People who have studied the Zelda timeline may be wondering at this point when and where this story takes place. Without dropping spoilers, I'll say it's set in the big gray area after the timelines converge, but before the Sheikah Civilization that came 10,000 years before Breath of the Wild. As for why Hyrule doesn't appear on any maps and why Hylian magic doesn't mix well with wizard magic, that will become apparent later on. WooOOoo~
In illustration news, I've made a portrait of grown-up Zelda that I'm pretty proud of! Check it out on garden-eel-draws dot tumblr dot com under my "concept art" tag!
"How did Hermione vanish so fast after class? I didn't get the chance to tell her to give me a turn with the book," Blue whined. "I took it back, and then she stole it from me! I only had it for two days!"
Harry rolled his eyes and Red was entirely unsympathetic. "You nicked it from her and she nicked it back. Seems fair to me," the latter drawled.
"Stealing is never a good idea, Blue. I thought Uncle Vernon had taught us that," Harry said. Lowering his voice, he asked, "You have all the same scars that I do, don't you?"
"Yes, and don't you remember that we snuck another sandwich two weeks later?" Blue replied with a wicked flash of teeth. "Now, where did Hermione go after Potions?"
"She'll be in Defense Against the Dark Arts for sure, so it doesn't matter." Harry shrugged. Hermione wouldn't have missed a class for the world. She was always there, always on time or early, and always prepared; it was a fact of life. "You can ask her—and I do mean ask her—for the book after class." He gave the boy a stern look. "It isn't our book, anyway, so you shouldn't be so possessive. All of Gryffindor House should get the chance to read it."
"They have! I've passed it around a few times," Blue defended.
"Out of the past eight days, you've had it for six," Harry said flatly. His more scholarly counterpart had spent every spare moment reading the Bestiary in his bed, a scroll of notes and a Self-Inking Quill set out beside him. It was only because the tome couldn't be taken from Gryffindor Tower (though Blue had certainly tried) that the boy hadn't had his nose buried in it constantly.
Yellow skipped out of the Potions classroom, having finally finished washing up. "Hi, guys! Whatcha talking about?"
"Blue's obsessed with the beastie-book and he's in a snit 'cause Hermione took it back," Red said, smirking at Blue when the boy puffed up indignantly.
"It's a repository of untapped information!" Blue insisted. "No one can understand it better than us; not only are we the latest bearer of a Hylian hero's blade, but we have someone on hand who knows Hylian!" He gestured toward Harry.
"I can actually read the book and I'm not half as crazy about it as you are," Harry said. He had translated passages from the Bestiary several times at Blue's request and read the parts he had deemed important on his own, but he was content to finish perusing the book at a comfortable pace. Blue, on the other hand, was determined to cram the entire thing into his brain at the soonest opportunity. He had an impatient, pushy thirst for knowledge; when he read a book, especially the Bestiary, he devoured it like a favorite food that might be snatched away at any moment. Harry didn't understand his obsession over the Bestiary, and in fact found it to be rather un-Harry-like behavior. He couldn't recall a single moment in his life when he'd been so fixated on a mere book. Escaping from Dudley's gang, keeping his guardians relatively satisfied, and not starving had always been more important. Sitting around reading books unrelated to schoolwork had only ever given his relatives another excuse to call him lazy.
"Meatheads, all of you!" Blue huffed. He crossed his arms and scowled. "I can't believe you'd be so—"
He was interrupted by an unearthly shriek from a nearby corridor. The very air seemed to freeze as the horrible sound echoed off of the stone walls. Harry tried to suck in a breath, only to find his lungs wouldn't respond. His body was paralyzed, held in place by a sense of death and instinctual fear. Though his inner primate screeched at him to flee, Harry could do nothing but lock his teeth together and wait for the spell to break.
The terrible magic mercifully faded after several seconds, and the Harrys slumped against the wall. "What the hell was that?" Red asked hoarsely.
"Probably a ReDead," Blue said in a quavering murmur. His face was grayish and his arms shook so intensely that he folded them in an attempt to keep them still. "They're like zombies, but worse."
The boys all had to hold in a shriek themselves as, like twin bolts of lightning, Fred and George Weasley streaked down the corridor from the direction whence the banshee screech had come. They squealed to a stop in front of the Potions classroom, grabbed two Harrys each, and threw themselves into the room.
