There's an illustration for this chapter! I painted the first cavern of the Hero's Trail (which I'm super proud of because I can't mentally picture rooms/locations like AT ALL). You can find it on Ao3 or under the "dungeon 5" tag on the garden-eel-draws tumblr.
Content warning for Harry suffering some second-degree burns in this chapter.
Harry paused at the cracked-open entrance to the Hero's Trail, steeling himself against the uncomfortable warmth and brilliant glow of the lava within. On legs made stiff by trepidation, he forced himself to walk into the shimmering orange haze filling the cavern.
The Hero of Lights had must have had zero fear of burning to death, if she'd gone through all the trouble of establishing a trail here, of all the locations on Death Mountain. A fast-moving lake of lava fell in thick rivers from tubes at the back of the cave, flowed across the room, and disappeared through a broad, low-hanging opening on the other side. Veins of superheated rock snaked through the craggy walls and ceiling, seeming to thrum with the volcano's distant rumbles. Bits of rock fell from the ceiling every now and then as Death Mountain grumbled around them. Harry intentionally put out of his mind how unstable the room might become in the event the volcano erupted again while they were in it.
The trail ahead of him consisted of a series of brilliant Bluestone hooks hanging from stala rods bolted into the cavern ceiling. How the Hero of Lights had gotten them up there, Harry had no idea. Due to how difficult the hooks had probably been to install, they were sparse—no more numerous than they needed to be. Though their spacing over the open expanses of lava made Harry's stomach flip, the arrangement made the path reassuringly linear. He wouldn't have to worry about where to go, just the timing between swings. There were usually three or four hooks between the dark isles occasionally dotting the glowing river. Each circle of solid stone was small, only able to hold three or four people at a time—and that was assuming no one needed space to safely land. More than just timing his swings across the hooks right, he'd have to make absolutely certain he landed correctly on the little islets.
Harry stared into the lava. If he fell into that, he would die. He knew that with absolute certainty. It brought to mind the last labyrinth, with its crackling water. That water had actually turned out to be survivable, though. This…well, it was lava. How many liquids out there were deadlier than lava?
Anxiety made his head spin. Harry sat down on the ground—stone that would have been hot enough to fry him if not for the artifact on his neck. He was alive in here only because he had a necklace on. What if he tried summoning another magical item on instinct and flash-fried then and there?
"Thank Merlin I have a proper pair of glasses now," Harry heard Blue mutter behind him. "I'd hate to do this blind."
Yellow put a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Are you nervous because of the last temple?" he asked. "We can try going the other way up to the city if you want. There's probably some way for us to get past that flood."
Having his lack of confidence pointed out gave Harry a boost of spiteful resolve. He'd show Yellow! "I can do this," he said. "I have to be able to do this."
"Those mean two different things."
Harry glared at him and reiterated, "I'm fine. I can do this!"
Yellow's grip on Harry's shoulder tightened. "You and I both know that's the least reassuring string of words any of us could ever say, Green."
Harry ignored that statement and stood back up. "Okay, here's the plan!" he announced. "Only two people can be on an island at once, and only one person can be on the hooks at a time. One person crosses until he reaches an island, then the second person lands after them. Whoever's on the islands will catch anyone who falls with a Levitation Charm. Harrys, make absolutely sure only one of us is on the hooks at a time, because if any one of us misses a swing and—" he faltered, imagining one of his brothers slowly sinking in the lava, screaming in agony all the while, "…and gets hurt, the rest of us are going to fall, too. Malfoy can't catch all of us."
Red raised his hand. "Just to be sure: any of us falling in lava means death, right?"
Harry closed his eyes, took a deep breath in and out, and opened his eyes again. Why had Red just had to say that out loud? Harry was already far too aware of that. "Yes. Make sure you have someone to catch you just in case." He turned toward the trail of glowing blue-white hooks. "No point in standing around and fretting. Let's go." Harry summoned the Vine Whip into his hand.
He…summoned the whip?
Harry's free hand shot to the necklace still keeping him from death. Then he gawped at the weapon he held. Both were there. The necklace was a passive piece of equipment like the Zora Earring, not an active tool like the Lenses of Truth or the Vine Whip. The thing was, he hadn't tested that first.
Exclamations along the lines of "God, we're dumb!" echoed through the cavern as Harry's realization occurred to the rest of the group.
"Bloody hell, I could've died!" Harry said in a soft, throat-straining scream. He swayed on his feet, a hair's breadth from crouching down and having a breakdown right there.
"Nah, I would've told you," his shadow said breezily. "I just wanted to see your expression when you realized."
Harry angrily stamped on his possessed silhouette. "You prick! That scared the crap out of me!"
Shadow Harry just laughed and slid out from under Harry's boot. "Yeah, I know! I wish I had one of those Sheikah Slate things to get a photo."
After pointedly grinding his heel into Shadow Harry's glowing gray grin, Harry stomped back to the edge of the outcrop. "Just follow me one by one and pay attention to how many people are where," he called over his shoulder. He scrutinized the line of three hooks in front of him, came up with an estimate of what speed and timing he'd need to cross those large gaps, and then backed up to take a running start. Three, two, one, go!
