I'm putting this out a day early because I'm going to be hella busy on Saturday! For this chapter, I've posted an illustration of the Dragon Fang Necklace under "dungeon 5" on tumblr and displayed it in the Ao3 version of this.

Someone patted impatiently at Harry's cheek.

Harry blinked blearily. A gray face with ketchup and mustard eyes hovered over him. Shadow Harry smirked and mouthed some words Harry couldn't hear. Then he conjured up a roll of parchment and bonked Harry on the forehead with it.

Pain! Knowledge! A croak, or maybe an unvoiced scream scraped in Harry's throat. Why was elemental protection magic so horribly complicated?! So many specifics—was that something about gas composition? Merlin, make it stop—

He sagged against the coarse dry dirt once the overwhelming flood released him. "Ow," he said, giving Shadow Harry an exhausted glare.

Shadow Harry raised an eyebrow. "Would you rather use up a Red Potion to heal yourself, Hero?"

Harry sighed. "Guess not." He pried himself off of the ground and dusted the yellow crust off of his clothes. Time to take stock of the situation.

His brothers were sitting around looking dazed, but healed and alive—good. Malfoy was also healed and alive, but curled up on his side and crying—less good. There was a dragon bigger than a brontosaurus peering down at him with round, fire-colored eyes the size of windows…

Harry screamed and scuttled away from the giant head looming over him.

The dragon winced at his reaction, shrinking back. "I'm sorry, Little Brother. I didn't mean to scare you," she said in a gravelly, rumbling voice. It was made marginally less scary than the other times Harry had heard it by the fact that it was somehow gentle despite its power. "I can't remember what happened. I was flying around on a nice day, a strange human dressed a bit like you called me down to his castle, and then I woke up here." She looked up at the orange-lit clouds clustered around the sides of Death Mountain. "Something evil has taken over my nest. I can feel it creating pressure in the mountain where there shouldn't be," she fretted. "Do you know what happened in the time I forgot, Little Brother?"

"Oooh, pick me, pick me! I know!" Shadow Harry cried, raising his hand. "But first, do you remember me, O Great Spirit of Eldin, Death Mountain's Avatar?"

Endraal squinted at him. Harry edged back from her looming head as she lowered her neck for a closer look. Her burning eyes roved over to Harry, who froze in the middle of his retreat, and back to Shadow Harry. "You're not a little brother, you're a spirit," she said in slow realization. "Not a World Spirit, nor a nature spirit. What are you, small one, and why do you look like these little brothers?" A sound like grinding stone edged her tone of suspicion.

Shadow Harry grinned. "Oh, I think you know." He spun around, his smoky robes solidifying into a belted tunic and leggings and his hair shifting from black to white. Conjuring up a windsock-shaped black hat, he pulled it on and gave Endraal a winning smile. His new borrowed face made it boyishly charming. "Remember me?" He struck a pose.

Endraal reared back with a ground-shaking roar that rattled Harry's recently-repaired eardrums. "YOU!" She stood on her back feet, picked up her tail, and started swinging it in rapid circles. Its flames flared from sedate reddish orange to a furious white blaze. "MURDERER! FACE-STEALER!"

"Yup, that's me!" Shadow Harry sang, poking his fingers into the dimples of a long-dead Hero's pretty face. "I'm baaack."

Harry jogged back to give him a generous berth, just in case Endraal decided it was worth obliterating a "little brother" to squash Shadow Harry. He honestly wouldn't blame her.

Endraal looked up at Death Mountain. "YOU DID THIS?" She turned a murderous glower on the dark spirit.

Shadow Harry (or would that be Shadow Link?) pouted and kicked at the dirt. "No, it wasn't me this time," he admitted.

Fire built up in the dragon's belly. "WHO? GANON?" Smoke drifted from her mouth as she spoke.

"It was Vaati."

Endraal blinked and deflated, dropping her tail. Its impact against the ground sent all the mere mortals bouncing into the air. "Vaati?!" she said in surprise. "He did that?" She stared up at the glowing clouds reflecting the lava pools higher up on the mountain. "He never had that much power in the legends…"

"Well, he's learned some new tricks and he's only going to make things even worse, so you'd better go stop him!" Shadow Harry encouraged with an alarming amount of cheer. "He's in the heart of the mountain!"

Harry narrowed his eyes at the dark spirit. What was he up to?

