Last-chapter recap: The Harrys returned to Hogwarts Castle for a day to see their friends and take their first step toward learning a few new spells. Yellow caught up with Ron, then received the new item, Exploding Solution, from Fred and George. Blue went to visit Professor Lupin, now roommates with Sirius Black, to learn the basics of some new magic. While there, he learned from his godfather that adults are, perhaps, not always either threats to his safety or annoying hindrances to his plans.
We've got lots of art between this chapter and the next because I just had a ball drawing the version of fairies that exists in this era! Check out the "characters" tag on garden-eel-draws or the Ao3 version of this chapter if you want to see some high-effort illustrations of the small fairy type that shows up in this chapter!
Shadow Harry had been coming as close to worrying as an entity like him could get as he listened to the Harrys make flight plans. He'd forgotten the damned wizards could fly.
The children didn't know about the "Silent Zone", as Shadow Harry had come to think of the eerily quiet field of death caused by his boss's foolish appropriation of magics he didn't understand. Those old Hylian scientists in that flying house had managed to get in, take their pictures, and get out only because they hadn't flown over the patch of gray that had just been forming at the time. The deadly area was now more than large enough to snatch a pack of unwary young wizards out of the air, then out of their world's reincarnation cycle.
"Hey," he said as the Heroes arranged themselves on the front steps of their dilapidated castle. "Hold on a minute." He took a metaphorical breath with his nonexistent lungs. Time to be—he shuddered—responsible.
The shadow rose from the ground and stepped out in front of the children he'd wound up mentoring in the place of some talking owl or annoying little fairy. He hated how the wariness in their eyes had been waning since they'd arrived in this world. It was to be expected, when he'd deviated so drastically from his traditional role, but he didn't have to like it.
"Is something wrong, Shadow?" Yellow asked. "You seem a little anxious."
"I am not," the spirit snapped. He forcibly stopped the pacing he hadn't noticed himself falling into. "You're just idiots, so I have to herd you."
"Herd us why?" Green asked, all business. At least he still had some bite to him when it came to his shadow, as he should. "Are you putting yourself in the way of the hole we have to fix? Because you might just get that sword fight you've been pushing for if you do."
"As much as I'd love that, no, that's not what I'm doing," Shadow Harry said. The Harrys were at a level where he felt they'd survive a light spar, but there was too much going on right now for him to have any fun with it. Maybe that could come after this infernal rip in existence was patched. "There's this big gray field of death around the hole punched through reality, spreading wider as the boss's anchor on the other side sucks the life out of both worlds at the same time. I've done some thinking and, best I can tell, my boss installed one of those ground-tap generators they have in this dimension over in the Dark World on the assumption that your dimension has the same amount of power in the ground."
Blue's eyes wandered over to the lush apple trees that stood in the distance, still heavy with fruit despite the Hogwarts students' collective appetite by the Goddesses' grace. Shadow Harry knew from the Harrys' memories that in the Dark World, those trees would have been picked bare and stayed that way until the next growing season. "Let me guess: the Dark World has more magic in its mages than it does in the ground," Blue said. "Given how every spell we cast here seems to astound people, I mean."
"Yes, the power balance is flipped: mages here are way less numerous and powerful, but the land is more bountiful in exchange. Your world is the opposite." Shadow Harry held up two fingers and swiveled them around. "If my boss put a ground-tap designed for the Light World anywhere in your dimension, it would easily devour the power holding the ground together in that spot, punch a hole through the wall between worlds, and then start sucking power from here, weakening the integrity of both places at once. The magic around the area on this side is sloping toward the vacuum, attempting to hold the substance of the Dark and Light Worlds together and making the grayness spread. And in the Dark World, with all that power flooding in from a place fundamentally opposite to it, things must be getting weird."
He chewed on his thumb. Just thinking about the silent annihilation creeping across his world made his skin crawl. So much life-force had been snatched out of circulation already; though no towns or villages had yet been consumed, plenty of desert plants and animals had. Even the dirt had been killed.