He sprinted, leapt, and flung his whip at the first hook. As soon as the weapon's claws caught, his eyes were already on his next target. He threw his legs out in front of him to heighten his arc, willed the whip to release, and lashed it at the second hook. There was something freeing about the motion of latch-swing-soar. In the large gaps between hooks, there were instances of him hanging in the air with nothing to hold onto, held aloft only by his momentum. It brought a half-scared, half-exhilarated grin to his face.
But then came the landing. And oh, that little stone island looked so much smaller than it had from the beginning of the trail. Harry desperately worked his body to give him enough distance to reach his target, but not so much that he put a foot off the edge. How could a circle of stone two meters in diameter feel like such a difficult mark to hit?
He stuck the landing like a gymnast—a terrible one. The force of coming in like a hammered post sent a painful jolt through his ankles and knees. As a trade-off, though, he'd managed to cancel out enough of his forward motion that he didn't stumble at all, which was worth the sting. Harry limped off to the side to let the next person have their turn.
Yellow came swinging in after him, landing in a deep crouch that he stood up easily from. "I'll be your spotter," he said, motioning for Harry to continue. "Next time you land, you should make sure you bend your knees more. You might sprain something, otherwise."
"I'd settle for managing not to land with one foot in lava," Harry said, backing up along the platform. The next line of hooks was at a different angle than he'd come in from, leading to a little island that stuck a few meters out of the molten river. Risky, but doable, just like the last section. He ran and jumped.
The first hook went fine, the second was accompanied by a little panic, and uh-oh—
Harry launched himself from the second hook, caught the third, and immediately realized his mistake. 'Shorten! Shorten!' he mentally screamed at his whip as the side of the raised platform loomed in front of him. The whip shrank at the last second, yanking him upward before disengaging from the hook. Caught by surprise, Harry yelped as he bobbled in the air. He hit the platform in a painful crouch that became a terrifying roll as his body kept traveling forward against his will. By the time he managed to uncurl, his legs were hanging over the edge. Harry yanked them back with a cry of, "I hate landings!"
As if they'd heard him and decided his day needed to be made worse, a cluster of Fire Keese fluttered down and started trying to harass him off of the platform. Harry dropped his whip, scrambled to his feet, and swatted at them with his sword. "Get…back!" he grunted, cutting down two of them in one swipe. A third pushed its flaming body right into Harry's face, making him cry out and clutch at his burning eyelids. "Ow! Just die already!" He dug in his heels and flailed his sword blindly at any chittering heat source he sensed in front of him.
The squeaking and scorching stopped. He cautiously peeked out of the crook of his elbow. Had he gotten all of them?
His shadow sighed. "Kid, if you don't find someone to teach you swordsmanship, then I'm going to kidnap a tutor for you. That was pathetic."
"I'm in the middle of a literal lake of lava, I have all of a meter and a half to maneuver in, and I just had my eyes nearly set on fire!" Harry snapped. "If you kidnap someone, I'll…" He realized there was literally nothing he could threaten Shadow Harry with, save for refuse to save the world and "be boring" at the castle, as the spirit would put it. "I'll take them back home," he finished with a huff. "Why are you still here, anyway?"
"Well, a: my current options are watching you or going back to tinkering with magic objects and spells out of boredom, and b: if you're going to die horribly due to your own incompetence, then it's at least going to be on my watch."
"You were fixing those artifacts because you were bored?"
"Why is that what you latched onto instead of the 'me wanting to watch you die' thing? I know you're not a Link, but that would definitely get a rise out of my usual rivals."
Harry shrugged. "Because there are a lot of people who'd like to watch me die. I mean, there's Voldemort, of course, but I'm pretty sure my relatives and Snape would be sat there eating popcorn." He was under no illusions that he was well-liked by many people. Being famous was not the same as having others care about you. It was dangerous to assume strangers, or even acquaintances, cared; that was how he'd earned some of his worst punishments growing up, trusting people he shouldn't have with his well-being.
"Oh…that sucks."
His silhouette lightened and lost its mismatched eyes as Shadow Harry retreated. Harry watched him go with a raised eyebrow. So all he needed to do to scare the spirit off was be a little dour? Good to know.
"Green, move!" he heard one of his brothers shout behind him.
Harry hastily sidestepped as Yellow swung in. Yellow, of course, had figured out that he needed to shorten the line on his whip for the last swing and managed to land perfectly.
"How do you do that?" Harry asked with envy.
"I just think about how much pain hurts," Yellow said. "Don't you?"
"Probably not enough," Harry admitted.
There came a shriek behind them as Blue overshot his landing and had to be saved by Red. He hovered over the lava, less than a meter from planting both feet in it. With a careful motion of his staff, Red towed him onto land, whereupon Blue clung to him like he was a living life-preserver.
"That spell is hard to do with a Magic Rod," Red called uneasily to the rest of the group, patting Blue on the back. "We probably shouldn't rely on Levitation Charms too much. It felt like one wrong twitch might have sent Blue into the ceiling."
Harry grimaced. First the new wands made healing spells into harming spells, and now it was cutting into their ability to provide a safety net for each other. Great.
Well, the fastest way to get them out of danger was to just get through the danger. Harry lined himself up with the next line of hooks, a series of four leading to an even smaller speck of rock that he doubted would be able to hold one person and another person coming in for a landing. After determining that no, he didn't want to be standing on that tiny island when Yellow was trying to hit his mark, Harry scoped out the section of land after that one, a raised ledge leading into another cavern. He took a steadying breath and shook the jitters out of his arms. Four hooks and a landing with Yellow as his spotter, then three hooks with no one to catch him. He could manage that.
