We've got some art for this chapter! Examples of the Harrys' standard outfit in Hyrule and this era's Spirit of Eldin have been posted on garden-eel-draws under "concept art" (and for Endraal, "dungeon 5"), as well as displayed in the Ao3 version of this. When the Harrys are in between dungeons, they'll wear that outfit minus the leather breastplate and pauldrons as everyday clothes.
Content warning for broken bones, sonic ear trauma, and a mention of someone throwing up in this chapter.
As one, the Harrys and Malfoy kicked off from the ground and shot into the sky with their brooms pointed north. The Harrys were now clad in Hylian tunics and leggings with leather bracers and pauldrons, cuffed boots, and leather chest armor to go with their protective corsets. Blue in particular was sporting a new pair of glasses enchanted to suit their wearer, which had cost enough that the other Harrys had decided to stick with their charity-bin spectacles for now. Malfoy, after much loud huffing over Muggles' supposedly poor craftsmanship and lack of style, had sprung for a chain-mail tunic to go over his clothes, an adventurer's belt, and a slim stone girdle enchanted to blunt bladed attacks.
Once they were safely above the roofs of the city's more ambitious pagodas, they took off in a straight line toward the Eldin Province. As they gained speed and altitude, Harry spotted the pale stone and soaring turrets of Hyrule Castle off to their left. It sat at the center of Castle Town's concentric arcs on an island surrounded by fast-flowing rivers that formed a natural moat. Said moat was made passable only by a single drawbridge connected to four sturdy hoists by thick chains. As Ruka had said weeks before, the castle bore an eerie resemblance to Hogwarts. It had quite a few more defensive walls that spiraled along the slopes of the small mountain it was perched upon, but Harry was still struck by the similarity. He could even spot the counterparts to Gryffindor Tower and the Hospital Wing!
He glanced at Malfoy, who was staring fixedly at the grand white fortress. 'I wonder what he thinks of it—a Muggle version of Hogwarts castle,' he mused. Red had told him about the small amount of progress Malfoy might have made that morning. Would there one day come a time when he'd realize that non-magical people were capable of their own impressive feats? Harry hoped so. He couldn't imagine Malfoy ever becoming a particularly pleasant person, but he thought there was a chance he could be decent.
Behind the castle lay a stretch of tree-dotted shallow hills that they quickly rocketed across, and then a small sea of foreboding black water that faded into the foggy distance.
Sickening alarm blasted through Harry's mind. "STOP!" he hollered at the members of his group. "DON'T FLY OVER THE LAKE!" As he spoke, he pulled out his Magic Rod. They were going too fast!
Blue and Yellow cranked their brooms back to redirect their speed and safely spiraled up and away from the lakeshore. Red and Malfoy, however, had to contend with the fact that the Nimbus 2000 was a racing broom, not a passenger model, and wasn't designed to maneuver with an extra person onboard. Red did his best to bank to the side, but two bodies going at over 100kmph weren't going to change direction so easily. They swung out over the Lake Kokiri's midnight waters.
Harry shot forward as Red's broom juddered in the air, then dropped a couple of meters, and then gave out entirely. "Wingardium Leviosa!" he cried with his Magic Rod extended. The desperately overpowered spell made him see spots, but through straining eyes he could see he'd managed to catch them. Harry carefully guided Red, Malfoy, and Red's Nimbus to the lake's dark, rocky shore and set them down before landing next to them. Blue and Yellow touched down after him with a crunch of gravel.
"What happened?" Harry asked, patting down Red. Then he checked on Malfoy, who looked pale and shaken.
"I-I dunno, it's like I felt this…'no'? But in my head?" Red said with a befuddled frown. "Something said 'no', and suddenly I forgot how to use my magic."
Malfoy curled one shaking hand into a fist over his heart and looked fearfully at the dark water. "I-It was the lake. The lake spoke. I can feel it, but it's…how could that be?"