"You need to find a way to your dimension that's close enough to the hole between worlds that you'll land by the source of the problem, and I know how you can get the Moon Pearl for a portal. All you have to do is help a certain spirit, find a natural weak spot around the Golden Cliffs to open a door in, and not turn yourselves to dust by flying over the mysterious gray dirt," Shadow Harry declared. "Good, clean fun for kids like you, right?" He ran a hand through his hair, which had been getting longer in time with the Harrys'. "Get yourselves over to the Great Plateau, and if at any point I tell you to turn around, either you'll listen or suddenly you'll be dropping out of the sky with your broom stuck in your shadow. Whether you live or die is on you, but I don't want to have to feel your life-force be destroyed by that existential vacuum, got it? It really sucks on my end."
Yellow and Red nodded. "Got it."
Green and Blue weren't as quick to accept. They narrowed their eyes suspiciously. "What did you do to make this mission line up so well?" Green asked. "You must have done something."
"Did you 'arrange' for us to find this Moon Pearl?" Blue piled on. "Take out a hit on someone with one, perhaps?"
Shadow Harry snorted. "I'm not that kind of bad guy, kiddo," he said. "No mortals got hurt this time and I didn't do anything permanent. Wander around the forest on the Great Plateau for a bit, and you'll find out what I mean."
He had, in fact, arranged some things. Not like an assassin, though, so denying that didn't count as a lie. It had felt good to enact some well-aimed destruction after all the ham-handed orders he'd been receiving lately. Seriously, "derail a train into a major city to lower public trust in transport and make the stupid mortals stay put?" Pfft, maybe he'd get around to it next month. Mass destruction was fun, but trains were a little too full of easily-mangled mortals for his tastes.
"'Wander around a bit'? Is that as much as you're going to tell us?" Green pressed.
"Absolutely!" Shadow said, eager to disappoint. Besides, if he explained everything, the Harrys would get all guilty over it and ruin the opportunity he'd gone through all the trouble of setting up for them. One of the things he'd been learning from watching these kids a little closer was that, instead of just barging into places and fixing problems like the Heroes he was used to opposing, they also had an annoying tendency to shoulder blame for things they hadn't caused.
"You have your new heading, kids," the spirit cheerfully declared. "Adventure awaits!" He dropped back into Green's shadow and watched as the boy sighed and conjured his Navi Slate.
"I bet the Four Sword bloke before us never had to deal with this kind of thing coming from that big owl," Green grumbled, poking around the screen. "It's too bad Hedwig can't tell us where to go.
The Great Plateau was an odd feature to the land that Harry wasn't quite sure was natural. It was a plateau, certainly, but one whose base was lined with constructed walls of pale stone. Those arches and columns were built in a different style than Hyrule or Hogwarts Castle. It was more reminiscent of the Castle Town that the Four Sword had half-memories of, in fact. The worn walls, unmanned battle stations, and rusting cannons gave the plateau the appearance of an ancient fortress hauled out of the earth. Those walls were still active with people, too, despite their obvious age. Multiple elevators, easily spotted by their shining blue markings, slid up and down the walls to ferry people up and down. There were even a couple of train elevators, though only one seemed to be running.
Wide, squat two-story buildings, clearly ancient but well-maintained, sat on the edges of the plateau—one on the northeastern side and the other farther south. They stood like mountains surrounded by clusters of smaller buildings and colorful open-air shops. People in pale, Greek-looking clothes buzzed in and out of the large buildings, intermixing with the more brightly dressed tourists who came up via the lifts. From up here, Harry could spot only two power generators. The bulbous structures pulsed like giant hearts, powering the circuit-webs of the nearby villages and elevators. In the distance, around the center of the plateau, stood a singular building that towered far above the rest.