Harry summoned his whip back into his hand and sheathed his sword. "There isn't enough space on the next island for both of us, so I'll be going on ahead," he told Yellow. Before his brother could tell him he was being stupid, he leapt for the first hook.
Latch-swing-fly, latch-swing-fly—Harry's eyes barely flicked up at the third hook as he caught it and whipped his legs forward. After all the practice he'd gotten in the last temple, catching the hooks was easy; it was the dismount that was the challenge here. The island he was headed toward was maybe a meter around, just barely sticking out above the lava.
'Get longer,' he thought at the whip as he targeted the fourth hook. The whip complied a little too well, leading to his boots just barely clearing the deadly hazard below. Harry gritted his teeth at the flare of hot pain in his toes and focused all his attention on the tiny island. He refused to die for Shadow Harry's entertainment.
Harry landed on the island, still full of forward inertia because he hadn't wanted to risk a full upswing. He stumbled across the dark circle, internally swearing a blue streak as he fumbled for his Magic Rod. "Aguamenti!" he incanted in a panic, pointing the staff at the lava he was helplessly forced to approach.
The ensuing blast of water knocked him flat on his back. Harry laughed weakly into the cloud of steam surrounding him. He was alive! Success!
Ow, his head hurt.
Harry dragged himself back upright, clutching at where he'd slammed his skull into the stone. At least his hair had gotten long enough to serve as a bit of padding. Maybe he'd grow it out even longer so he could tie it back in a little cushion. Or maybe he should just buy a helmet next time he went armor-shopping.
He stood up, still rubbing at his head, and watched the dark spot he'd created on the surface of the river wash away. So Aguamenti was enough to cool the lava down? Interesting. It would probably be a lot more effective if the molten stone weren't in constant furious motion, though.
Okay, last platform. It was up rather high, the hooks approaching it also lifting higher up. He would have to, er…Harry closed his eyes as he thought through the physics. Every time he caught a hook, the line would be longer and it wouldn't send him up as high, so he'd have to catch a hook, shorten the line, and then keep doing that for each swing. Yeah, that made sense.
'Ooh, not looking forward to this,' Harry thought after checking over his shoulder for anyone else who might be making a crossing. Everyone else was catching their breath. He turned back to the next challenge. No room to run, so he could only jump and use his whip's shortening to add to his speed. Harry coiled his legs and sprang with all his might.
Catch, swing, shorten! He held in a scream as he was yanked up in the air. The next hook was four meters away. He caught it, snapped his body forward, and shorten! His body started going into a backflip, his building forward motion turning into torque.
'No, no, no!' Harry didn't wait for the time to be right—he just flung out his whip as quick as he could before he could tilt back too far. His arms jolted painfully in their sockets as he was jerked back upright. Harry ordered his whip to shorten one last time, shooting up three meters as the overlong line shrank. He was tossed into the air above the cliff and landed in a tumble across the rough volcanic stone.
Harry hopped up and pumped his fist. "Yeah, I didn't die! Screw you, Shadow Harry!"
The spirit laughed. "Don't count your Cuccos just yet, kiddo."
Harry's stomach dropped. The new cavern he was in was also full of lava, this time moving fast enough to splash against the knobs of cooler stone sticking out of it and launch globs of superheated rock into the air. Jets of fire shot from the sides of the huge stone column sitting in the center of the room. Instead of a line of hanging hooks leading to the column, a matching set of stala poles bridged the lava river with a line of woven metal strung between them. Each pole hosted a glowing Bluestone node that made them stand out from their surroundings. A magical shimmer surrounded the zip-line down to the room's central column, causing any lava that flew high enough to hit it to slide off. High above, at the top of the fire-spewing pillar, Harry spied another zip-line pole that must have led down to a twin that he couldn't see from this angle.
So he just had to get to the top of that column, right? How hard could that be?
He squinted into the distance. It was hard to tell one section of dark stone from another, but it appeared the Hero of Lights had built a rock-climbing course designed to pass through the intermittently spouting gouts of fire that flared from the pillar. Shining blue handholds flashed in contrast against the deep maroon stone.
"How is this a shortcut?" Harry asked in disbelief. It must have been terribly intensive to carve out the natural stone of that column and install this Bluestone stuff, especially since—as Tiamus had told him during one of Harry's questioning sessions—Bluestone was a finicky magical material that was difficult to make useful unless one was trained to work with it. Sure, this trail had lasted for an impressively long time, but it must have been so tricky to rig up and was so difficult for most people to cross that Harry failed to see the benefit of building it.
"It's an obstacle course and a shortcut. The Heroes of Hyrule aren't nerds like you Lorulean ones tend to be. Most of them like exercise," Shadow Harry said.
Harry had never before resonated so fiercely with the complaints young Ravio had littered his sword journal with. This was bloody nonsense. "Damn you, Link," he muttered, watching a tongue of fire jet out right in the middle of a series of handholds. Who did this to themselves on purpose?
Yellow was the first of the group to land behind him. "You were reckless!" he accused, punching Harry in the arm.