Endraal fell to all fours and spread her wings wide. "VAATI!" she roared. "I'LL CRUSH YOU!" She sprang into the air and glided over to Death Mountain, where she started scaling its craggy cliffs in great leaps.

Harry leveled his Magic Rod at Shadow Harry. "What did you do?" he demanded. "Why did you send her into the mountain?"

The spirit raised his hands, his non-possessed eye innocently wide. "Hey, she won't die! ...Probably." His stolen face twisted with malice. Harry was tempted to slap the expression off of him. "She would have gone back to her real nest at some point anyway, now that you broke her curse. I just wanted to make sure you saw it so you'd be properly motivated."

"We were already motivated, you sadist! What does sending some gullible dragon to her death have to do with anything?" Blue asked.

"I told you, she probably won't die. Killing World Spirits before their time is a world-breakingly stupid idea. I don't know what happened to make the Spirit of Faron reincarnate before the other dragons, for example, but I'm positive that a good chunk of the world population came close to starving out in the time it took for Farosh to form and hatch. That's why Endraal was just cursed for a while to make her more useful instead of, y'know, murdered," Shadow Harry said. "But maybe the idea of that poor, kindly soul you just saved being poisoned by dark magic and stuffed in a convenient spare room will push you to actually do something instead of sitting around being boring teacher's pets for another month." He gave them an aggrieved glare.

"Well, sorry for not being raised in the woods by spirits like the bloody Hero of Time!" Harry snapped. "We've got people relying on us! We're in school! We can't just drop everything and go whenever we feel like. Do you know how much trouble we're going to be in when we get back to the castle?"

"No! Why should I care? Why should you care?" Shadow Harry tossed up his hands. "You've got an interdimensional villain to stop! Who gives a damn what your teachers think? They're going to have bigger problems if they all get turned into Vaati's slaves or some new kind of Wizzrobe!"

"Wizzrobes are people?" Yellow said, horrified.

"Not anymore, kiddo, and they volunteered for it anyway," Shadow Harry told him. To the Harrys at large, he went on, "Just stop being doormats, will you? I've been bored out of my mind sitting in your shadows for weeks, and I'm not going to get any leeway until the boss's new magic experiment is gone." He pointed up at the volcano. "Now go put those new pieces of equipment to work so I can get this headache-inducing eyeball off my face and go blow something up. Chop chop!" He sank into the ground and bubbled away into nothing.

Harry kicked at his shadow. "We're not doing this for you!"

His shadow blew a raspberry. "Too bad, so sad!"

Harry shook his head in disgust. Turning around, he cast a concerned eye over his group. "Hey, Red, is Malfoy alright?" he asked, noting the Slytherin's pallor. He hadn't said a word since Harry had woken up, either.

"M'fine," Malfoy mumbled. His hands were clamped over his ears like protective cages and his clawed toes curled in the gritty dirt. "Not deaf."

"I think Endraal's roaring hit him harder than it hit us," Red said. "Y'know, what with that super-hearing thing."

"I'm fine," Malfoy said a little louder.

The Harrys all gave him skeptical looks, but none decided to comment. "Blue, what about you?" Harry asked. "Your leg…Whatever happened, it felt bad."

Blue's sapphire eyes were glassy. "It healed. That's all that matters," he said. "Let's get started up the mountain."

"Are you sure—"

Blue showed his teeth. It wasn't a smile. "I'm alive and my femur isn't broken anymore. Let's just go, Green."

Harry decided to check up on him later. "Okay, then, I guess we'll just fly up there," he declared. "Does anyone have my broom? I don't know what happened to it."

"I've got it here." Yellow pulled it out of his bag. "Is it a good idea to fly up there, though?"

Harry raised an eyebrow as he reclaimed his Nimbus 2000. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Well, I mean…look at your broom."

Harry looked, and then did a horrified double-take. "Merlin," he said in hushed dismay. His hands ran along the singed sections of wood along the shaft, his eyes catching on all the blackened bristles in the tail. "I thought the Fireproof Elixir worked on it," he said, his heart sinking. This was one of the first gifts he'd ever been given, and while it was far from completely wrecked, the damage was still more than he could bear.

"If that potion hadn't had some effect on it, the whole thing would have turned to ash," Blue said. "I'll admit that detail slipped my mind, though—wooden brooms in a dragon fight. Ugh, what a stupid thing to forget."

Red frantically looked his broom over. "Oh hell, I would've been more careful if I knew the potion wasn't working!" he bemoaned. "How are we supposed to get these things fixed?"