"Since the lake is so big and important, it might have its own spirit," Yellow said. "The dragon we're going to have to fight is the spirit of a place, too—Death Mountain."
Malfoy scrambled away from the water. "The lake is possessed?!"
"I don't mean ghost-spirits, I mean spirit-spirits!" Yellow said. "Like, how some blokes talk to their cars and treat them really nice and like people so that they run well. Except if the car were actually alive. Sort of?" He frowned. "I don't think I'm very good at explaining things."
"Think of spirits like fairies," Blue said. "For example, dryads represent the trees back home, and here the Koroks do the same thing. They're the idea of a tree—it's essence, kind of." He rubbed his chin. "I think this is just a really hard concept to explain. It took a while for Zelda to lay it out for me."
"So sometimes things or places are alive and we don't want to piss them off, right?" Red summarized. "Simple enough for me. Sorry, lake." He inclined his head toward the dark expanse.
In the distance, a sail-like triangular fin arced out of the water. The glowing red and green fan, massive enough to belong to a whale, hung in place for a couple of seconds before dipping back under the glimmering ripples. An even larger forked tail briefly flicked into view as its owner dove back down.
"Oh, brill!" Red exclaimed, waving after the lake spirit.
Malfoy looked ready to faint.
"So, er, since the spirits around here probably don't like intruders flying in and taking shortcuts, we're just going to go around," Harry said. Despite his attempt to sound assertive, his voice wavered. The sword had really freaked out about them flying over the lake. He couldn't help imagining what might have happened if they'd angered the spirits by blindly blundering in. Did the lake and the magical forest inside it have protections against mages who might try to steal from there or desecrate the land? It would made a lot of sense, given how most of Hyrule's enemies were mages of some sort.
The others agreed with mute, wide-eyed nods. Soon they were off again, shooting safely around the small inland sea. Harry looked out over the long stretch of inky water. Were it a clear day, was sure he'd be able to see Kokiri Isle in the distance, but the volcanic smoke shrouded the middle of the lake in mystery. It was hard to believe the Ravenclaws were doing as well as Zelda had been reporting. The Deku Tree must have had a lot of power to filter the air for a forest as big as the Lost Woods.
He looked down to watch the ground fly by. The grass was getting patchier, interrupted by stretches of grayish dirt and exposed red stone. They were getting close. His heart fluttered not unlike the way it did before a Quidditch match. He was going to fight a dragon. Not to win, but still…that was a pretty tall order. And then, after that, he'd be going into a volcano. How wild was tha—?
A sound like the world's largest gas pipe hissed in the distance, followed by an explosion that felt like the sky cracking in two. Harry froze up with startled fright. Then he forced himself to look up, and up, and up. Cranking his neck back, he took in the sprays of lava slopping over the edge of the jagged cliffs high above. Molten rivers cascaded down the rugged red stone, catching and cooling on spear-like rock formations. Death Mountain was so unfathomably big that there was no chance of that lava reaching the ground.
Another explosion reached his ears as a thick plume of black smoke poured into the sky. The haze had quickly gotten darker and thicker as his broom had eaten up the distance between the far end of Kokiri Lake and the base of Death Mountain. He grimaced at the ache starting in his lungs and put a hand to his mask. That little piece of cloth wasn't going to do anything about the toxic gases roiling invisibly below him.
Harry slowed down, eyeing the ground speculatively. Was it even safe to land? According to Zelda's reports from the Lost Woods, first and second-years were most at risk of suffering permanent damage (if not death) from breathing in the unseen poisons gathering around the base of Death Mountain. Harry wasn't a first-year, but he was rather small.
He frowned in thought. The plan for getting Endraal's teeth had been to follow the Zonai method, keeping her in the air with agile and distracting flying while someone on the ground retrieved whatever scales or teeth their teammates managed to knock off of her. Would they all have to stay in the air, though? He hoped not; if one broom had two people on it, they'd have three acrobatic fliers and two sitting ducks.
