the splinters with a murderous gleam on his machete.
The Bokoblin tackled John to the floor, crouching on his chest. He raised his blade dramatically, and probably would have killed John had Aradia's whip not come streaking through the air, flaying his sword arm open with a nasty crack. The Bokoblin shrieked and dropped the machete. John pushed off the monster and ran him through with his own weapon.
John found he didn't like the sensation. And odd thought to have, having killed a number of the creatures already, but the feeling of sliding in, the wet squishing sound, the feeling of flesh parting, the way the blade vibrated as the it scraped bone and tore through different textures of tissue, was so brutal. He watched the light go out in the monster's eyes. Sure, smashing its head in would have been just as painful and twice as ugly, but it would have been faster.
That's what he thought; what he said was "I thought you didn't like fighting."
"Doesn't mean I don't know how," said Aradia, coming to look pityingly on the corpse. "I hoped he would run away, tend to his wound, have a long hard thought about his life, and maybe start trying to communicate with people instead of trying to eat them." She sighed. "Maybe one day."
The machete made for an excellent skeleton key, in the sense that the heavy blade was well suited to smashing through the wooden boards blocking all the alcoves. Of course, the cheap metal was chipped and warped to uselessness by the time they'd finished. "The smith probably thought that folding the steel made it stronger," John sighed as he threw it off into the corner.
"It…doesn't?" said Roxy, eyes narrowed, ears perfectly horizontal.
John shook his head. "It takes out the carbon. It's how you turn shitty steel into good steel; by folding it just enough so it stops being a brittle mess and starts acting like metal. If you fold it too much though, it goes back to being iron. Really shitty iron too."
One of the newly liberated alcoves contained broken pottery, over which Aradia was very excited. The other contained a small chest with a heavy, silvery key. John slipped it into his pocket. "I was kind of hoping for rupees. Even gold would have been nice," he sighed.
Through the door at the end of the hall was something John had not at all expected. Cold. Wind. Sound. Dazzling blue. Dazzled by the new, or newly rediscovered sensations, he was unsure of what he was seeing for a moment until Roxy whooped with joy. "It felt like I'd been in that hole forever!" Then it all clicked into place. They were outside.
John knew that they'd been going vaguely upward even when the ground seemed fairly flat, but this height was ridiculous. He took a step and then another, but stopped because a third step would take him over the edge, plunging down into the churning sapphirine waters below, from which rose jagged black rocks like Charybdis' teeth. Slowly turning his head upward, he looked for the horizon, and couldn't find it. Off in the distance, the sea and the sky blended together. The world was like a bubble. He wondered where the dark clouds were. Looking up, he found that they had either subsided slightly or had been much smaller than he'd thought. Maybe Pyralsprite had calmed down some; who could guess? There was probably a metaphor buried in here somewhere, John figured, or there would be if this were fiction and not real life. The wind whistled in John's ears, ruffling his hair like an old friend. John thought he'd be able to understand its whistling, if he took the time to decipher it. It could understand him, after all, when he played the Breath Waker.
To the left was a narrow stair wrapping its way around the mountain made of grey marble bars rammed into the stone somehow. "Did the trolls build it or was it your legendary rock eaters?" asked Roxy, half jokingly as she tested the first step with her foot. It supported her weight, but she couldn't be sure unless she stomped the shit out of it. She did so.
Aradia shook her head. "The stairs are non-native stone. The 'rock eaters' only ever made things out of local stone. I think these are probably trollish, but we may never know. Now move it!"
The stairs were not fun to climb. Marble is generally speaking very slick, even when it's been out in the elements for centuries, and not a particularly hard stone to begin with. The spacing was regular, but a bit too far. Not enough for them to slip between the steps, but certainly enough for a toe to get caught and cause a stumble. Roxy, bringing up the rear, nearly sent the three of them plummeting to their deaths after just such an event, and John nearly tore off Aradia's left wing while grabbing hold for dear life. "Asshole," she muttered, wrapping them around herself like a shroud, cheeriness temporarily gone.