"Sorry, Harry," one twin panted his brother slammed the door, "but those monsters were scarier than Snape on a bad day."
"What monsters, pray tell?" a cold voice asked.
Harry cringed at the familiar oily hiss and then glanced up. Towering over him was Professor Snape, who appeared none too pleased to find two notorious troublemakers and four copies of his least favorite student crowded around the door.
"Hullo, Professor," one twin said with false cheer. "There're fireproof Inferi-things down the hall and 'round the corner. Thought you'd like to know."
"Inferi?" Snape's coal-black eyes narrowed. "You must be mistaken. Those haven't been seen since—"
"No, no." The other twin flapped a hand. "They're Inferi-things. Not Inferi." He looked pointedly at Blue, who he'd hauled into the classroom. "We'd know what they were called, but we didn't get a turn with the beastie-book."
"Why does everyone insist on calling it that?" Blue grumbled.
Snape fixed him with a sneer. "Did your fawning caretakers neglect to teach you how to share?" he asked. "You could have gotten someone killed with your foolishness. Ten points from Gryffindor."
Harry sighed and exchanged a look with Red, whose sword-hand was twitching. "They're called ReDeads," he told Snape. The sooner the Great Bat was informed, the sooner they could escape his lair. "They're reanimated corpses who use their screams to freeze people in place. Then they bite on those people's heads to crack them open and get at their brains. The only way someone without a sacred sword or holy instrument can kill them is with bombs."
The Weasley twins each raised an eyebrow. "Bombs, you say?" one asked with enthusiastic interest.
"Any other monsters those work on?" his brother inquired.
"Er, most of them, if you can time it—"
"Don't give them ideas, Potter!" Snape barked, making Harry flinch. The Potions Master's glittering eyes bore malevolently into the teenage boys who had intruded upon his domain. "If I see any of you brewing potential explosives in my classroom, you can be assured that I'll have you tossed out of Hogwarts faster than you can say Evanesco. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Professor," Harry and Yellow mumbled.
"Mm-hm," Blue and Red grunted noncommittally.
"Okey-dokey!" the twins declared with matching salutes.
"Now go to class before I start taking points," Snape snarled. He opened the door with an angry flick of his wand. "I'll investigate these—" his upper lip curled, "—'ReDeads' on my own time."
Glad to be free, Harry led the charge out of Snape's classroom. Ugh, he hated being around that infuriating man. The sound of the professor's voice—soft, silky, and bladed with well-honed contempt—made Harry's skin crawl.
"I think I want to punch him even more than I do Uncle Vernon," Red growled. "The Walrus is just big, dumb, and loud. The Bat, on the other hand…" He trailed off and shook his head.
"He's creepy, smart, and a petty bastard," Blue described for him. "I'm just glad he didn't take fifty points for Fred and George nearly losing their brains to Hylian zombies."
One of the twins walked up and slung himself over Blue's shoulder. "Nah, he wouldn't take fifty. He loves us too much for that. Doesn't he, Fred?"
"We've been pulling Es and Os in his class since first year, and we've blown it up on purpose at least once every term. He'd probably make it a nice, round hundred points in our memory," Fred said proudly. "It's how he shows he cares."
"Speaking of caring, here's some advice," George said with more seriousness. "Don't go past the Potions classroom when you're exploring the dungeons."
"The magic's gone all funny down there. Makes you see things." Fred looped a finger near his temple. "We almost got chomped on by those ReDeads because we fell through a wall that wasn't there. They were downright friendly, though, after those ghosts with the masks."
"Those buggers possessed us!"
"Flipped everything backwards, they did!"
The twins shared a grin. "It was wicked!" they both declared.
"But in an, er, dangerous-to-little-third-years kind of way," Fred hastily added.
"Gave us plenty of ideas, though," George said. His eyes twinkled with brewing mischief. "With that bomb tip you gave us and what we saw down there, we'll have inspiration—"
"—and nightmares—"
"—for weeks!" George sobered somewhat after his exclamation. "Still, though, don't go down there expecting a quick little adventure, 'cause you'll get your brains gnawed on by zombies."
"Also, you might be stuck down there all day. We missed a whole double-session of History of Magic, and it wasn't even on purpose," Fred added. "We saw that something had changed using our, er…" He exchanged a glance with his twin. "…pranking magic, and decided to look into it during the back half of breakfast—"
"—and then we wandered in circles for three hours," George finished with a shrug.