The others pulled to a gradual stop with him. Malfoy was hanging off of Red, one hand pressed to his gills as he gasped for air. "Can we go…back to the…possessed lake?" he wheezed. "I'm willing…to risk it. Can't breathe!"
Blue pulled a bottle of dark gray Fireproof Elixir out of his bag and handed it to Malfoy. "That's a potion that travelers use to get to Goron City, so I'm assuming it protects against volcanic gases as well as the heat. It'll buy you fifteen minutes."
Malfoy took the bottle eagerly, then hesitated. "How many doses…do you have?"
"One for me and my brothers, one for you, and one for just in case, since we need to stretch our money as far as we can until we have a stable way to make more. I bought some potion-making materials at the apothecary, but we'd have to land for me to make use of them."
With a grimace, Malfoy set the bottle on his knee and refrained from drinking it. "Let's review…the plan first."
"Yellow will be on the ground, while the rest of us will be in the sky. We'll stay spread out so Endraal can't swat all of us at once, but keep close enough to make her focus on us. We can't let her get on the ground," Harry said. "Back before she got mind-controlled, she was all about Goron sports—races around the mountain, boulder-smashing contests, and all that. She's fast, she's strong, and her fire works best when she can dig her claws in to hold her still. In the sky, what you mainly have to watch for is her tail. It's like a meteor on a string."
"The incantation for the Arrow-Shooting Spell is Sagitta Creo, and I hope you've all managed to get it right by now," Harry went on. He repeated the incantation and gave his Magic Rod a light flick. With a slight tug at his soul, five plain, iron-tipped wooden arrows—more than the spell was supposed to call up—appeared at his side. "This spell had to be banned from Quidditch games because a referee caught one through his nose during a match, so these arrows are real enough to hurt. Make sure you don't get so focused on aiming at the dragon that you shoot each other." He sent the arrows toward the ground with a sharp jab of his staff. "Don't fire willy-nilly, either, otherwise your Magic Rod might make you pass out. It doesn't work the same as a wand; you have to be careful with it."
"I have a question," Yellow said, raising his hand. "How big is this dragon lady? You never said."
"I didn't?" Harry asked in surprise. He must have assumed they all knew. "She's, er, like a small building, maybe? Or a really big dinosaur? Tiamus said she could hold a couple of Gorons in one hand."
His group goggled at him.
"A BUILDING?!"
"She's smaller than Farosh, at least…?"
Malfoy shook his head. "This place is mad. You're all mad." He sucked in a difficult breath. "Dragons the size of houses? Dragons that look like snakes?" He flung a hand toward the sky. "What's next, dragons with bird wings?"
"Oh, Endraal has those!" Yellow said. "Green said that much before."
"Madness!" Malfoy uncorked the bottle of potion he'd set on his knee and downed it in a few grimacing swallows. "Let's fight this thing and get its teeth. I want to see this Goron City. That bartender back in town said they had little regard for jewels, which means I can get them at a good price. Can you imagine what a cheap ruby here would fetch back home?"
Blue gave him a funny look as he reached into his bag for another potion. "Here we are on a fantasy quest, and you're out here turning it into a business opportunity."
"From my point of view, a quest is just a business opportunity with more physical risk involved. Can you imagine the profit we could turn if we managed to replicate the enchantments on the artifacts we've found so far? There are a lot of wizards who would pay any amount of Galleons for the ability to swim without fear of drowning or glasses that could cut through any illusion. The more artifacts we find, the more money we can potentially make."
Blue squinted at him. "I think I'd like to study your brain."
After Harry choked down the charcoal-flavored Fireproof Elixir and all of them fired off a few practice rounds of the Arrow-Shooting Spell, the group paused to take a nervous breath before starting their flight into Endraal's Keep. The dragon's area of obsession was the scorched wasteland around a swamp where her master's castle had once stood. An intrepid group of Zonai had decided to establish a settlement there, right in the dragon's "nest", which meant they'd be able to spot the center of Endraal's territory from a distance by its torches if the haze was too thick for them to see the swamp itself.