Harry drifted toward the lone building on his broom. It resembled a Gothic church, with many narrow, stained glass windows and a high steeple with a big, shiny brass bell. Hylian places of worship didn't look like this—not these days, anyway. They prayed to their goddesses in places that looked like small Greek temples, or at the feet of stone statues often decorated with embroidered aprons and given offerings of food and apple wine. This church reminded him of…It looked like—
The Four Sword walloped him with a stream of memory. A distant sense of intimidation as he walked up to a silent, solemn temple set away from the cheerful bustle of Castle Town. Feeling the hallowed building's spiritual gravity weigh down his shoulders as he entered and stepped up to a pedestal within—
A hand yanked Harry up, saving him from falling sideways off of his broom. "Green, what are you doing?" Red asked. "If you're gonna daydream that hard, you ought to land first!"
Harry shook his head and put a hand to it. Those memories had been stronger than usual—likely because they'd belonged to the Hero of Time. That boy's recollections were particularly sharp, since he'd been the last of the Old Kingdom's divine sword-bearers.
Yellow floated over. Shielding his eyes from the sun with one raised hand, he peered into the distance. "Was the sword talking to you about that church over there?"
"It doesn't look like anything in Castle Town," Blue remarked. "Doesn't it seem rather too Christian for this place?"
"It's the Temple of Time," Harry said. The words just kind of fell from his mouth without him trying to say them. "Or rather, a Temple of Time. The one the Four Sword remembers is under the Great Sea." Harry didn't have any real ties to this world—no Master Sword, nor a connection to any goddesses, nor a divine destiny sitting on his back—but the sight of the building still rang powerfully in his mind. Maybe Link would have to visit there someday, if and when he was hit by his own stroke of divinely bad luck.
Harry pried his eyes away from the building's magnetic pull. "Erm. A forest. We're supposed to be looking around a forest," he said to remind himself. He looked around for the biggest patch of green below and aimed his broom toward it. "This way!" He shot toward the woods.
He and his brothers set down at the eastern edge of the trees. Harry peered into the darkness under the low canopy doubtfully. It looked a lot friendlier than the ominous gloom of the Forbidden Forest, but he still had to wonder what he was supposed to find here. They had to help a spirit? What kind of spirit? He hoped they wouldn't have to track down a Skull Kid; those tricksters specialized in getting people lost.
Red strode into the trees. "Shadow Harry said 'wander', so that's what I'm gonna do," he declared. "Ooh, look! Mushrooms!"
Blue walked in after him. "You've been studying that Hylian foraging guide I bought for everyone, I hope."
"'Course I have. Foraging isn't boring like vocabulary lists and verb charts." Red pounced on an orange mushroom and held it up. "Endura Shroom! I haven't seen any of these in the woods by Castle Town."
Harry and Yellow shrugged at one another and decided to join in the mushroom-hunt. They split into pairs to sweep the woods in a western direction, meandering toward whatever fungus or useful flora caught their attention.
It didn't slip Harry's attention that the woods were unnaturally quiet. There were few birds chirping in the treetops and none of the deer that Avoka had warned him against using his low-powered training bow on. A dim sense of danger crackled at the back of his neck. The only sounds were of his and Blue's footsteps, and…
Harry closed his eyes to focus on his hearing, putting out a hand to stop Blue. Piggish noises were bouncing off of the trees, coming from somewhere to his right. Then there was the sharp snap of a stick breaking under heavy force.
Towing Blue by the front of his adventuring belt, Harry tucked the two of them behind a wide tree. "Moblins," he whispered in response to his brother's questioning look.
"Ah," Blue mouthed, conjuring his Magic Rod.
Harry leaned out just a sliver beyond the edge of the tree. A pair of red Moblins were trundling through the woods with stripped-down trees resting against their shoulders like clubs and lanterns held out to light the mild gloom. They walked along a narrow dirt path already marked with their big cloven hoof-prints, sniffing at the air and speaking to one another in low grunts and snorts.
"They can talk?" Blue muttered with interest, leaning out beyond the tree to watch.