"Wait until the owner of the sports shop in Hogsmeade gets a good handle on how to use a Hylian staff?" Blue suggested. "But I agree with Yellow. Flying on a wooden broomstick around pools of lava isn't a good idea. There's no guarantee that these—" he conjured a bulky necklace composed of huge red beads and miniaturized versions of Endraal's tusks and held it up, "—will do anything to protect our brooms, and I don't want to find out the hard way that they don't."

"They'll filter the air and protect you, your clothes, and your conjured weapons from high ambient heat, and that's it. Your brooms would spontaneously combust," Harry's shadow said. "I'm only telling you this because I don't trust you dinguses not to try lighting yourselves on fire or swimming in lava."

Everyone looked askance at Red.

"I was gonna touch the lava, not swim in it," Red huffed. "Besides, we have healing potions."

"Not for re-growing fingers you lost on purpose, we don't!" Blue slapped him upside the head. "You dingus."

Draco stared up at the mind-bogglingly vast geographical feature that was Death Mountain. He had seen mountains before on his trips to the Alps, but the knowledge that this one was full of fire made it seem even larger.

His heart pattered with fear and exhilaration. He had never been so entirely removed from his element before. Draco was someone most comfortable in the softly lit rooms of his dorm under the Black Lake, the swaying cabin of a modest yacht, or on a freshly cleaned deck watching the brilliant sunrise on the ocean horizon. He had never in his life been anywhere so far removed from water.

Draco fought the urge to start guzzling through the many jugs of water he'd filled up from the (miraculously functional) tap back at the castle and stuffed into the limited confines of his mokeskin wallet. He was here out of greed, not because he was oblivious to the risk; he knew that a semi-aquatic creature like himself had no business on a volcano, and there was no way in hell he was going to go into the caldera with the Potters. Just being at the bottom of the colossal mountain, where dark spills of recently-cooled lava coiled at the bases of the slopes ahead, was enough to suck the moisture from every exposed inch of him. His skin, though less delicate than a Zora's by virtue of his mostly-human heritage, wouldn't stand up to the heat within Endraal's nest, period. He genuinely wanted to see the Goron city, though. Not only for its riches, but because…well, it wasn't like he'd ever see anything like that back home, would he? His parents were willing to send him off to a frozen wasteland for school, but they would never, ever let him visit a live volcano, let alone a civilization built by rock-ogres. Now that he was somewhat assured that the Muggles here were a relatively harmless strain, he was curious to see how this strange breed of them made use of their surroundings.

Draco worked out his nervous energy by flexing his toes in his replacement shoes, a set of boots he'd bought in Castle Town. He'd never admit it out loud, but they were well-made for their price. The fine stitching and comfortable fit was worth more than the five Sickles he'd spent, and he could tell at a glance that the leather was durable enough to weather the horrors of questing. Draco squared his shoulders and stared down the red cliffs like they were a nouveau-riche half-blood whose ego he planned to break. A bunch of stupidly big rocks weren't going to be enough to keep the heir of the House of Malfoy from making a profit.

They passed through a natural arch marked by a stone sign whose inlaid iron letters translated to "Goron City", with an arrow pointing diagonally up. 'Helpful,' Draco thought dryly.

Gorons were clustered around the bottom of the mountain trail in a sad little tent settlement. They looked miserable, many of them nursing ugly red and black burns on their thick, rough skin. All members of the group were either particularly old or young, leading Draco to suspect that the most fit among them were still up at the city.

Green stopped to chat with one aging specimen who looked like he was slowly being flattened by the weight of his own craggy bulk. Draco had never seen such an impressive hunch before. Potter, being Potter, wasted time asking about the Gorons' well-being, what they were doing down here, if they needed any help (as if the Potters didn't have enough on their plate!), and what the quickest way up to the city was.

"The train station and turnplate at Eldin Plateau got buried in boulders a week ago, Brother! The young'uns are still working on digging it out. The road to the city got flooded, too, so you'd have to wade through lava going that way," the elderly Goron boomed, punctuating his statement by clanging his metal cane on the iron paving underfoot. Draco winced at his volume. When would everything stop being so loud? "That old trail the Hero of Lights rigged up a few centuries back is still around, though, if you're fool enough to use it," the Goron continued. "Human adventurers still use grappling hooks, don't they?"

Everyone but Red, who'd given up on following the conversation in lieu of staring at the fiery clouds, conjured and held up their whip.

