Last-chapter recap: The Harrys searched for a Great Fairy's broken pieces around the Great Plateau's market and religious landmarks. In doing so, they met Ron's and Ginny's dimensional alternates, Romani and Malon, and experienced their first taste of Hyrule's concentrated Light.
It's Great Fairy time! Art of Hora and the generic "model" for Great Fairies in this fic have been posted on garden-eel-draws under my "characters" tag and linked/displayed on Ao3.
Jitters still danced in Harry's fingers as he lined up in front of Hora's flower with his brothers. He couldn't stop thinking about the soul-deep fire that had lit up his nerves when he'd touched the Temple of Time.
Brushing against that faith-soaked stone had been like baring his heart to the sun. He would have expected some sense of judgment—a wordless shout of "unworthy!"—but instead he'd simply been scorched through every layer of his being. It was less painful that being declared the equivalent of a demon, he supposed. Now, if only he could shake off the memory of feeling like big chunks of his hands had been burned away…
The converging lights of Hora's five pieces recaptured his attention as they flew up in a bright spiral. They swirled around in the air like a small flock of starlings, chattering with one another in their squeaky voices, and then darted one by one into their giant flower-shell via a small gap in the petals.
Magic washed across the starlit clearing. Where the grass and trees had been dark and misty, a soft, glittery golden haze now wafted up. Golden light blazed from within Hora's flower. A deep gonging sound and a whisper of tinkling laughter accompanied the mental sense of something in the world clicking into its proper place.
Hora's flower opened in a sparkling spray of fairy lights, revealing a pool of rippling water backlit by a glowing golden headboard. The inner petals of Hora's flower were a sunset pink, the tips of the longer ones in back coming to points decorated by turquoise teardrops. Even when open, the flower still bore a distant resemblance to a seashell.
Two huge, glistening blue-black hands clamped onto the edges of the pool, followed by a smaller pair. Then the water parted to admit a great head decorated by a pink conch twice as long as Harry was tall, one pair of shoulders on either side of a seashell brassiere trimmed with swinging strings of pearls, and another set of shoulders.
Memories of past Great Fairies (human-looking, two-armed, smaller) flashed confusedly behind Harry's eyes in the face of this gigantic, alien being. Hora resembled a photo-negative of a shapely human woman as much as she did a fifteen-meter-tall Buddha statue made of semi-opaque glass; her face in particular was carved in a stylized way that would have looked deeply uncanny if it were made of flesh. Silver bracelets and arm cuffs, some decorated with pearls and others with Bluestone, sparkled in the golden aura floating around her. Rippling blue-white hair wrapped around her head in a heavy, sculpted braid, decorated with shells that resembled the ones holding up her big, shiny bosom. Shades of turquoise light flowed through it like water.
"I'm baaack!" Hora sang, flourishing one pair of hands and striking a modeling pose with the other. "Ohhh, it feels so nice to have arms again!" She rolled her shoulders and stretched them out. The Great Fairy's voice wasn't loud, nor was it as deep as Harry would expect from someone three times the size of the giant Zora who'd made his adventuring bag. Instead, Hora's words seemed to come from everywhere at once at a comfortable volume, carrying an echo like ringing crystal.
"Big!" Yellow peeped behind Harry.
"How heavy d'you reckon those melons are?" Red whispered to Blue in English. Rather than lewd, his tone was closer to genuine curiosity.
Blue responded with equal interest, "That depends on whether they're composed of glass or flesh. Either way, easily as much as a car apiece. They're the size of boulders!" He folded his arms and tilted his head to one side. "How does she squish like that? What is she made of?"
"Think we can get Green to ask?"
"Maybe."
Harry cast both of them a dirty look over his shoulder as he walked up to Hora's spring. He should have known those two would eventually team up to get him to ask weird questions. As he approached, Hora flicked a hand toward the flower petals in front of her, transfiguring them into a set of golden steps that led to a small platform.
"Hello there, little one," Hora cooed, leaning down closer to Harry's level. Her bathtub-sized pink and blue eyes roved over him. "My, you're rather young for your race, aren't you?" She reached out and gently tapped one long blue nail on the hilt of the Four Sword sticking up over Harry's shoulder. "My condolences for being chosen by the goddesses at such an age. They don't pay much attention to the growth cycles of mortals, I don't think."
Harry's cheeks warmed with shame. "I, er, I wasn't really chosen by anyone," he mumbled. An old protective enchantment on Hogwarts, or perhaps the manifested spirit of the school, had simply led him to a forgotten room. He'd probably only been sought out because he could speak to the magic snake carving. "We don't have goddesses like yours where I'm from. They faded away when the kingdom of Lorule fell."
The Great Fairy gasped. "That's horrible!" she exclaimed. "How have your people survived with no one to guide the life force of your world?"
"We just, er, found other ways to power things, I guess," Harry said, reminded uncomfortably of the lecture on pollution he'd gotten in his last year of schooling before Hogwarts. Hyrule's energy sources only worked on a small, carefully limited scale, but also burned a lot cleaner than anything back in the Dark World. The only pollution he'd seen here were the piles of animal bones and discarded fruit rinds and cores left by monsters after their meals.
"Do you have any guidance at all on your quest?" Hora asked worriedly. "I could ask around the other spirits and see if there are any who would know about these kinds of things…"
Once again, Harry was struck by the strange tendency of Light World people to instantly adopt him. First he'd had Zoras calling him "hatchling", then the Gerudo and Gorons giving him free food and clothes on Death Mountain, then Link and Avoka helping him in all kinds of ways for no good reason, and now this nice stranger was volunteering to find him a quest guide! Light World people were far too willing to go out of their way to give him things. Seriously, what if he were a bad person who wanted to take advantage?