Harry put a hand on his easily-distracted brother's chest and pushed him back into safety. Then he conjured his archery equipment, which he'd cajoled Shadow Harry into letting him add to his weapon-summons list as a complete set. A small, plain wooden longbow popped into his suddenly glove-wrapped hand. On his back appeared a full quiver and a bow sheath, straps and all. Because stringing and un-stringing his bow was a pain and having extra equipment hanging off of him would tire him out, Harry had taken the convenient, wizardly route and made it all conjure-able. He'd figure out what effect that would have on adding the fancier bows in his bag to his conjuring list sometime later, when his arms became strong enough for him to actually use those weapons.
Briefly, he considered dipping an arrow into the exploding potion Fred and George had come up with. This was a very flammable forest, though, and those monsters were carrying enough fire as it was. Planting his feet, Harry drew back a shot and tracked the Moblins. Their helmets protected the backs of their heads, so if he wanted to nail one where it hurt, he'd have to do it from the right angle.
Harry released the arrow.
Ftt. The arrow vanished from his bow and reappeared, feathers quivering, right in one of the Moblins' snouts. True to what Avoka had told him, the monster toppled like a tree, stunned. "Let's go!" Harry hissed at Blue. He vanished his bow and charged forward, conjuring the Dragon Hammer as he did. The other Moblin, who'd started looking around suspiciously after its partner had gone down, noticed him and roared, lowering its club from its shoulder. Harry held the head of his hammer low and only ran up faster as the monster went into a wind-up.
"No you don't!" Harry planted his left foot and swung his hammer at the same time the Moblin brought its club around in a devastating sweep.
The jet in Harry's hammer kicked in, and the curled golden horns met wood with a terrific crack. Splinters pelted a tree in front of him as the Moblin's weapon broke in half. The Moblin squealed in dismay, then shot a glare at Harry with its eerie crystal eyes. Harry had just enough time to throw himself backward as it took a swipe at him with its lantern. He managed to avoid catching any one of those dangerous metal corners, but not the spray of hot, flaming oil that flew out beyond the lantern's arc.
"Argh!" Sticky, liquid flames clung to his robes and tunic. A lick of agonizing heat by his ear had him slapping himself frantically in a blind panic. Being set on fire hurt way worse than being sprayed with acid! The only clear thought in his mind was that grease fires were bad and couldn't be put out with water. "No water! No water!" he screeched, hoping Blue was listening.
"Of course I know that!" Blue yanked Harry away from the fire that had sprung up around him. "Mundare!"
In a soft whisper of sliding cloth, the burning oil was gone and only hot, itching skin was left behind as a reminder. "It didn't hurt?" Harry asked in surprise. The Scouring Charm always felt like being worked over by a mean scrub-brush.
Blue yanked him back as the second Moblin, who was now conscious, armed, and angry, attempted to hammer Harry like a nail. "That was a Cleaning Charm. It's on that 'Spells to Learn' list I handed you," he said quickly. "As is this one: Depulso!"
The Moblin was picked up and thrown over the trees like a toy.
"Ooh, the clarity of intent on that one is nice," Blue said with great appreciation. "There isn't that nasty weighing-down effect like a Levitation Charm, either!"
Harry conjured his bow and fired an arrow at the face of the Moblin approaching them with its lantern raised for a throw. The monster collapsed and he leapt onto it, drawing his sword. "So it's like a Levitation Charm and a Knockback Jinx in one? What spell was that?" he asked as he slashed the monster's throat and stabbed it a couple of times in the chest. Being a low-level creature, it died quickly. The thing wouldn't have been all that hard to beat if he'd thought a little harder about using a heavy, slow weapon against a Moblin, a creature most easily defeated by speed and agility. 'Mental note: the hammer ought to be used for cracking armor and sending Bokoblins flying,' he thought, sticking the spoils of the battle in his bag.