"Close enough!" the Goron declared. "If you follow the main trail for a bit, you'll find the start of the Hero's Trail in a cavern splitting off of Kagoron Tunnel. Assuming you live, it'll let you out by the Bridge of Eldin, where you can follow the road down to the city." He paused for a second, frowning in thought. His beady purple eyes lit up as something occurred to him. "Oh, right! Are you fireproof, Brothers?"

Draco face-palmed while the Potters all nodded. Leave it to such a dim-looking brute to ask the important questions last!

"Then you're good to go!" The Goron rubbed his chin wonderingly. "Although why would you want to go to the city right now, anyway?"

"To slay the monster in the volcano!" Green said brightly. "Thanks for the help!" He ran off, his brothers on his heels.

Draco snickered at the Goron's dumbstruck expression. Yes, the Potters were certainly something that had to be experienced to be believed. He switched his whip out for his new magical necklace and jogged after the mad Gryffindors.

Hot, moist air hit Draco's nose, causing his gills to flare in surprise. His latest inhale went awry, sending him into a coughing fit. "I thought we were past this," he angrily wheezed, pressing his hands hard against the holes in the sides of his airway. The arcs of bone rose up against his fingers in protest before settling back down. "Water can be in the air! It's still bloody air!"

The sound of his coughing brought a flock of worried Potters down on him. "Are you bleeding again?" Red asked. "You can have a healing potion if you want."

"It's the hot springs, isn't it?" Yellow said sympathetically, looking off to the side. "The air around here is pretty humid."

"'Hot springs'?" Draco repeated, following the direction of his gaze. He beheld a shallow lake of bright blue water giving off misty waves of steam. His eyes went wide. Mountain springs were a thing he knew existed—they were spoken of in many a fairytale—but volcano springs? He'd never seen heated water that hadn't come out of a tap before.

"As superheated as the volcano is right now, that water is probably hot enough to cook in," Blue remarked. Indeed, the turquoise pond was bubbling. "I heard back at the market that it's mildly magical, like a weak healing potion, but you have to sit in it for it to work. It wouldn't be safe to test right now." He sighed in disappointment.

"Are you going to be okay around it, Malfoy?" Green asked. "You aren't going to throw yourself in?"

"I'm not stupid, Potter," Draco snapped. "Besides, no Zora would want anything to do with that." It wasn't a lie; he felt absolutely zero draw toward the boiling pools on either side of the trail.

"Hey, Green, what are those glowing rocks over there?" Red asked, pointing. At the edge of the pool, in the shadow of a red wall of stone, lay massive turquoise crystals of a kind that Draco had never seen before. The glow was different from the blue tracery powering Castle Town—more greenish and lacking the crisp brightness of Bluestone.

"I have no idea," Green said. "Maybe they're something you can only find on the mainland. At this point, I'm pretty sure the Four Sword only has memories from the Old Kingdom."

"Do you think we could take a sample?" Blue asked eagerly. "I'd love to make a Magic Rod out of that. Zelda might know its spell-casting specialty, since she's from New Hyrule."

Yellow dragged him back from the boiling spring. "You just got done saying that water could cook us," he said with exasperation. "If we find rocks that don't have something lethal around them, we'll take a sample then."

"I think it's still cool enough down here that I could use my broom—"

"We have more productive things to do." Yellow towed this brother behind him as he resumed trekking up the trail. "Experimentation can come later."

"But Yellow, I—! Oh, those are new."

Blue and Yellow came to a sharp halt as a cluster of glowing, lava-like blobs hopped up from the ground in front of them. The Harrys all unsheathed their swords and circled around the gooey monsters, whose drifting googly eyes shifted around to watch them.

"I've never seen Buzz Blobs with eyes like that," Blue commented. "Do you think they're some kind of ChuChu, Green?"

"Definitely ChuChus, but I don't remember them ever being on fire," Green replied. "That's different."

"Swords don't conduct fire, so I can stab 'em!" Red crowed. He threw himself at the nearest fiery blob and brought his blade down in a diagonal slash.

The ChuChu blew up. Then the two ChuChus sitting next to it also blew up. Draco was incredibly thankful not to have been keeping pace with the Gryffindors.

"OW!" all the Harrys cried, jumping and slapping at their flaming clothes. Red and Blue wound up staggering woozily away from the monsters, clutching their heads.

"Augh, pain feedback from all four at once," Blue groaned, massaging the base of his skull.