They hung low over the ground in a wide spread, Yellow riding with Harry and Malfoy borrowing Yellow's broom. Harry's stomach turned with anxiety as he followed the faint yellow glow of Thyphlo Village's lights. What would a mad dragon sound like? What would she look like? Even after seeing creatures as big as Farosh and Argulla, he had trouble grappling with the idea of a creature as big as Prince Tiamus had described.
The hiss-crack-BOOM of another volcanic eruption made him jump. That one had sounded way closer than before!
…Closer? The summit of the volcano hadn't moved.
Thundering footsteps approached from the side.
"UP!" Harry bellowed. Harry strained to get his broom to follow his own advice. He swerved up and to the left as a galloping mass of molten orange and dull red shot through their group like a Hylian rocket-train. Blue, Red, and Malfoy scattered into the air, then turned around and started slinging arrows.
Endraal slid to a stop, leaving furrows in the stone where she'd used her talons as brakes, and roared like the volcano she embodied. The spirit wasn't as big as Farosh, but her compact humanoid form made what size she had far more intimidating. Farosh, at least, didn't have bulging biceps and thighs that looked like they could move mountains.
The Spirit of Eldin was a roughly gorilla-shaped creature with short legs and long arms whose meaty hands she knuckle-walked on. She wasn't heavily armored like Harry had expected; instead, she was covered in pebbly red and white skin marked by occasional patches of thick pentagonal scales and stony growths similar to the coverings on Gorons' backs. Her wings were as big as sails, made of feathers whose hue shifted between the colors of fire. A line of actual flames stretched from behind her short orange mane all the way down her tail. The tip of that long, whip-like tail was a round club almost entirely hidden by the yellow and white fire jetting out of its vents. Her horns and the dual lines of dark scales going down her belly glowed like fresh lava squeezing through cooled rock.
Endraal sucked in a deep breath, her belly scales splitting apart to allow the stretchy pouch they laid over to expand. Fire swam just under the ballooning skin.
Harry fled to safety over the dragon's back as she loosed a narrow beam of blinding blue fire into the smoky clouds. She whipped her head back and forth, sending it slicing through the sky like the blade of a sword. Malfoy screamed when the fire swept too close under him, turning his shoes into a spray of embers. Dozens of meters away, even under the effects of a Fireproof Elixir, Harry could feel the extraordinary heat wash over his skin.
Yellow's arms trembled around his waist. "Wh-When are you g-going to s-set me down?" he asked in Harry's ear, his voice barely stronger than a whisper.
Harry was unable to tear his eyes away from the glowing stripes now engraved into the side of Death Mountain. "Er, I'm not sure—"
Endraal stood up on her hind legs, revealing the fact that she was just as bipedal as the Gorons she distantly resembled. She picked up a nearby boulder and pitched it at Red with a rumbling bellow of "LEAVE!" Red went into a sharp dive to avoid getting smashed in mid-air, barely pulling up before he smacked into the ground instead. Endraal's frenzied turquoise, pink, and violet eyes rolled madly in her head before she lunged to grab him. Red jerked straight up to avoid her reaching hands, only to get clipped by one of her squiggly horns as she charged by. The near-miss still sent him pinwheeling.
Harry hunched over with a hoarse croak of pain, clutching his knee. Red hadn't quite shattered his, but it felt like a near thing. And that was from a graze!
Endraal scooped her hand along the ground, dredging up a fistful of rocks as her fingers carved a groove through the stone. With a deft twist of her elbow and wrist, she fired a spray of stone bullets into the sky. The Harrys cried out in unison as Blue was battered by what felt like a hail of smaller, sharper Bludgers. Two rocks caught his upraised arm, one possibly fracturing his wrist by the feel of it. Another narrowly missed blinding him, slamming into the enchanted glass of the Lenses of Truth instead of his eye. His leather corset kept the two that pounded into his gut from doing any organ damage, but Harry could feel the dull ache and see Blue gasping for air.