"It's called a Banishing Charm, and it works by throwing things away from you to wherever you want them to go. Within a certain range, of course," Blue said. As the second Moblin came tromping back through the trees, he used the new spell to pelt it with rocks. Some missed, but a fair few managed to hit. The Moblin staggered back, swatting at the air with its lantern-holding hand and flinging oil everywhere. Some of it landed on its broad chest, which made the monster yelp and drop the lamp. Yet more oil jumped out and spattered its legs. Hollering and stomping, the Moblin frantically tried to put out the fire. Unlike Harry, it was quickly succeeding—the benefits of being not-quite-real.
Harry ran in to take advantage of the monster's dwindling distraction. He jumped over a simmering line of flames left by the wild spray of oil and sidestepped a slow overhead swing of the Moblin's club, hopping as the tree trunk impacted the ground to keep the shock of it from going up his legs. Darting in, he jammed the Four Sword up through the monster's belly.
Behind him, Blue called out, "Wingardium Leviosa!" The Moblin's club jumped out of its hand and spun around to crack its owner in the head with incredible force. With those two hits, the monster keeled over and vanished in a puff of smoke.
"Nice!" Harry called back to his brother, giving him a thumbs-up. "How did you do that?"
"If you have a clear, strong idea of your goal and pretend you're leading an orchestra, you can get a lot out of that spell," Blue explained, raising his staff like a conductor's baton and swinging it with a vicious flick of his elbow and wrist. "Do you think Professor Flitwick would give us extra credit if I showed him something like that?"
Harry shrugged. "It's worth an effort even if he doesn't." Classes had resumed without them, so they would need all the help they could get. Hermione had loaded him down with homework when he'd visited before this trip. Writing assignments for all the classes that could be learned out of the book or with the help of a Magic Rod, drawn up by Professors Flitwick, McGonagall, Lupin, Dumbledore, and even Trelawney. Harry would have bet Hermione had wheedled them into crafting those essays and research projects specifically for the Harrys to be able to do on their quest. While Harry wasn't exactly delighted to have homework to do while he was out monster-fighting, it was a sweet gesture in a very Hermione-ish way.
After magically dousing the flames left by the Moblin's lanterns, he and Blue resumed their westerly trek through the woods, slaying whatever came their way. Bluish gray ChuChus bubbled out of the bushes, accompanied by sparse swarms of Keese that dropped out of the trees. Red Bokoblins jumped up from behind small boulders and peeked out between trees, some armed with bows similar to Harry's. The red Bokoblins armed with swords were small-fry at this point, but the ones with bows were still a massive pain in the arse regardless of their color. Those arrows hadn't gotten any less barbed or able to put holes through a human body.
Blue leaned out from behind the tree next to his. "Protego!" A milky white mist formed a vague disk in front of him that was quickly punched through by three arrows. Blue jerked back behind cover as one of those arrows sailed through where his shoulder had been. "Sod it all, I can never get that one right," he cursed.
Harry conjured his Vine Whip and yanked the bow out of the closest Bokoblin's hands. The monster stamped its feet in offense at his theft, then snatched up one of the swords he hadn't managed to loot from the Bokoblins that had come before them. As the creature walked around the tree to menace him, it caught an arrow to the back from one of its fellows still firing at Harry, making it squeal and stumble.
Harry lunged, snagged the Bokoblin by the loose skin around its neck, and used that as leverage to haul it behind his cover and stab it to death. He collected its sword and the horn and green Rupee it dropped, then picked up the arrow that had been in its back for good measure. Might as well. He summoned his archery set and nocked the arrow.
"Nothing big to levitate around unless I want to uproot a tree. I could make the monsters fly away, but I'd rather defeat them. I can't use fire because of all the wood around here," Blue was mumbling to himself as he looked between his Magic Rod and the archers. "What about this? Accio bow!"
Harry's bow jumped from his hands and flew away. Soon after, there was a pained yelp from Blue.