"Fire is worse than electricity," Red bemoaned. "How could it be worse?!"

The ChuChus were still there after exploding, but smaller and darker. The air around them no longer shimmered. "Attack them now!" Draco shouted impatiently at Yellow and Green, who were cautiously hanging back. "Can't you see their fire has gone out?"

"I mean, I guess I'll try." Green rushed forward as Yellow stepped back. He hit the nearest monster with two quick sword-strikes and it vanished in a plume of smoke. An inanimate glob of glowing red jelly was left behind.

"Hey, it worked! Good call, Malfoy!" Green cheered. He backed away as the other two monsters flickered back into full brightness.

Once everyone else was safely out of range, Draco conjured up a line of arrows and fired them off. The spell didn't allow for precise aim, but two out of the five lodged in a ChuChu's side before vanishing. The monster wobbled and then sent out a blast of fire, causing its remaining fellow to do the same. Between the four Potters, the two deflated, cooled-down monsters didn't stand a chance.

"I wonder what this type of ChuChu jelly does," Blue said as he tipped some into a small bottle. The gel was cohesive enough for him to pick it up with both hands and feed it into the container's mouth. "Green, you're the expert, aren't you?"

"It's a base for healing potions," Green said. "I mean, it used to be, at least. Red ChuChu jelly for healing potions, green jelly for magic-restoring potions, and blue jelly for both effects." His face screwed up in confusion. "Wait, er…I'm not sure if those colors even mean the same things anymore. The sword says green is for magic or for stamina? Blue might mean something different, too. And…were those even Red ChuChus? They definitely aren't supposed to be on fire. This place is weird."

"Oh, now you realize that, Potter?" Draco asked. "I've known this place was mad since I started turning green and immune to magic!"

"Well, try listening to like five different Hylians' memories saying different stuff about the same thing and all insisting they're right at the same time. And only the fuzziest of those memories is kind of the same as the version of the thing you just saw," Green said, rubbing at his temples. "If you're going to use that jelly for potions, Blue, be careful. Either it'll heal you or it'll do something fire-related, and there's no telling what the fire one might do."

"I'll let Fred and George figure it out, then," Blue decided. "Whatever they come up with, it should be interesting."

They continued farther up the path, using the Arrow-Shooting Spell to disarm the Fire ChuChus littering the iron-plated road like mines. As it turned out, the monsters would toss their gelatinous bodies at anyone who came too close, leading to the Harrys still catching a few waves of fire despite giving the blobs more space. The Fire Keese perching on the rock spires and towering natural archways looming over the path were mercifully familiar and easily defeated, though. Draco picked them off with Sagitta Creo, which wasn't the most effective (it took two arrows to slay one little flying rat), but saved the Potters some trouble. He let Red deal with collecting the body parts they dropped, since Draco wasn't going to handle some monster's slimy eyeball when he had a perfectly useful friend to do it for him.

"These monsters aren't so bad," Yellow said optimistically after they banished another cluster of Fire ChuChus. "Maybe this volcano isn't so scary after all."

Blue elbowed him. "Don't say things like that! You've challenged the universe to make our lives worse again."

Yellow pouted. "Just because bad things happen sometimes, that doesn't mean the universe hates us. Good things happen, too!"

"The universe absolutely hates us," Green disagreed, looking around warily. "Also, there's something dangerous around here. I just can't see it."

Draco ducked his head and held out his Magic Rod defensively as he looked around. Danger? What danger? There were Fire Keese and Red ChuChus glowing at the mouth of the giant tunnel up ahead, looking like spots of lava. They glowed even brighter than the iron baskets of luminous red stones that served as lamps and trail markers for the road, so they couldn't have been what Green was missing. Draco squinted into the shadow of the cave, willing his creature eyes to cut through the darkness.

A section of the rock twitched ever so slightly, revealing the shape of a head with bulbous eyes.

Draco jumped at the realization. "It's a Lizalfos!" he exclaimed upon landing. His memory called up a mental image of Green, limping and bleeding from at least two places after fighting Lizalfoses in the Forbidden Forest. Draco certainly didn't want to fight one of those beasts in a world where they were even stronger.

"A Lizalfos? Where?" Green peered into the cave.

"Sagitta Creo!" Draco fired a line of arrows at the camouflaged lizard. To his dismay, the spell hit both his target and another Lizalfos he hadn't seen. Two oversized reptiles, one wielding a sword and the other bearing both a sword and shield, sprang out of the cave.