At the top of the stairs was a rocky ledge, connected to another by a rope bridge in surprisingly good condition. Beyond that was the metallic gleam of the ancient metal doors that peppered the structure. Roxy was not afraid of heights, but she found herself relived to think that they'd be 'safely' inside soon, never mind that inside was the blazing throat of an active volcano.
Unfortunately, there was a ten foot gap between the original top of the stairs and the place where they ended now, the malleable stones having crumbled away to useless rounded stumps like rotted teeth sticking out of the side of the mountain. John looked down, once again seeing the rocks and the churning water below. They were much higher now than they'd been then. "Now what?" he asked, rubbing his chin. "I…guess I could jump it. How 'bout you Roxy?"
"If I could get a running start," she said, musingly. "But I really, really don't want to try running up these stairs is the thing. Maybe I could finagle my way along the wall with my not-ninja training."
Aradia didn't say anything, but she did straighten her hat, tilting it to a daring angle before pointing upward. John looked and saw a rusted metal bar with a stylized claw at the end that had been roughly jammed into the stone. "I don't get it," he said, or rather started to say before Aradia hooked him around the waist and pulled him close. His cheek was almost touching her cheek. Her hair really did feel like wool.
With a deft snap of her arm, her steel-cable whip wrapped itself around the metal bar. "Grab on Roxy!" she shouted. "This is my favorite part of mountain climbing!" Roxy eagerly complied, squealing with joy as they swung across the gap at what John felt was a stupidly dangerous speed.
Landing unsteadily on the other side, he let go of Aradia a smidge too quickly. "Am I that unpleasant to touch?" she asked, pouting exaggeratedly.
"Nah," said Roxy, slinking over to his other side. "He just doesn't want you to know his true feelings, so he got away from your smokin' body as quickly as possible instead of lingering like he really wants." She put her elbow on his shoulder and grinned evilly. "Isn't that right, Johnny?" she asked, wagging her eyebrows.
He twisted his way past the girls and stormed towards the bridge. "Roxy, you're fired. We're not on an adventure together anymore!"
"So it'll be just you and me?" Aradia asked, fluttering her crimson lashes.
"He's got that grey fever," said Roxy, her arms crossed, nodding smartly.
"Yeah!" Aradia agreed, "Grey fever!" She turned to Roxy and whispered, "What does that mean?"
John ignored them and made his way across the bridge. The girls hurried to catch up. The bridge swung steadily, rhythmically in the wind, not helped by the tromping steps of the tweens, and the ropes creaked disconcertingly as it moved, groaning like a dying old man. And then, at the halfway point, the kids heard a now familiar sound; the shrieking, howling call of a Bokoblin. He stood at the far end of the bridge, machete in hand. With a rude gesture, he swung his blade toward the supporting ropes.
Roxy's knife whizzed through the Bokoblin's ear, throwing off his aim just slightly so he struck a vertical rope and not a horizontal one. Next, Aradia's whip wrapped around his ankle and dragged the creature towards the kids. "Listen up," she said sternly once he was well within striking rnage, eyeing the blade still clutched in the creature's hands. "There's three of us and one of you. We have you on the floor of a suspension bridge thousands of feet above the ocean. There's a dozen ways for us to hurt or kill you without any harm coming to us, but the only way you can kill us kills you too. So just drop the weapon. We'll let you go past, and you'll let us go past, and we'll all get to live to see tomorrow." She flashed him her biggest, brightest smile.
The Bokoblin paused, as if considering. Then with an even more obscene gesture than before, he swung his machete through the horizontal ropes on the left side. The bridge bucked and then fell.
"You stupid asshole!" Aradia screamed as the weight of the laughing Bokoblin pulled her down. "You could have lived and now you're going to die because YOU CAN'T FLY!" She snapped the whip and the Bokoblin careened away from her into the side of the mountain, bouncing off with satisfying pop. Ugh. No, not satisfying at all. She hoped that one didn't come back to haunt her. He was such an ass.