"Did you just—?" Harry looked over to see Blue rubbing a red welt on his cheek with one hand and holding a child-scaled hunting bow in the other. He cracked up laughing. "You beaned yourself in the head with my bow!" he wheezed. "What is that spell even supposed to do?"
"It's a Summoning Charm!" Blue snapped, chucking Harry's weapon back at him. Harry vanished it in the middle of its arc. "I was trying to get one of the monster's bows, not yours!"
"So you messed up the spell."
"It summoned what I asked for, didn't it?" Blue said waspishly. He pointed his Magic Rod around the edge of his cover. "Expelliarmus, expelliarmus, expelliarmus! Accio the bloody Bokoblins' bows!"
Three bows sailed into the air, then flew at Blue, who was hunched over and breathing hard from casting four spells in the span of two seconds. The flying weapons pummeled him like overeager dogs, knocking him to the ground.
"Maybe that should be a one-at-a-time kind of thing," Harry suggested.
Blue sat up in a clatter of wood and flipped him off.
Harry stepped out with his sword in hand, ready to kill the low-level, disarmed Bokoblins. He hesitated, though, when a dark, fizzing object flew into the small, bush-lined clearing. Harry stared at it for a second, the sheer absurdity of seeing a bomb in a forest making it take longer for him to realize what he was looking at.
"Dammit, Red!" Harry shouted before throwing himself back behind the tree.
The bomb went off with a bang that shook the wood pressed against his back, sending a smoky wave of flame across the dry summer underbrush. Three dying screams rang out from the Bokoblins, quickly replaced by the crackle of flames finding their footing on the bushes.
Red tumbled into the clearing like he'd been shoved onstage. Yellow came stomping in after him. "'No fire in the woods', I said, and then you go and use a bomb!" Yellow seethed.
"I didn't use my new sword or the fire potion, though!" Red pointed out. "I thought bombs just went 'boom'! No one told me they set things on fire."
Harry sighed and sheathed his sword. Walking over to the worst of the fire, he conjured his Magic Rod, and braced his feet in one of the stabilizing stances Avoka had been teaching him. "Aguamenti!"
Between the four of them, the Harrys got the flames out and quickly picked the battlefield clean. "We found a weird spot in the woods before we came over here to help you," Red said, pointing a little north of where Harry and Blue had been going. "There were a lot of weak monsters around there, guarding something, but Yellow and I cleaned them out."
"Without bombs, even," Yellow said with some bite to his voice. "You should apologize to the trees for forgetting what gunpowder does, Red."
Red laughed. "Why would I apologize to the…?" Realization wiped the amusement off his face. "Oh, right, there are spirits and Koroks and stuff here." He bowed to the forest. "Sorry for being dumb! It wasn't on purpose, but it'll probably happen again."
A quiet laugh brushed the edge of Harry's hearing. It made the stubby corners of his ears itch. "I think the forest forgives you," he said.
Red rubbed at his ears. "Yeah, I think I heard that, too."
The air became strange and floaty as they approached the "weird spot" that Red and Yellow had found. A sweet natural perfume teased Harry's nose and fine white mist lapped at the hem of his robes. Glowing blue plants and mushrooms dotted the bases of trees, outnumbering the red and green flora of the rest of the woods. Harry felt a soft sense of pressure settle on his back.
They passed through a somewhat thicker section of trees and then found themselves in a strange meadow. It was a clearing, but at the same time it wasn't; the sky was open overhead, yet nighttime dark and dotted with stars. There was a sense of being boxed-in here, like Harry had walked into someone's house.
The middle of the starlit meadow was dominated by a massive…flower? Clam shell? The tightly closed, flattened dome of pink petals managed to resemble both.
"Oh, thank Farore," a tiny, bubbly voice squeaked from somewhere nearby. "Hello, children! If you can see my bud, you can see me, right?" A turquoise light descended from above.
Yellow gasped. "A real fairy!"
"They really aren't just legends here," Blue remarked. "Link mentioned them, but I wasn't sure."