Yellow backed up frantically, holding his sword out in front of him. "Red ones?! I thought they came in green or yellow! What do the red ones do?"

"Er, fire, maybe?" Red suggested as one of the lizards took a deep breath.

A continuous stream of fire spewed from the Lizalfos's mouth, sweeping over Red and Blue, who hadn't fled far enough. Draco winced as all four brothers howled or hissed in pain. Green, who'd been set upon by the other Lizalfos before he could get his shield off of his belt, angled his sword wrong for a block against the lizard's heavy strike and caught a redirected slice to his shoulder. His new pauldron saved him from getting cut as badly as he could have, but it didn't stop the attack entirely. The Potters collectively suffered once more.

Draco ran through the list of spells he knew, including ones he'd snuck out of old textbooks in his family's library and never managed to get quite right. "Aguamenti!" he incanted with an uncertain waver in his voice. The blast of water that shot out of his staff nearly blew him off his feet. It hosed down the fire-breathing Lizalfos, dousing its flames, and drenched the lizard menacing Green. Draco wasn't sure he managed to hurt the monsters at all, but the spray of water made them abandon their attacks and leap back with their scaly skin steaming.

"Thank you!" the Potters chorused.

Green called up a host of arrows and flung them at the nearest Lizalfos before conjuring his whip and snapping it at the monster's hands. Its sword became Green's. "Hey, Malfoy, here! Have a weapon." Green kicked the sword along the ground and then dove back into battle with an upward slash at the Lizalfos's neck. He drove the monster back with unrelenting attacks, leaving it unable to do anything but continually jump away in an attempt to put space between them.

Draco tentatively picked up the blade that Green had slid over to him. It was a fairly average-looking sword, as far as he could tell. He wouldn't have been surprised if the Lizalfos had stolen it off of a traveler it had killed. The weapon was both lighter than expected and more difficult to maneuver. No wonder the Harrys had looked so clumsy when they'd first started out! After a moment of looking the sword over, he shrank the weapon and stuck it in the mokeskin wallet he'd brought on the trip. Once he had the time to figure out how to wield it without hurting himself, he might consider using the brutish Muggle weapon when his Magic Rod wasn't enough. Only out of sight of his pureblood classmates, though; he had a refined reputation to uphold.

Blue and Red double-teamed the other Lizalfos, Blue hitting it with arrows whenever it tried to draw a breath and Red doing his damndest to get rid of its shield. The monster kept batting away Red's attempts to disarm it with said shield and hid behind it whenever either of them tried to land a strike. They'd tried a couple of Disarming Charms, but the lizard had just retrieved whichever armament went airborne using a quick shot of its tongue. Draco was impressed by its show of intelligence and skill. One would think the monster actually had a brain, the way it was fighting! He'd never seen a conjured creature demonstrate such an advanced level of autonomy before; in that narrow field, at least, Hylian magic had conventional magic outdone.

Yellow and Draco hit the Lizalfos from two sides with a hail of arrows and a Severing Charm respectively. Blue yelped and ducked as an arrow nearly hit him in the forehead. Draco's overpowered charm sent out a spray of hot sparks as it cut the monster's shield in two, forcing Red to back-step and guard his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Blue!" Yellow called out sheepishly. "I didn't watch where I was aiming well enough."

"Its shield is dealt with, so kill the thing already!" Draco barked.

Yellow sent him a disapproving frown for his tone before running up to stab the lizard through the base of its tail. Said tail popped off, making Yellow scream and flee from the squirming appendage. His brothers downed the enemy in his stead, hitting it with alternating slashes before Red finished it with one final thrust at its chest.

"Oh, cool!" Red said upon noticing the tail lying on the ground. He picked it up and flopped it around. Draco felt his stomach turn. Though there was no blood, he could clearly see the meat and bone where the limb had fallen off.

Yellow went green and turned away. "Ewww!"

"What is wrong with you?" Blue snatched the appendage from Red's grasp and stuffed it in his bag before wiping his hand on his trousers. "Don't be vile!"

"It's just a big lizard tail!" Red protested. "I think you're just too squeamish."

"I bet you'd play with monster guts, too, if I gave you half a chance," Blue grumbled.

"Nah, I'd just try to cook 'em!" Red said with a grin. He dodged Blue's attempt to thump him and ran over to where Green was gathering his spoils, giggling.