"Being reckless is the only way to get through here," Harry defended, rubbing at his bicep. "I mean, look at that!" He pointed at the pillar of flames and handholds. "The Hero of Lights must have been like Red times five."
Yellow's face pinched with dismay. "She built that for fun, didn't she?"
"Yup."
The rest of the group trickled in. Blue looked beyond wit's end, his sweaty hair sticking up all over the place and his eyes bright and wild with barely-contained hysteria. He breathed hard through clenched teeth, as though holding in a scream. Malfoy, meanwhile, was melting. Steaming with sweat, he clung onto Red for dear life. Even without the Lenses of Truth, Harry could see the greenness in his complexion and the ghostly image of his half-glamoured freckles catching the vivid orange glow of the rushing lava river. His skin was flaking off at a terrifying rate—worse than any sunburn Harry had ever seen Dudley come home with from a day at the seashore.
Yellow went to Malfoy's side. "Hey, did you bring extra water?" he asked gently. Malfoy's dull eyes slid in his direction before his head jerked in a mechanical nod. "You need to drink that water now," Yellow said. He and Red carefully guided the limp Slytherin to the ground. "If you need more, we can always conjure some with that neat spell you taught us. You just really need to drink something right now, okay? Red, do you know where he packed his things?"
"Yeah, I've got it." Red started rummaging through a scaly pouch on Malfoy's belt. "Where in here…?" he muttered, up to his elbow in Malfoy's wallet. "This thing works different than the Zora bags…Aha!" He pulled out a two-liter glass bottle of water and worked the cork loose. After pouring a bit of it over Malfoy's head, making the Slytherin sputter and revive a bit, he handed it over. Malfoy was too dehydrated to chew Red out for dousing him, grabbing the jug and downing it in desperate swallows as the water Red had dumped on him wafted in clouds from his clothes.
"My wallet should have shrunk to nothing when you tried to open it," Malfoy gasped once he had some human color back in his skin. "It's mokeskin."
"Oh, really?" Red tilted his head at the scaly bag. "Lucky me the magic got a little scrambled, then. At least the pocket-dimension thing still works."
"Space-Expansion Charm," Malfoy clarified. He put the empty jug in his bag, pulled out another, and dumped a fair amount on his head. "Augh, my skin's dried out," he said, raking his nails down his neck. He flinched after the attempt to scratch and glared at his nails like they'd betrayed him. Harry noticed only now that they were unusually opaque and came to sharp points. Blood trailed down over the faint impressions of Malfoy's gills. "Stupid bloody claws!"
"Literally," Red said with a grin.
Malfoy sent him a look that could curdle milk. "I know a spell that would turn those crooked fangs of yours into actual fangs, Potter. Would you like to know some of my pain?"
"Aw, don't be a grump. Besides, those claws and that bunny-jump of yours will probably be a lot of help in the next section of this place," Red said, pointing toward the obstacle course.
Malfoy's heat-flushed cheeks darkened further. "Bunny-jump?!"
"Well you don't have wings like Ruka, so it's not exactly a flying jump yet, is it?"
"I'll thank you to leave off the 'yet'," Malfoy growled, standing up. "I'm still human enough, aren't I? A Zora would have turned to smoked fish by now." He drank more from his jug of water, poured some more over himself, and then put it away. "Alright, I've bought myself a few minutes." He scanned the pillar in the middle of the room. "It's always obstacle course after obstacle course with these bloody Hyrulean Muggles," he said with a contemptuous curl of his upper lip. "One must wonder how much of the population can read better than they can monkey their way up a tree."
"Being able to monkey up a tree is way more useful than reading when your country gets attacked by monsters and mages and who knows what all the time," Harry said. "If one of the giant Moblins around here came after me on my own, I'd rather know how to climb than how to read."
"Hmph. If I had to deal with all that nonsense every few years, I'd just move to somewhere sane," Malfoy huffed. "All it would take is a Moon Pearl, a mage who knew where to use it, and a step through a portal."
"Oh, yes, picking up and moving to a place where no one speaks your language, the rules of magic are different, you have no friends, family, or papers to prove your existence would be so easy," Blue said dryly. "Right."
"A Malfoy could do it! We're raised to succeed!"
Seeing an argument incoming, Harry cut in with, "Bickering can wait until we're out of these caves and Malfoy stops melting." He gestured toward the zip-line. "How about you fight over who can cross the room faster instead?"
Blue and Malfoy looked away from each other. "I'd rather you went first," Blue said, more subdued.
"I'm not melting. Drying out is practically the opposite," Malfoy mumbled.
With that settled, Harry turned his attention back to the zip-line. Sprays of lava leapt up from the river in time with surges that rippled across the cavern. The rises in the river were preceded by louder grumbles from the volcano around them. Harry closed his eyes to listen, counting in his head. Since Death Mountain's current mood was artificial, caused by a monster messing with its pressurized heart, it was entirely possible that there was a certain tempo to the tremors.
Every count of ten. That was it. Every tenth second, there was a rumble like a thunder and a subtle quake.
Harry opened his eyes. "Before you use the zip-line, count to ten in your head," he said. "Those sprays happen every ten seconds." He pointed as a cloud of airborne lava parted around the enchanted metal cable. "It looks fairly harmless, but you have you remember that stuff is made of rocks. If you get hit, it'll feel like getting pelted by Endraal and you'll have lava cooking into your skin. If you think getting hot grease on your arm is awful, a lava burn would be a million times worse."