The dragon continued her assault by whipping her body around with the grace of a martial artist and sending her tail swinging in a perfect arc to hit both Malfoy and Red. It stretched like a bungee cord, the flaming boulder on the end truly living up to Tiamus's meteor comparison. A wall of fire arced through the air in its wake.
Malfoy and Red swerved to either side of the diagonal attack, leaving the white-hot comet to crater the ground with earth-shaking force. Red moved in to take the offensive in while the dragon was busy reeling her appendage in. A volley of conjured arrows peppered the stone crest on her forehead, narrowly missing the tusks jutting from her lower jaw. "Get up here already!" Red shouted, following up the arrows with a bright white Sunburst Spell aimed at Endraal's face.
To everyone's surprise, the bolt of flame didn't bounce off. It splashed over the dragon's neon eyes, causing them to momentarily flicker a more natural-looking yellow, orange, and red. Endraal staggered, then corrected her balance with a flick of her weighted tail. "MAGES! HATEFUL MAGES!" she thundered in outrage, glaring with wild hatred at the gnats buzzing above her. "THREATS TO THE NEST!" She crouched on all fours and launched her heavy body into the air with a coordinated push of her wings and powerful legs. "DESTROY!"
Yellow slapped at Harry's shoulder. "Now's your chance! Put me down!"
Harry swallowed. This was the plan. He just wished the plan didn't involve Yellow being dead meat if Endraal decided to land for whatever reason.
He reluctantly landed to let Yellow hop down and then zipped off to add to the distraction team. The more people were in the sky, the less reason for the dragon to look down.
Endraal held herself up with heaving flaps of her wings, clearly not designed to stay airborne for long. The dense muscle that made her so quick on the ground dragged her down, making her body sag around her wings like a kitten caught by the scruff of its neck.
"DIE!" The dragon threw herself into a backflip. Harry almost wondered what for before he saw the swinging white comet now in her orbit. He did a frantic, tumbling roll to the right to dodge, and then nearly got yanked off his broom as the massive projectile's superheated slipstream sucked him in its wake.
Harry hunkered low over his broom and white-knuckled it with both hands, watching as Endraal's tail made another pass at a different angle. Blue, flying around ten meters off, made the mistake of flying back to dodge instead of to the side and was sent into a dizzying front-flip by the meteor's powerful downdraft. He bobbled as he struggled to regain his bearings.
Endraal stopped her spin and locked her eyes onto Blue. She started pulling in a gusty breath, her scales stretching to show the hellfire building in her throat.
Harry zoomed toward the dragon, lassoing his Magic Rod as he did. He hit Endraal in her left eye with a flash of white fire. Her planned attack left her in a belch of black smoke, followed by a round of coughing.
"Sagitta Creo!" With a flick and jab, Harry sent a round of arrows into the thinning smokescreen.
One of the five arrows hit its mark. Endraal's left tusk glowed where it had been hit, then shot off in a ball of shining white light. It flew up and streaked toward the ground a hundred meters below.
The dragon shrieked like scraping metal. The sound ripped at Harry's eardrums and hummed in his ribcage. "YOU DARE?!" she shouted. Even as she spoke, her tooth had already grown back halfway. "YOUR BONES WILL LINE THE NEST!" She drew in a short, sharp breath and aimed her piggish snout at Harry.
For a split-second, Harry stared down the barrel of a living volcano. His lungs froze, his heart seized, and his brain came to a halt. Then he dropped out of the sky like a stone.
A searing laser of tightly spiraling flames shot less than a meter over his head, so bright and hot that Harry's vision whited out. What had been intended as a short fall became an uncontrolled plummet because he couldn't see. Streaming curses as he fell, Harry pulled his broom in the direction opposite gravity. He vanished the Lenses of Truth to rub furiously at his stinging eyes.
One of his brothers' voices reached his ears. "GREEN! MOVE RIGHT!"