The fairy hesitated in the air. Translucent pink dragonfly wings kept the fuzzy ball of light hovering in place. "Do Hylians not know what fairies are these days?" she said with dismay. "I hadn't thought that long had passed since I last had any mortal visitors. Only a decade, maybe. That's short in human time, right?"
"We're, er—We're from Lorule, not Hyrule," Harry explained, deciding to skip the whole "we're from a country to the south of the country that may or may not have been built atop the ruins of ancient Lorule" thing. "The fairies there aren't like the ones here."
"Lorule?" the fairy repeated, fluttering down to his eye-level. She circled around him. "Maybe my older sisters would know about a country like that. I haven't traveled as much." She bobbed in front of Harry's nose. "Did you know you have far more magic than I've seen in a mortal before? You all look like little suns!"
"It's because the magic in our world is spread around differently," Harry told her. "We were looking around the forest to see if there was something to find or someone to help around here. Would you know anything about that?"
The fairy bounced excitedly. "Oh, you can help me! I need help! Assisting a spirit will look good on your record when you interact with other spirits, too!"
Blue frowned at her in confusion. "Do fairies count as spirits? I thought everyone could see you."
"Yes, we all count as spirits, even if mortals only think of the more powerful fairies as such. The tiny, normal fairies like helping mortals directly, so they tend to make themselves easy for you guys to see," the fairy said. "As for me, well," she spiraled up into the air, "I'm the Great Fairy Hora!" As she drifted down, she amended, "Though I'm not looking so 'great' right now."
Memories of unearthly, sparkling, statuesque women flickered in Harry's mind. This fairy didn't resemble any of those beings whatsoever. Instead, she looked like a tiny, wasp-like silhouette mostly hidden under a fuzzy puff of brightly glowing hair. "What made you shrink?" Harry asked.
"Are you okay?" Yellow added.
"I'm not in pain or anything," the fairy said. "Just powerless because I've been broken into pieces. It's happened to a couple of my big sisters during take-overs of the kingdom before, so I at least knew what to expect when it was my turn." She tried to gesture with her wings, causing her to drop several centimeters in the air before she caught herself. "Oh, right, being all wings means no shrugging. I don't know how my baby sisters deal with not having arms."
"Can we really put you back together?" Blue asked. "And how did you break in the first place? That doesn't sound like something that occurs on a whim."
The fairy let off an angry puff of pink steam. "Some meanie came in the middle of the night and hit me with a curse!" she cried. "I have no idea who it was. All I saw was a shadowy man with a skull mask and glowing yellow eyes, and then bam! I was cracked in five! The rest of me took off in a panic, but I just hid behind my bud until the evil wizard left."
'There's ANOTHER ONE?!' Harry wanted to scream. He stuffed the words back down his throat. "An evil wizard?" he said hoarsely. Like Vaati wasn't bad enough on his own!
"I didn't get a good look at his magical nature, but I don't know who else could do this to a Great Fairy," Hora said. "Could you please send the other four of me back here so we can merge into one? I promise I'll grant you a wish if you do!"
"Of course we'll help," Harry assured her. Even without the promise of a reward, he wouldn't have just left the poor spirit in this state.
"Do you know where the rest of you might have gone?" Blue inquired.
"They'd want to hang out by the tourist spots next to the abbeys, I think," Hora said. "I've always wanted to see what those humans do all day, but I'm normally much too big to fly around in places built for mortals." She wiggled in the air, maybe attempting to gesture without arms again. "If they got distracted over there, that would explain why they haven't come back. The most you'll have to do is find my other pieces and remind them to come back to our bud. They won't get lost!"
Harry waited until they were out of Hora's clearing and a few dozen meters into the normal woods to bury his face in his hands and let out a noise that was half-groan, half-scream. His brothers converged on him with varying levels of curiosity to worry.
One of them—Harry didn't have to look up to know it was Blue—poked him in the cheek. "What has you so wound up? Is this a sword feeling?"