"Sometimes backwards, with the masked ghosts and all. Seriously, that was brilliant!"
"So, yeah, avoid the weird cave down the hall," the two said, clapping Harry on the shoulders. "See you later!"
The twins waved a farewell to the Harrys and then sauntered off toward their next class while avidly discussing the mechanics of making a bomb that would reverse someone's sense of direction. Harry weakly returned the wave, his mind spinning.
As soon as he'd heard the words "weird cave", Harry had suffered a jolt of realization. The twins had found another dungeon, like that dark and bat-infested maze he and Red had stumbled into a week and a half ago. This one sounded completely different, though. He'd never seen a Re-Dead in the castle before (and technically still hadn't), and he didn't recall running into any masked ghosts who had disorientation magic. Whatever cave the Weasley twins had stumbled into and, miraculously, out of, it wasn't the same one the Harrys, Hermione, Ron, and Malfoy's gang had gotten lost in. For one thing, it hadn't even trapped the twins!
Blue appeared to have come to the same conclusion as Harry. "There's more than one labyrinth in Hogwarts," he announced. "We found one and the twins found another. There's probably more than that, though there's no way to know how many until people come across them."
"Why didn't they get stuck, though?" Yellow asked. He tilted his head to the side with his lips pursed. "We got lost for ages, and the only exit had a big, scary Keese-dragon in the way! How did Fred and George escape without having to go through what we did?"
"Maybe whatever spell Vaati cast on those caves only clamps down when we run into it," Red said. He tapped the hilt of his sword, which stuck out behind his shoulder. "The twins got out because the curse didn't care about them. The moment we walk in or anyone goes in with us, though—"
"—the curse senses Heroes and snaps the exits shut," Harry mused. He liked that idea. It was something of a relief, to think there was a chance that no uninvolved students would wind up forever lost in some hellish cave. Now that he thought about it, wasn't it awfully considerate of Vaati to keep the lethality of his monsters and death traps to a minimum? Maybe the flying eyeball wasn't completely terrible…for a villain with a god-complex, anyway.
"Draco would want to know about this," Yellow said.
Harry nodded in agreement, recalling the look of determination on Malfoy's face when he'd received Hermione's neatly written team roster. The boy wasn't enthusiastic about the dangers of adventure, but he was willing to endure the risk if he got treasure and one step closer to freedom in the end. It also helped that he kept a set of bodyguards (which now included Dog) around him when he walked the halls, lowering his personal level of risk.
"We can't have him in our group if we've got Ron and Hermione with us. Ron would lose his mind," Red pointed out.
"The four of us could pair up and go in with other people," Yellow suggested. "That way, we can get through the dungeon faster with two groups and the separation headache won't be as bad for us."
"Good idea," Blue complimented, prompting a happy smile from Yellow. "It worked just fine for us last time. Red and I can go with Malfoy's lot, and Yellow and Green can accompany Ron and Hermione."
"Why do we have to take Malfoy?" Red whined. "He's a git!"
"Hermione and I are both good at figuring out puzzles, so there should be one of us on each team. You're a fighter, Red, so you should be with Malfoy and me because we aren't as great at leaping into danger as you are. Green is a less impulsive fighter, so he should balance Ron out. Yellow will go with that group because he can calm Ron and Hermione down if they get in a quarrel about something." Blue held his hand out. "We'll prepare for the next week and a half, and then we'll dive in on the Saturday after this one. Is everyone on board?"
Harry shrugged and put his hand on top of Blue's. It was a sound plan, and he was perfectly happy to let his inner Hermione take charge. Yellow put his hand on top of Harry's, bouncing excitedly on his heels. It was as though he'd completely forgotten the danger they'd faced the last time and was simply looking forward to the new quest. Red joined the stack last, grumbling about babysitting bigots.
"Good! Now let's get to Defense before class starts." Blue took off running down the hall. "Come on, I saw a nest of Floormasters near the painting of Cockeyed Catherine!"
I'm sure anyone familiar with Zelda is scratching their heads about the theme of the next level, but since I'm relating the temples to features of Hogwarts's geography and going in order of "easily accessible" to "oh god, it's there?", it made sense to capitalize on the dungeons being right downstairs. It'll be a little while before they go in, though; I've got more plot threads to web myself up in.