There was a more than decent updraft now, not like the foehns that were coming off down the mountain on the western face, where Pyralsprite was facing and flinging his dragonly abues, so she should be able to make it back up. Aradia spread her wings, which rippled painfully, looking like loose fabric for a second before catching the wind and pushing her back up. Her handful of attendants watched her with hollow-eyed expressions almost tangentially resembling curiosity. The pale creatures really should just move on with their afterlives. A swarm of flies like a silvery cloud, a handful of fish swimming through the air as if it were water, a wild pig that hadn't accepted her peace offering, a palm tree she'd cut down, its roots and leaves shuddering like the tentacles of some obscene outer god. Not everything she'd ever killed, but a good portion. It was hard to imagine how much the deaths of other creatures were necessary for your own life. It put some things in perspective. Of course, not every ghost she saw was haunting her, specifically. John and Roxy had attendants of their own, with much more frightening visages. And there were dozens of fallen children who'd passed away on the path to their god. One of them, reliving his death, tumbled past her right then and there.
Something pink and blue whizzed past immediately after, following the exact same path and screaming "Rae-Rae!" A flick of her wrist and the whip was wrapped tight around Roxy's waist. The girl was a bit heavier than the Bokoblin, but Aradia had the wind under her wings now. A few good beats, and she was safely on the far side of the bridge, where the Bokoblin had popped up in the first place.
John shuffled his way over to the far ledge, hand over hand, thanking every god he knew that he hadn't drawn his hammer fighting the monster, because else he would have dropped the thing, and his Nana's shield into the bargain. The fact that he was dangling from a rope with only his fingers thousands of feet in the air only irritated him compared to the thought of losing those heirlooms. By the time he reached the far ledge, the girls were just touching down. John might have said something about how cool it would be to fly, but didn't want to get teased again.
Pyralsprite roared. The mountain shook. Cracks appeared in the ground and along the walls, and steam and black soot hissed out for just a moment. "Well shit," said John. "I really, really hope we can calm Pyralsprite down." The girls nodded, a little stunned. John stood up. "So, Aradia," he said, trying to shift things back into a more casual tone, "how did you make it to Pyralsprite with so many Bokoblins up here?"
Aradia shook her head wildly, and her wooly curls all but writhed. "They weren't here before. I'd never even seen one in real life until today." There was a Bokoblin's ghost haunting the main floor of the post office who looked more confused than evil, but that was beside the point.
Roxy rubbed her chin. "Hey John, didn't you say that the ones on your island were carried in by kargorocs?" she asked.
John nodded slowly. "You think that's what they're doing? Invading from the top down?"
Roxy shrugged. "It's pretty smart actually. Well, it would be if the Bokoblins weren't so damn dumb," she smirked. "But yeah, a downwards push is probably what they're going for."
The discussion over, the kids strolled over to the door and kicked it open, slipping once again into the warm darkness. The constant changes in temperature were probably going to get them all sick.
Aradia produced a torch one again, and once again the children examined the chamber they found themselves in. Against the far wall was a pyramid of carved stone blocks, atop of which was another hole cut in the cave wall. Off in the corner was a bedroll, a few crates, and a lamp. "Base camp 03!" she said proudly. "After this it's just a climb up another set of stairs and we'll be with Pyralsprite!"
"And then we'll have a whole other set of problems," said John. "What if we have to fight him?"
"I hope it doesn't come to that," said Roxy. "I don't think we can fight a crazy dragon-god right now." She whispered loudly, "Sounds just a tiny bit above our skill-level!" No one laughed, so she laughed for everyone.
The children rested a while, as much as they could when preparing for eminent death. It had only now, near the end of the arduous climb, dawned on them that reaching their destination was not a victory but would merely be the start of another trial.
This thought was quickly forgotten when Aradia offered her guests snacks, and, without waiting for a response, opened the tightly sealed food crate, and recoiled in horror when she saw the gelatinous red mass that had filled the entire space. A bulbous head-shape stretched out from the opening. Two spheres rose to the surface and emerged into the air as neon-green eyes. A large bubble popped, leaving behind a gash that served as a crude simulacrum of a mouth. "The fuck is this?" asked Roxy.