"He's such an ogre!" Blue vented to Yellow. "I'm not letting him near a cooking pot while we're out in the field. There's no telling what he might put in it, and I never want to find out whether all of us feel the effects of poison at once."

They joined Green at the entrance to the long tunnel. Green was studiously ignoring the wound the Lizalfos had dealt him, which was sending a growing stain through the short green sleeve of his new tunic and a red line down his arm. "You should use one of those healing potions, Potter," Draco advised. The Gryffindor's sword arm was hanging by his side.

"It'll scab over," Green said. "I'd rather wait until it's life-or-death to use a potion. Using them for little stuff means we won't have any left for the big things, and they cost money. We don't have much of that to throw around."

"I've got a potion-making kit and ingredients in my bag," Blue said. "Drink a potion. I can make another if we need one."

"It doesn't hurt that much. I can still use my sword!"

"Green," Yellow said sweetly. "Just do as you're told, please."

Yellow had apparently said the magic words, because Green stopped protesting and took a bottle of Red Potion out of his bag. He drank it with a grimace and, once the bloodstain on his shoulder had stopped spreading, he set about magically repairing and cleaning his clothes.

Draco peered up into the tunnel's dark confines. Flaming monsters and red lamps dotted its length at all angles, making it look eerily like any side of the stone tube could potentially serve as the floor. Occasional spots of luminous blue-green accentuated the dim orange-red light—crystals of that strange stone they'd seen around the edge of the hot spring earlier on. Around the green stones grew strange plants that…Draco wasn't entirely sure how to categorize. They consisted of a circle of red and green leaves with a blue-black sphere sitting in the center. Atop the blue ball sprouted a lacy white flower whose orange stamens resembled…a fuse? Why did it look familiar?

Oh no. Draco blanched. He knew exactly what the plant reminded him of; it looked like a smaller version of the giant blue bomb that Shadow Harry had used to blow up the Slytherin common room. He cast a nervous glance at Green's shadow, which showed faintly in the torchlight.

Draco clutched at Green's sleeve. "Potter, please don't tell me this tunnel is full of bombs," he said desperately.

"What do you mean, full of bombs?" Green looked more closely at the objects silhouetted by the glowing rocks, then straightened with a look of astonishment. "Huh, the Gorons are still growing Bomb Flowers! I guess it's just one of those things that stuck around, like the Minish hiding things in grass."

"Bomb flowers?" Draco shrilled. Growing a garden full of explosives sounded like the worst idea since the invention of invisible trousers. "Why would they cultivate such a thing?!"

"I'm sure that Gorons were the ones that hollowed out this tunnel." Green's voice started echoing as he walked farther in. "Did you think they did all their mining with pickaxes and hammers? Dynamite doesn't exist in Hyrule—at least, as far as my sword knows—so they found another way to speed things up."

And just like that, Draco was reminded that the Gorons were simply Muggles in different skin. They were not only non-human, but also just as non-magical as the vermin back home. It made sense that they'd solve problems in similar ways, given their identical inability to do anything through civilized means. If Draco knew anything about Muggles, it was their fondness for things that violently exploded; that quality seemed to be consistent across dimensions.

Blue dug through his pack, pulled out the Hylian Bestiary, and took the book over to one of the plants. "Look, Bomb Flowers are still around thousands of years later!" he gushed at Zelda. "Didn't you say Gorons have been growing these since back in the Old Kingdom?"

Red excitedly dashed into the tunnel to pluck one of the flowers, only to be intercepted by Yellow partway there. Draco watched, wide-eyed, as Yellow muscled Red back, locked his arm around his brother's neck, and hissed something in his ear. When he let go, Red approached the plant with more respectful caution. He picked it up, which set the "fuse" in the middle of its blossom burning. Then, after a glance at his sternly supervising brother, he ran up the tunnel a ways and pitched the bomb as far as he could. The plant rolled up along the ground after it landed, pulsing red. Then it started rolling back, since the slope was rather steep. Draco nearly screamed before the bomb exploded at a safe distance in a cloud of swirling smoke. The gooey remains of two Fire ChuChus were left in its wake. Seconds later, the Bomb Flower re-sprouted as if it had never been plucked.

Draco gritted his teeth and rubbed at his ringing ears. The explosion hadn't been anywhere near as loud as Endraal's roars, but within the confines of the tunnel it felt like a punch to the eardrums.

"Ohhh, so it's on a timer. I thought it would blow up when it hit something," Red said. "Hey, Yellow, can I throw another?"