A wave of unease swept across the group, missing Red but hitting the others hard. Yellow suddenly looked ill. Harry could imagine what gory simulations were running through his mind. Blue coiled his fingers in his sweaty hair and stared blankly at the ground, likely imagining similar scenarios. Malfoy looked very close to crying.
"Just keep count and you'll be fine," Harry assured them. "It's really on-tempo." He hooked his whip around the zip-line, closed his eyes, and waited for the next rumble.
…7, 8, 9, 10, GO! He pushed off just after a spatter of lava globules slid around the enchanted metal cable. Harry hadn't expected his trip to the central pillar to be all that fast, given the shallow angle the zip-line was at, but he slid along at an exhilarating clip. He couldn't help an exhilarated smile at feeling the wind on his face and seeing the lava under his feet fly by. While obstacle courses still sucked, he could admit this part was fun!
He dropped from the zip-line just before he could smack into the pole on the other side and caught himself against the wall. Now, here came the sucky part. He did a heel-turn toward the gouts of flame spouting on and off between the first set of Bluestone handholds.
A cliff four meters high stood in front of him with two natural ports nested in the wall perpendicular to it. Blasts of flame shot across the climbing wall at regular intervals, adding to the pitch-black scorching along the surface of the dark stone but doing nothing to affect the handholds dotting the wall.
'I hope there isn't a trick to it,' he thought, scrutinizing the blobs of crystal as closely as he could. He was nebulously aware that people did rock-climbing for sport, though he'd never seen it for himself. The only things he'd ever climbed were trees, and even then it had been to escape Dudley's gang and avoid Aunt Marge's vicious dog, not as a hobby. Those handholds looked like they were sized and spaced for an adult; the Hero of Lights had undoubtedly been much larger than an underfed thirteen-year-old. Harry hoped that factor wouldn't hamper his group too much.
The fire came in seven-second bursts, stopping for around ten seconds in between. There was always a bubbling rumble before the fire jetted out, so he'd have some warning. Harry locked his eyes onto the first rounded blue crystal mounted on the wall and waited. The first jet started, a pillar of flame a meter around blasting out of the column. Then the second began, a couple of seconds after the first.
Harry moved as soon as the first jet had subsided. He hopped up, caught two handholds, hiked up his right foot to brace himself on a third, and pushed himself up the wall. Then he grabbed another set of handholds, felt around with his left foot until he found another one to push off against, and jumped up to catch the glowing blue bar running across the top of the wall. With seconds to spare, Harry hauled himself up to the next platform. He breathed a sigh of relief. Despite looking intimidating, this challenge was shaping up to be way easier than the last. "See! It's just climbing! You can do it!" he called back to cheer up his group. Mainly Yellow, Malfoy, and Blue, who were huddled together on the room's entry ledge. Red was already zip-lining over to join Harry.
Okay, time to face the next climbing wall. This one was built into the body of the pillar and much wider as a result. It was shaped roughly like a deep pot, with a little "handle" continuing over a platform almost hidden behind the rounded edge of the pillar and several meters up. A bed of hot red coals coated in wispy white flames blocked the path to the wall, preventing Harry from cheating by running right up to the base of the raised ledge and climbing straight up. Six…no, seven jets of fire blasted out of ports in the climbing wall at staggered intervals of five seconds on, five seconds off. They didn't spray across the whole climbing area this time, though, so that made avoiding them easier; he'd just have to make sure he wasn't in front of one of the vents when it went off. The most difficult thing would be keeping himself from slipping off the too-big, wide-spaced handholds as he avoided the flames. If he dropped from the heights he'd have to climb in order to reach that platform, he'd undoubtedly break a leg or snap an ankle. There just wouldn't be enough time for him to get his staff out and cast the fall-slowing spell. Then, on top of being in too much pain to walk, he'd have to deal with the hot coals, which he was certain wouldn't be pleasant even through the Dragon-Fang Necklace's protective spell.
Harry brightened. Broken bones and burns were much less scary than dropping into lava! He could handle those consequences just fine.
He hopped up on the wall, the spacing of the handholds forcing him to spread his limbs out a little awkwardly. "How big was this lady?" Harry grunted, pushing all his muscles to fling himself to another set of crystal knobs. The children's book they'd bought about her from that shop in Fortune City had been about the adventure that had earned her the title of "Champion", which she'd gone on at age fourteen. She'd been painted as lanky-looking compared to her trundling little voice-controlled cannon, but not too far from average. The Hero of Lights must have gone on to be on the tall side, though. Or maybe she'd spaced these out just to up the challenge.
Scaling the wall required him to repeatedly throw himself across it, and Harry quickly found himself running out of breath. He wasn't heavy, but that also meant his muscles weren't all that big. At least when he'd been swinging between hooks, he hadn't been hauling himself to a stop with each leap. Here, he had to push off with all four limbs, since his footholds were never high enough to get proper leverage, and then hope at least two extremities hit the mark when he landed so he'd be able to stop. Otherwise, he'd just continue sailing through the air until he hit the coals.
Harry saw an available jump, started to go for it, and was halted by a column of flame that erupted just over his shoulder. Mild pain lit up along the side of his face—an unpleasant warning of what would have happened if he'd made the mistake of leaping without looking. Harry squeaked in surprise and did his best impression of a shy turtle as the fire kept spouting. This was not a good place to be!