John readied his hammer, but then had an idea. What had Gamzee said about that pictobox? He summoned it from its card and snapped a picture. A brilliantly colored image of the creature rolled out of the bottom. The back read: "Red chuchu. Jelly has medicinal properties. Incredibly fragile." John nodded as if given instructions, and stared at the thing's derpy face. It looked as if it would be a slackjawed idiot if it were human. He chuckled, and smashed it with a hammer, splattering curative goop all over the small room and his friends.
"Is this revenge for the grey fever thing?" asked Roxy, who was trying very hard not to move and thereby spread the thing to other parts of her body. "Because I'm not sorry." The fur on her ears had puffed out like an irritated cat's.
Aradia stuck a finger in her mouth. "It tastes…spicy? Like cinnamon and nutmeg. I wouldn't have thought that."
"It's medicinal!" John said, glad to be the one who knew a thing for once.
"And a little cloying," said Aradia, smacking her lips. "Like bad honey."
John ignored her. "The magic pictobox that the sketchy clown we met in that dungeon says so!" He paused for a moment. "That…sounded saner in my head. Like, way saner."
"I think you're right," said Aradia. "It tastes almost exactly like red potion. We could probably just boil it down and make cheap, bootlegged medicine." She strode forward, producing some glass jars and scooping it in.
Roxy, meanwhile, had found Aradia's water supply, a huge blue jar. She lifted it over her head and dumped it all over herself, washing away the red slime.
A few minutes later, the trio was ascending the stairs. It was a considerable longer climb than the first one. Not only was the stairway longer, but the going was slower as the steps were in considerably worse condition. Here and there a step was broken in half or missing altogether, and other steps looked worn enough to crumble at any time. Eventually, the kids reached a stretch of steps that was solid enough to linger. And they decided to take a breather. John actually sat down, legs dangling over the edge, and the girls gasped.
He chuckled. "Didn't you climb down a sheer wall in the middle of the night, Roxy? And you can fly," he said, pointing at Aradia. "I'm just some guy, why are you two scared?" They waited some five minutes. Just when John was about to swing his legs back up and resume the ascent, he noticed a tiny white flower with five rounded petals growing out of the crack between the marble step and the volcanic wall. John smiled at the brave little plant, wondering how it could have gotten so high up. He considered plucking it, but decided against—
The mountain shook as Pyralsprite's booming roar, louder now than ever, more terrible than a thousand cannon blasts, but strangely musical, like a trumpet, filled his ears. The bent themselves down in pain as the air blurred and the mountain shook. There was a rhythmic pounding that they'd not heard before; Pyralsprite was stamping his feet wildly, as if in pain. There was an ugly series of cracks as the sound faded away.
John jumped back up to his feet, almost falling over backward but pushed back to stability by Roxy. "Run!" he said, taking off up the stairs. Roxy looked back over Aradia's shoulder and gasped. Aradia plunged a few feet as the stairs gave way under her before unfurling her wings. She drifted lazily along as her Hylian friends raced ahead of the crumbling staircase.
Author's note: No polyfandrous this isn't the trollish cliff-hanger I told you I was plotting, that's next chapter. Which should be up fairly soon, as I'm trying to complete this story arc before moving onto something else (what do you all think I should do next? A little Trollish Layer I'm thinking) but y'all know how I am with promises.
People really liked Aradia last chapter. Especially her hair. It was just a joke, but now it's canon I guess, since I made reference to it again. Huh.
I only realized while I was writing the previous chapter that the statues and things in Dragon Roost Cavern are probably supposed to be Gorons (d'oh!) a fact that I'm sure would fascinate Aradia to no end. She seems a bit more prominent than the other two in this chapter, but that's because she knows the dungeon well; it only stands to reason. Also she was probably the second character whose role I'd decided way back in the planning stages.
You've of course noticed that I changed the dungeon layout. Otherwise, it would be the kids running back and forth while Roxy has brain-blasts and Aradia wonders who reset these thousand year-old traps and John grows incredibly bored of smashing chuchus and everyone wonders how they're getting so close to lava without exploding.