Harry, still unable to see anything more than vague blurs, rolled to the right as far and as fast as he could. A blurry line of fire tipped by a shining nova cleaved through the space where he'd been. Harry gripped his broom hard as the air yanked him to the left, but managed to stay on and upright. After one last rub at his eyes, he conjured the Lenses of Truth back onto his nose and rose up to rejoin the fray.
Endraal was aiming short jets of fire at Red, who was avoiding them with admirable grace and whooping with excitement all the while. He looped around one shot, dropped below another, and then feinted to the side to foul her aim before spinning in the opposite direction. It reminded Harry of the wild acrobatics he'd had to pull off to avoid the cursed Bludger that Dobby had sent after him the year before. While Red kept that up, Malfoy and Blue, were struggling to hit the dragon's teeth as each burst of flame sent her jerking backward through the air. Harry fired off a Sunburst Spell to confuse her, but it bounced off of her armored chin instead of having any effect. He cursed. It only worked on her eyes!
Red managed to make the shot instead, hitting her squarely with the purifying spell after doing a corkscrew around one of her columns of flame.
"AUGH! WHAT IS THIS?!" The dragon clamped her hands over her face.
In that brief moment of opportunity, Harry, Blue, and Malfoy sent a hail of arrows at her pained grimace. Another tooth glowed and shot off in a high arc. One to go!
Hiss-crack-BOOM! Yellow flinched in instinctual fear as a sonic explosion from Endraal shook the air. A crushing sense of pressure boxed his ears, drawing a whine of pain from him. Between the feeling of having his eyes lightly toasted earlier and now this, he figured some of his brothers were going to wind up partially deaf or blind for good if they didn't drink a Red Potion once the battle was over. Yellow paused in running toward his latest objective to take stock of the conflict above.
The dragon was sucking in air, and it wasn't a short breath, either. This time she was going all out. After seeing how she'd shoved herself backward with those short shots she'd been using earlier, Yellow was sure this would quickly turn into chaos.
He glanced at the second tooth glowing softly in the orange sand around twenty meters away, and then back up. It could wait; staying alive took precedence.
Endraal loosed her flame. As Yellow had thought, the powerful beam pushed the dragon in the opposite direction of where she was aiming. Her body became as much a hazard as the blinding laser as she zoomed through the air like a titanic deflating balloon.
Yellow watched the light show, his muscles like taut wires. His eyes tracked every motion of the dragon's head; she wasn't blowing around at random. While her wings couldn't produce enough force to steer her, the powerful muscle in her neck was enough. She was doing her best to either fry her targets or fling her body at them whilst also keeping herself in the air. The fact that she was using that same beam to stay airborne meant—
He leapt into a forward roll as dragon flame drew a river of lava in the volcanic plain behind him. Then he dropped out flat against the ground as the beam raked overhead at a dangerously shallow angle. Tucking his legs, he pushed himself back to his feet and went into a sprint to avoid the burst of molten rock that splashed from Endraal's latest downward blast.
Yellow ran for the fallen dragon tooth before she could sink it into a pool of molten rock. It was about as big as he was, but he didn't let that faze him as he took his magic bag off of his shoulder. He fitted the end of the huge tusk into its opening, then pulled the bag sideways. The tooth shrank as it was swallowed by the container's magic, and then it was safely packed away.
He looked up from his work just in time to fling himself into an uncontrolled backward tumble across the dirt. Endraal's swinging tail kissed his skin with muted heat as its shimmering wake washed over him. Yellow frantically shook off his flaming robes, which had been half-vaporized by the near-miss. The Fireproof Elixir apparently worked only on him and his Hylian clothes! Also, he would have died right then if he hadn't drank a potion first! Good to know!
Yellow giggled hysterically. Facing his mortality was never going to get easier, was it?
Blinking the spots out of his eyes, he squinted up at the battle in the sky. Endraal was a twisting ball of enraged fiery beams orbited by the erratic moon of her tail. She was also worryingly close to the ground now. Her wings were beating slower, their movements becoming less coordinated with exhaustion. Yellow put a hand to his Magic Rod. If she touched down and no one was able to get him off the ground, he would have to land a Sunburst Spell in her eyes and pray its effects lasted long enough for someone to sweep him away from her claws.