Where could he go? There was a set of three handholds below him that could work, though there was another fire port…hmm, right where his head wind up. Not that way, then. He could always go back to the left, but that would be giving up progress. To his right there were options diagonally up and diagonally down, both blocked by intermittent fire. Harry eyed the upward option, which he'd originally been aiming for. It was the riskier choice, especially since it would require two jumps across the wall to get clear of the fire, but he needed to make some vertical progress. He was hardly above the bed of coals as it was.
He waited for the fire to spout again, counting the seconds until it was over. Harry sprang right before the flames turned off, confident in their consistent timing and his ability to keep tempo. It was very much a Red sort of move, but his assumption turned out right, so no harm done! He landed right over the port, his chest in front of its line of fire. Then he flexed all his limbs again, throwing himself farther to the right—
Hot, crackling pain sank its teeth into his hands right when he needed them most. Harry screamed and forced them to latch onto the next handholds despite the searing, numbing fire in his fingers. He held on for dear life as he weathered the sensation, taking controlled breaths to push past it.
He looked around for injured Harrys. Yellow was catching up to him on the wall and Red, who looked pale and panicked (and had probably just fallen), was clinging to a set of handholds just above the pit of flaming coals. That left Blue. "Hey, Blue, you alright?" Harry called out, fully knowing the answer.
"I just had my fingers cooked and nearly cracked my skull open! DO YOU THINK I'M BLOODY ALRIGHT!?" came the answering shriek.
"Well, take a Red Potion then!" Harry told him.
"Of course I will! Who do you think I am? You?"
A jolt of energy followed, accompanied by Harry's minor aches and pains disappearing.
Yellow shot Harry a pointed look. "Yeah, who does he think he is—you?" he parroted.
Harry rolled his eyes. Yellow was still sore over his performance in the last Hylian temple. Honestly, you say one stupid thing while delirious from blood loss… "I'd take a potion if I got my fingers cooked, Yellow," he said with exasperation.
"But not when you have a serious sword wound. Got it."
Harry sighed and just started looking for another place to jump. Being in a volcano was just making Yellow extra-cautious, was all. He was usually fine with the other Harrys going out and getting themselves hurt, so long as they didn't get too hurt; in a place like this, though, there was a pretty narrow line between one and the other. A single mistake meant quite a lot more when it involved lava. Harry could understand why his normally-quiet brother had decided to be bossier today, even if he didn't enjoy being nagged.
He crossed the rest of the wall in a few more jumps, boosted by the potion Blue had drank. Really, he wasn't sure whether he would have made it if not for that; throwing thirty-something kilos of Harry sideways and then catching all that weight on awkward handholds was way more tiring than his usual exercise routine. Maybe he'd have to find some way to work climbing into his morning sword practice from now on.
Pushing his sweaty hair back—Harry really needed to invest in either a haircut or a hair-tie at this point—he walked around the pillar to take a look at the next challenge. He might as well scope it out while he was catching his breath.
'Monkey bars?' he thought, assessing the lines of glowing blue ascending diagonally in front of him. A wide ladder with stala sides and Bluestone-highlighted metal bars was mounted on either side of an 8-meter gap between the ledge Harry was standing on and a higher platform. Below the ladder awaited a long drop into fast-flowing lava, and along the flattened wall running parallel to the ladder lay—
Three tongues of fire lashed at air below the ladder for several seconds before retreating into their ports.
Yes, more fire. Of course the Hero of Lights had intentionally placed those bars right where anyone ascending them would get cooked. Why not? Link had seen an opportunity to make things harder and taken it.
His shadow snickered. "I should follow you Dark World types more often. I've never seen one of my usual rivals react to a challenge like you do."
"All she had to do was put a bridge here or something!" Harry said, gesturing in frustration toward the monkey bars. How were those supposed to work, going up? "Clearly she knew how to make Bluestone do whatever she wanted. Why did she do this with it? It just makes things so much harder for no reason!"
"Making things harder is the reason, kiddo. No pain, no gain."
"Well clearly, no one put her through enough pain," Harry huffed, glaring at the bars.
"Er, what?" Shadow Harry sounded genuinely flummoxed.
Harry looked down at him. "Pain is what teaches you not to do things. Not being in pain is the gain. Why put all this stuff in a volcano when it could be right next to her house or built into a cliff that's not surrounded by lava? Clearly, Link didn't grow up with pain, or she would've had more sense."
Shadow Harry blinked his yellow eye at him. The red one remained stuck open, ever-staring. "…Wow, you just say stuff like that without realizing, don't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"We're definitely both shadows, kid. That's all I'll say."
Harry just shook his head—he didn't get why Shadow Harry still insisted on them being similar when they had nothing in common but the memories that the spirit had copied—and walked up to the next challenge. The bars were mounted about two meters up, which put them just within range of Harry jumping to make a grab. Their spacing was, again, not the most comfortable for someone of his small stature, but manageable. He was tempted to try swinging across with his whip instead of going the expected route, though. Just because the Hero had decided to make life harder for no good reason, that didn't mean Harry had to go along with it himself.
Actually, why not? Screw the rules—he had a cool whip.