"Only if no one is standing within five meters of it, including you," Yellow said in a voice like steel. "If you blow us up, I know where you sleep."

The rest of the group shrank back fearfully. Draco stared at him in disbelief. If Yellow had the ability to draw this kind of reaction from his siblings, why did he so rarely give them commands? It was clear that, despite his obsequious deference to everyone around him, he could seize control of the group at any time if he so wished. With the option of leadership right there, why not take it?

Yellow noticed Draco's eyes on him and flashed a smile. "Sorry for getting a little scary like that. It's just good to be cautious when handling explosives, you know?" he said in his usual bubbly tones. "I know you won't do anything silly around the bombs. Right?" His golden eyes went cold and sharp.

"Right!" Draco quickly agreed.

"Good!" Yellow returned to monitoring Red's bombing run on the monsters up ahead.

Draco kept his hands pressed over his ears to block the noise out, though he still shrank back whenever one of the explosives went off. It was hard not to be reminded of Shadow Harry's attack on the school. His disposition toward dreamless sleep had saved him from nightmares, but it still felt like those memories were waiting just below his thoughts.

"Zelda says the flowers have a seven-second timer and no shrapnel. I was surprised by the last bit, since they look like they're made of ceramic," Blue reported as he walked up. Draco jealously noted that the booms echoing down the tunnel didn't seem to affect him at all. "In fact, she didn't know what I meant by explosive shrapnel until I mentioned it. I guess grenades are a foreign concept to Hyrule."

"What is a grenade?" Draco asked. He dreaded the answer as soon as he voiced the question. "Another kind of bomb?"

"Yeah, but they're designed to send out a bunch of metal when they explode. It's enough to rip anyone nearby to shreds," Green said. "It's kind of like a gun, if you know what that is, but in all directions with bullets made of tiny knives." He spread out his fingers to demonstrate.

Draco shuddered. That sounded like the Muggle version of a spell even scarier than the Blasting Curse. "That's horrible."

"Yeah, with or without magic, people always find innovative and awful ways to hurt one another," Blue said. "The Light World has a little less of that, but I'm sure there are some nasty weapons and enchantments out here." He turned toward Green, hugging the Hylian Bestiary to his chest. "I'm going to get those rock samples now," he declared with a challenging lift of his chin.

Green shrugged. "Just follow Yellow's rules and keep your shield on hand in case you get pelted with the rock you blew up," he said. He peered up ahead. "Also, don't take too long. Red's already trying to leave us behind." He jogged farther up the tunnel. "Hey, Red, slow down!" he hollered up the slope.

Red cackled madly. "I'M GONNA BLOW UP THE WALL!" he announced, a lit bomb in hand. He sprinted around a corner. Four seconds later, another explosion echoed down the cavernous corridor, followed by the sound of clattering rock. They all paused to stare fearfully at the tunnel ceiling. It looked just as stable as before.

Green sighed. "At least he didn't blow himself up or cause a cave-in."

"He didn't do it on a whim, either," Yellow called down. "He just opened up the Hero's Trail! It looks like a bunch of old lava was blocking it off."

Draco took in the sight of the monster parts strewn around the tunnel, as well as the warm glow of the cavern Red had just revealed around the corner. It appeared the quickest way to make progress was to hand Red a generous supply of swiftly-regenerating bomb plants and pray for the best.

'Or, he thought, warily eyeing Yellow, 'give him infinite explosives and a minder he's too scared of to defy.'

Item Get: Dragon Fang Necklace. Dims volcanic heat to the more survivable temperature of a sweltering summer day for the wearer, protects weapons and clothing from spontaneous combustion, and filters poisonous volcanic gases. The necklace only protects against ambient temperatures; it won't shield against touching volcanic hazards!

Notes:

-Shadow Link/Harry's habit of causing natural disasters has killed quite a few people over the millennia, even though his priority was terror and chaos rather than murder, so the World Spirits particularly hate him. The face he borrowed to antagonize Endraal was that of the last Four Swords Hero as a young adult.

-The Harrys' brooms will be alright! I just didn't want them being able to take a convenient shortcut here. This was also a demonstration that broom-flying under dangerous conditions will have consequences.

-In this fic, Gorons aren't fully immune to lava. It burns them in the same way hot water (like maybe 160F) would burn a human.

-The "fuzziest" memories Green was shown were Skyward Sword's version of Red ChuChus.