Yellow ducked another close encounter with the truck-sized meteor tipping the dragon's tail, hissing as its trailing flames blew across his hair. It didn't hurt, per se, but Yellow knew enough about the colors of fire to be certain it would have boiled his brain in his skull if the Fireproof Elixir weren't active. Another death narrowly missed.
He stood up, danced away from a stray beam of fire, and frowned up at the battle with his hands on his hips. Was there any way he could speed things up? Because he was getting tired down here and he didn't think he could keep this up for much longer.
As if answering that thought, two beams of light arced high into the sky and fell like shooting stars. Yellow ran to the closest one, a little confused. Why had there been two? Had the others just gotten lucky?
The light faded around the object he was running toward, revealing a…scale? It was one of the beige pentagons that studded her body here and there. Yellow gave a low whistle at its size. It was only a scale, and it was still the size of a couch cushion. This dragon lady was just too darn big!
Yellow had no idea what they might use a huge scale like this for, but he figured it was worth gathering. He started his bag at one corner and soon had the giant polygon successfully contained. On to the other thing, then! He sure hoped it was the last tooth they needed.
He kept an eye on Endraal as he ran. She was about twenty-five meters off the ground now, which sounded like a healthy distance until one remembered she was around thirty meters long from nose to tip. At that altitude, she could easily crater him with that bungee-cord tail of hers. As much as she was spinning around to hit the others, the possibility was becoming ever more likely.
Yep, there it went. Up, over, and—he jumped just before the meteor made impact.
BOOM! Dust flew in the air, just like he would have if he hadn't been paying attention. The thing he'd been running toward went airborne, too. In his direction, even! How lucky!
Yellow hopped to the side as the small, dark boulder hit where he'd been standing and bounced to a stop. He walked over to stare at it in bafflement. What was this? Not a scale, not a tooth—maybe a chunk of horn? It had one of those shimmering orange stripes that looked like a vein of lava running through it. He sighed and gathered it up. Honestly, what were they doing up there?
There was a ground-shaking thud, and Yellow looked over. 'Uh-oh.'
Endraal had landed.
With a thousand curses running through his head, Harry threw himself into a desperate dive. He'd been so focused on not being swatted out of the air that he hadn't noticed they were getting closer to the ground! He should have expected it; Endraal was too heavy for sustained flight and they'd been keeping her in the sky for a while now.
Endraal shook herself, her tired wings folding against her muscled back. She glared at Blue, Red, and Malfoy, who were sending Sunburst Spells ricocheting off of her horns and forehead as they tried to hit her in the eyes. That meant she was facing away from Yellow, who was dangerously within grabbing distance, but it also put him in the path of her tail. Really there was no end of this dragon that one wanted to be on.
The tail arched up high as Endraal let out a sonic boom that sent the other fliers wobbling in the air from the concussive force. Harry didn't hear it; he could only feel the roar shove his broom and hit his whole body like a punch. He wrestled his broom back in the right direction and pulled up alongside Yellow, who scrambled to get on as the tail above them flexed in aggravation. Together, they flung themselves into a disorienting leftward double-spin as the tail came down. Harry flinched as he felt the earthquake-generating crash. With that casual show of force, it was hard to believe the dragon hadn't been aiming for them!
Harry pulled up and out to the side. With Endraal's head pointed one way and her tail facing the other, the safest place to be was directly above her or in the blind spot created by the forward angle of her eyes. It was strange, watching a silent battle against what he knew was an incredibly loud beast. There wasn't even a ringing in his ears, just a total lack of noise. Sound was only a vibration.