Harry waited for the fire to cycle off, snapped his whip at a bar around a third of the way across, and jumped. He shortened his whip as he went, preparing ahead of time for the final swing. Today was not the day he'd learn what smacking into the side of a hot stone cliff felt like.
He crossed in record time, completely untouched by the fire. A wide grin split his face. There was something especially satisfying about breaking the "rules" of a physical challenge. It was a thing the temples never let them get away with, what with their puzzle-magic.
The next challenge (and hopefully the last, because Harry wasn't sure Malfoy and Blue would survive this obstacle course if it went on for much longer) was a series of little stepping-stones spaced across a ten-meter-long bed of flaming coals. Each foothold was rounded for maximum inconvenience and, again, designed for someone who would have towered over Harry.
"Dammit, Link did grow up tall," Harry muttered.
He lined himself up with the scattered arrangement of footholds. With a final curse aimed at the Hero of Lights and her long legs, he started leaping across.
Merlin, it was hot. The necklace protected him from the ambient temperature, but not the added heat from the coals. Sweat poured off of him and floated away in a trail of steam as he sprang from stone to stone. He hissed a curse when he caught a glimpse of his new boots charring in the heat. Link couldn't have positioned these footholds a little higher up? Or added Bluestone caps to make them taller, maybe?
Death Mountain rumbled, sending a shiver through the pillar. Harry landed on the next stone just as it shook, causing his foot to catch it at an off angle. He wobbled, wind-milling his arms. As hot as standing on the step-stones was, he did not want to fall into those coals! Coiling the one leg he'd managed to brace on the rock, he tossed himself desperately at the nearest foothold. Harry caught that one wrong, too, and staggered forward.
White-hot pain and instinctual panic replaced Harry's ability to think. He took off across the coals at an all-out sprint, probably faster than he'd ever gone before. The pain faded to background noise under the deafening mental screech of "RUNRUNRUN!"
He barely screeched to a halt before he ran off the pillar altogether. He sat down and curled up in a ball, working through the pain clawing at his feet with the power of internal screaming. While the boots had protected his feet somewhat, they'd also charred and cracked apart in some places, letting his feet feel a measure of the flames coming off of the coals. After a deep breath to collect himself, Harry wiped his tears away and sat up. He would be okay. His feet were still in one piece and he hadn't directly applied them to the coals, so the burns couldn't be any worse than second-degree. He didn't have to waste a—
Yellow came hopping across the bed of coals, as unfairly graceful as ever. While balanced on one foot, his other tucked up by his knee, he fired a torpedo glare at Harry. A shiver of fright went down Harry's spine. This volcano really wasn't doing Yellow's mental state any favors. He fished a Red Potion out of his bag and downed it before his brother could give him an earful. Immediately, the agony screaming in his half-cooked feet lifted. Huh, maybe he'd been hurt a little worse than he'd assumed. It felt like he might have had some nerve damage messing with the pain signals there.
"That's three potions we've used now, and none of us have come even close to dying yet," Harry groused when Yellow joined him. "We still have a whole temple to get through and a volcano monster to fight!"
Yellow's glare was cold and sharp. "Green, if your feet didn't get proper treatment soon enough, they would have rotted off. And even without an infection, they would have taken weeks to heal." He crossed his arms. "If you'd stop being stupid, I wouldn't have to be mean, but here we are. You know how injuries work as well I do, so act like it."
"We can get more than one injury before we heal ourselves, Yellow. I could have still walked out of here." Harry started mending his boots. The fact that they looked an utter wreck was just proof that they'd done their best to protect him.
"Were you planning to hobble around on rare-done feet for however long it took for you to get set on fire again?" Yellow asked, raising an eyebrow. "What if it was an hour? Two? Prince Tiamus said that healing potions only reverse wounds less than an hour old, and they can't do anything for an infection."
"I'd take a Red Potion before the time limit if I needed to," Harry said, annoyed. "I do have sense."
Anger carved new lines in Yellow's face. "Do you?" he snarled.
Harry was so taken aback that he actually found himself warily stepping away from his brother. He'd never seen this kind of reaction from him before.
"You almost died. I saw the insides of your arms dripping out on the floor. It was more than just blood," Yellow said, tears forming at the edges of his furiously narrowed eyes. "Do you know what it's like, watching your brother die and hearing him say he doesn't want your help? Do you?!" He stepped up to Harry, putting them nose to nose. "I'm not letting that happen again if I can help it. Do you hear me?" he growled. "If I have to make you hate me to keep you alive, then fine. I'll be the pushiest, most horrible jerk alive. But you will live, goddammit!" He spun around on his heel and walked toward the zip-line mounted atop the pillar, sniffling and wiping the tears away.
Harry watched his brother hook his whip around the glowing cable and zoom away toward the bright light of the cave's exit, totally at a loss. Yellow had been acting mostly normal these past few weeks, hadn't he? Harry had known that Yellow had been bending just as much under the stress of constant supervision as the rest of them, despite his relative lack of complaints, but he hadn't suspected his brother was holding in this level of emotion. Just how much fear had Yellow been quietly suppressing this entire time? Why hadn't he told any of the rest of them about it until now? Remorse panged in Harry's chest. If he'd known his brother was so scared for him, he wouldn't have brushed him off earlier.
"Hey, look, treasure!" Red's loud, brash voice shouted behind him.