"I saw him go a little bug-eyed when Hora mentioned an evil wizard," Red told him. "Maybe it's more of a Hero feeling."
"Oh, shoot, I didn't even think about that," Yellow said, sounding like it was half to himself. "One evil wizard is already loose, whipping up windstorms and messing with the whole universe. If there's another one around, that's even worse!"
It was Blue's turn to groan in dismay. "Please don't tell me another one of Hyrule's god-level megalomaniacs is loose. I think I'd rather fall on my sword that face Ganondorf's destiny-fueled nonsense."
"If you tried doing that, Blue, I'd tie you up and sit on you until you talked about your feelings," Yellow said sharply. "Don't even joke about that kind of thing."
"I dunno, I think I'd like to fight another evil guy who isn't Voldemort," Red airily remarked. "Vaati has some fun ideas, after all."
The other Harrys gave him incredulous looks.
"Between 'putting my creepy snake-face on the back of a guy's head for a year' and 'playing mix 'n match across dimensions', the second one is way cooler," Red defended. "We've fought three dragons this year! It was awesome! What's one Basilisk compared to that?"
Harry rubbed his temples. "Red."
"You're bloody mad," Blue said flatly. "You've already died once, and you want to have another go at one of these Light World demigods?"
"I wasn't quite dead," Red huffed. "The potion still worked, innit?"
"Your skull was caved in, you absolute—!"
Yellow dove forward and caught Blue in a restraining hug from behind to keep him from tackling Red. "Can't you just use your words, Blue?" he pleaded. "You've got so many fancy ones!"
Harry's shadow gave a loud, impatient cough. "Hole in reality, remember?" Shadow Harry said. A sense of quiet dread settled over the group like a lead blanket. Right, that. "Besides, I know who Hora was talking about. Don't worry about it."
Much like one of the normal, human Harrys insisting he was "fine", that was an incredibly un-reassuring thing to hear the spirit say. "Don't worry about the fact that there's another bad guy loose?" Harry said incredulously. "What if he starts carving up Hyrule into teleport-able pieces, too? We can't ignore that!"
Shadow Harry made a sound of aggravation. "Goddesses, you paranoid Dark World types are tiring. My Light World reflections never overthought things half as much as you do," he griped, mussing his silhouetted hair. "Look, if you still think it's such a huge problem later, I'll explain then. In the meantime, though, you need to get your butts in gear because that hole isn't getting any smaller and it's not like me or the boss are going to close it. I'm sure we can all agree that both our worlds turning to moon dust would be bad, right?"
Though Harry burned to know what other, unexpected enemy he might have to face (one strong enough to break a Great Fairy, no less!), the dark spirit had a good point. "Fine," he sighed. He turned to his brothers as a group, and they straightened attentively to listen. "We're splitting up to search the abbeys. Yellow and Blue, you're going to the one farther south, while Red and I will search the one closer to the forest. Let's go! I'd like for us to be able to get to the Dark World by noon."
Notes:
-While Great Fairies are known of in Hyrule, their locations shift and those locations slip from mortals' minds, so they're still somewhat mysterious, mythical entities. Less spiritually aware mortals also can't perceive them, which adds to their elusiveness.
-Great fairies in this era look like a cross between Wind Waker ones and Breath of the Wild ones. Normal fairies have appearances based on that hybrid look, retaining some elements of this Hyrule's oceanic roots.
-Hora's name comes from horagai (法螺貝), Japanese for "conch shell". Her broken form is distinguishable from a normal fairy by her pink wings and shell; normal fairies are blue all over.
-Shadow Harry was the one to break the Great Fairy, in case that wasn't clear. Instead of using Harry's face to do it, like he traditionally would, he used (Ocarina of Time) Phantom Ganon's instead. He figures the Harrys have low enough self-esteem without him adding to it.
Next month: ninjas are at Hogwarts, the Harrys might technically be demonic, and...Ron's a milkmaid?