With most of his sensory focus on his eyes, Harry was picking up more on the visuals of the battle, including the fact that the rest of the fliers looked ready to drop off of their brooms. Blue was forced to steer his one-handed, his injured wrist in enough pain to send echoed twinges up Harry's arm. Red, who had been doing the fanciest flying and the most reckless shooting, was holding onto his broom like it might fly away if he didn't. It kept dipping and yawing as his exhaustion made him sway. Malfoy looked ill, and had in fact been sick over the side of his broom after catching too many sonic booms. All the fliers were leaking blood from their ears by now, but the Slytherin's injury was taking a harder toll on him. His flying was dizzier, his aim more wild; he'd been the one to unintentionally discover that bits of Endraal's horns and scales could also come off.
Endraal wasn't showing any signs of slowing down despite her wings having given out. She stood with her tail in hand and started swinging it like a flail. Harry gritted his teeth. Her tail was even harder to dodge than her fire, since usually the only safe direction to go was out to the side, and moving sideways was incredibly difficult to do quickly with two people on a broom.
The dragon whirled her tail overhead, forcing Harry to cut out his magic and drop to dodge fast enough, and then swung it diagonally at Blue. It was a weird angle, moving upward instead of following the usual descending path of her gravity-aided strikes. Blue, caught off guard by the new direction, shot to the side as usual. It was the wrong move.
There was an echoed crunch in Harry's leg. Harry lost time. There was just pain.
Awareness came back to him when his broom suddenly spun without him telling it to. Harry jerked back into conscious thought as his hands automatically tightened around the grip.
A handful of sharp pebbles and the bone-shaking vibration of an explosion battered the back of his head. He turned around to see the stretched length of Endraal's tail less than a meter from him, now reeling back from the new crater pounded into the rock. He stared at it with dull surprise. He'd almost died just then? Huh.
His ears were ringing now. When had they started ringing?
Someone slapped at his shoulder. Oh wait, that was Yellow. He twisted his neck around. "Yeah?"
Yellow was crying and pointing at the still form of their brother sprawled on the ground. "Blue!" he mouthed—or probably shouted. "Stop her! Save Blue!"
The fuzziness in Harry's head hardened into cold focus. Stop the dragon. Save Blue.
He jerked his broom up and shot out in front of Endraal's snarling face. Her neon eyes tracked him, narrowing with malice. Even addled as she was, she had enough intelligence to know an easy target when she saw one. She drew in air, and Harry felt Yellow tense against his back.
Harry lassoed his staff as the dragon's belly inflated with hellfire that would surely vaporize him and Yellow, potion or not. He breathed out, concentrating on the feeling of his energy flowing into the Hylian staff. He was willing to give it all he had if he could make this work.
Just before he fired, someone else landed an arrow on Endraal's mouth. The last tooth they needed went sailing away.
Harry grinned fiercely, pointed his Magic Rod at the dragon's murderous eyes, and passed out in a blinding white flash.
Notes:
-The spirits in this fic are very similar to the Shinto concept. They're not ghosts, but the essence of different objects, places, and forces of nature. World Spirits like Endraal or the Great Deku Tree are solid, alive, have life-spans, and reincarnate, while little spirits like Koroks are invisible to most people and not as bound by certain laws of the mortal realm.
-Kokiri Lake is the same lake that surrounds the Great Hyrule Forest in BOTW, but much larger and far more difficult to cross. Though the Master Sword doesn't rest within the forest in this era, the lake spirits are very protective of the Lost Woods.
-Lord Mekar, the spirit of Kokiri Lake, is a huge, elongated Stealthfin Trout with an exaggerated dorsal fin.
-The Arrow-Shooting Spell is canon and the incantation I made up for it translates to "create arrow" in broken Latin. Because these arrows are made of magic, they do less damage than real arrows in the Light World. They're also rather difficult to aim.
-Endraal's design is inspired heavily by Valoo's (colors, scales, bird wings, weird tail, clumsy flier) and a bit less so by Dinraal's (horns, mane, flames). There are also Goron elements there in her limb proportions, muscles, and rocky accents, since she's kind of their mother spirit.