Harry was suddenly aware of the tears steaming in his eyes. He hurriedly wiped them away before turning around. "Y-Yeah?" he said.
Red ran over to a crimson treasure chest sitting in the middle of the platform atop the pillar. "It must be a prize for finishing the obstacle course!" he crowed. Opening it, he pulled out a slim, simple stala wand topped by a little globe of Bluestone. It looked rather like a luminous lolly with a bronze stick. The orange crystal on top flashed turquoise and shone a narrow beam of light back the way they'd come.
Shadow Harry cackled.
Harry glared at him. "What."
"I can read the enchantment on that thing. It's a locator for the Hero of Lights's other training courses," Shadow Harry said, his mismatched eyes curling along with his smirk. "Now you can find these 'shortcuts' wherever she left them across Hyrule just by following that handy little doohickey. Don't you love it, Green?"
Red gasped with delight. "There's more?"
"Yep, and according to what I read while all of you were puttering around town, the Hero of Lights would have placed a treasure at the end of each challenge just for adventurers like you. Ain't that considerate?"
"Wicked!" Red practically clicked his heels with joy. He leapt onto the zip-line to go tell Yellow the "good news".
Harry watched him go, and then glowered furiously at his possessed shadow. "Really? You just saw Yellow freak out about this place, and you want Red to drag us to another?"
"No pain, no gain, kiddo!" Shadow Harry sang. "If it makes you feel better, I'll turn the other rewards into spell scrolls to make things fair. See, I'll get to be entertained by watching you struggle not to fall down a mountain or something, and all of you will get a prize at the end. Win-win! Yellow might lose it again, but hey, at least he'll be a winner." He winked at Harry and then faded again.
Harry let loose an inarticulate yell and fired off all the meanest spells he knew into the lava far below. Every spell went off like a shot from a gun, jolting his arm. They made the molten rock jump and spatter against the dark rocks parting the wide river. Harry only stopped when it seemed like his brain might shut off in protest. He sat down, breathing hard and waiting for his vision to stop fuzzing out. Of course Red would want them to take every shortcut they could find, and Blue, upon learning that every shortcut came with a prize, would agree with him. Ordinarily Harry wouldn't be too against it, either, even if the concept of a useful shortcut being made intentionally more difficult offended his sensibilities. Hell, if Malfoy decided to keep coming along, he'd probably want that reward, too.
But Yellow…Harry didn't want to put him through the wringer just for treasure. Yellow was such a tricky person for even his siblings to understand. He seemingly showed his emotions on his sleeve, and yet he also held his feelings in with such iron control that Harry hadn't understood them until now.
'Wait, it's not feelings. It's pain,' he mentally corrected after some thought. Yellow would cry if he was scared and smile if he was happy, but if something truly bothered him or he felt like his honest reaction might cause a fuss, he'd lock his emotions in a box and never let anyone know. It was the same way Harry had hidden all signs of pain from Dudley and his gang, who'd take advantage of any weakness they could sniff out. Yellow was stuck in that mindset because he was the cautious Harry. As close-lipped as Harry could already be about certain things, Yellow took that to the same extreme as Blue took his love of learning about the world and Red his affinity for adventure.
Harry ruffled his hair with frustration. How was he supposed to help Yellow deal with that? That degree of emotional caution hadn't sprung from nothing, after all. Harry, and therefore Yellow, had a very good reason to hold certain things in. For example, if his friends or Professor Lupin knew how many mental knots Harry sometimes found himself in, they'd have a collective conniption and get the Harrys in all kinds of trouble. So convincing Yellow to just stop being careful wasn't an option. It was good that he had practical worries about dangerous situations and also had enough emotional control to lock his emotions down when he needed to; it was just bad that his level of anxiety was hurting him and he didn't think his brothers should be in the know.
"Why do people think I'm one of the smart Harrys?" he groaned, flopping onto his back. He was a better match with Red, for sure. Harry laid there, out of ideas, waiting for Blue and Malfoy to arrive. He hoped they were in one piece; as Yellow had shown him, Harry definitely wasn't cut out for taking care of people.
Item Get: Trail-Finder. Crafted by the Hero of Lights three centuries ago, the Trail-Finder glows brighter and shines a guiding beam as its holder approaches the hidden games and obstacle courses that Link hid across Hyrule for adventurers to find.
Notes:
-Just in case anyone forgot, the Harrys have two quick-select wheels they're working with: Items/Weapons, and Equipment. The way they cycle through their inventory is more like in Four Swords Adventures or the Oracles games (sword is constant, secondary item switches out) than Breath of the Wild. If the Dragon-Fang Necklace had been an Item rather than a piece of Equipment, the necklace would have vanished when they conjured the whip and they would've been cooked on the spot.
-The Hero of Lights grew up to be huge for a Hylian (whose avg. height is 5'7"), at six-foot-four and two-hundred thirty pounds of solid muscle. Part of it was her genetics, but most of it was a certain magical talent that we'll get into later on.
-That Red Potion Blue drank had a secondary Stamina-restoring effect.
-The more time Shadow Harry spends actually talking to the Harrys instead of just spying, the more confused he's going to get lol. He's accustomed to dealing with sunshine children favored by Hylia, not abused, quietly traumatized Dark World kids.
-None of the Harrys are okay, but especially not Yellow.