"Thank you for the offer, ma'am, but we're okay," he told her. "We have a quest guide who's dealt with a lot of Heroes before." He held back his guilt with a silent reassurance that it wasn't a lie, just the truth phrased a certain way. "He's met people with the Four Sword before, too."
"Is Kaepora Gaebora still kicking around, then?" Hora wondered, tapping a nail against her pouty turquoise lips.
Harry choked on his spit as the Four Sword finally decided to match a name and human face to the giant owl in its wobbly Hero-memories. Kaepora. Gaebora. Link's father, Raurim, and the ancient name his had come from, Rauru. Link's family had a horned owl as their crest. Too many things lined up for that kid not to be descended from Old Hyrule's last Sage of Light.
Yeah, Link was absolutely doomed to find a magic sword one day.
He heard half-stifled snickers from his brothers behind him as he fought to regain his composure. Having never felt was it was like to have a stranger's memories unexpectedly dumped into their head mid-conversation (often too late for them to be useful), they always found it entertaining when the Four Sword blindsided him.
"N-No, it's not him this time," Harry said after managing to clear his throat. "They would know each other, though."
"Alright, if you're sure," Hora said uncertainly. "Now, what would you like for your wish? I did promise to give you a freebie for helping me out."
"Could we have a Moon Pearl, please?" Harry asked. "Or, if you don't have one, could you point us toward someone who does?"
"A Moon Pearl? What an interesting request," she remarked. "You're in luck—a mortal a few centuries back gave me one in exchange for a favor." She raised her arms and spiraled down into her pool with hardly a splash.
"What do you want to bet the mortal who gave her that pearl was a blond girl named Link who loved building puzzle rooms and had a pet laser cannon following her around?" Red asked. "Because if there's one thing I've learned from listening to Blue mutter to himself in the middle of the night, it's that everything in Hyrule is connected to something. Things happen in big circles around here."
"That's kind of what having goddesses and a functional life-energy cycle does," Shadow Harry muttered from underfoot. "Reincarnation happens in long enough cycles for mortals to forget their past selves and wind up treading the same paths they took centuries and millennia before. Everything always leads into the next thing."
"How many times has the Spirit of Courage circled around, do you think?" Blue asked.
"Take the total time of Hyrule's existence and divide by about two and a half centuries." Shadow Harry replied.
"But how old is Hyrule?"
"Ha! Like I'd know. Go ask Hylia, maybe."
"The goddess?"
Hora pulled herself out of her spring again, this time pinching a blue-black sphere between her long blue nails. In her giant hand it really did look like a pearl, rather than an eccentric crystal ball. "You know about the legends surrounding these, right?" she asked as she handed it over. "Mortals who associate with Divination have a scary tendency to suddenly vanish without explanation. My big sisters said that's why Moon Pearls fell out of fashion with Seers. No one knows why it kept happening, so be careful, alright?"
Oh, this was interesting. Harry had never been on the side of knowing why an ancient mystery had taken place before. "The reason those people disappeared is because they opened doors between worlds by accident, fell through, and couldn't see the portal to go back through it. Moon Pearls don't just let people see the future; they can make openings between dimensions, too," he explained. "We're making a portal on purpose, don't worry. We need to get back to the Dark World."
"Some bad stuff is going down there," Red said.
"And the effects of that might start spreading from random spots around Hyrule, if Vaati uses the same method to siphon power in other parts of our world," Blue warned. "Tell your sisters that if they see the ground crumbling into gray dirt anywhere near their flowers, they need to move house as soon as possible. If they stick around, they'll turn into dust, too."
The Great Fairy nodded, wide-eyed. "Okay," she said."Dearie me, I didn't know all this big stuff was happening. It's hard to keep track of what's going on out here on this plane of existence, since I only get news when visiting mortals tell it to me. I'll pass your message on to my big sisters, for sure." She rested her lower arms on the rim of her pool and leaned forward. "Before you go, is there anything else you'd like to ask me for while you're here? Your equipment is, well…" She gave them a sympathetic look. "Let's just say it could use a pick-me-up."
Harry saw overlapping visions of himself standing before smaller, more human-looking Great Fairies again, this time dropping different weapons into their pools. "Would we pay you in Rupees?" he asked.
She shrugged. "That would work for some things. Any given spell takes a certain amount and specific kind of power. Rupees are good for general improvements, like boosting the protective capabilities of armor or increasing the damage a weapon can cause. If you want to boost the specialized magic already laid on an object, I'll need both Rupees and magical materials."
Hora snapped her fingers, conjuring a wooden sign next to Harry that sprang out of the golden platform he was standing on. "For instance, laying a blessing of durability and protectiveness on your robes would take this much," she said, waving a hand toward the sign. A "100" appeared in painted letters, followed by a green Rupee symbol. "Meanwhile, improving upon the magic of a Fire Sword would require these materials." The sign's display shifted to a bullet list consisting of "3 Fireproof Lizards", "5 Fire ChuChu Jelly Drops", and "20 Rupees". "I'm rather young for a Great Fairy, so I don't have the skills and power needed for high-level blessings yet, but I can improve most weapons at least once and clothing once or twice." She rested her chin thoughtfully on one hand."If you've got anything really old that you found in a dungeon and want to spruce up, you'll have go ask Rasen—my eldest sister on the mainland. Archaic magic is weird and complicated, and she and the remaining sea fairies are the only ones who still know how to fiddle with it. I don't know where Rasen's flower is right now on the mortal plane, though."
"If we boosted our clothes, would all four of us be able to get that spell at once, or would we have to pay a hundred Rupees each?" Harry asked. His mind turned over different options. Improving their basic Hylian outfits—school robes, adventuring belts, leather armor, tunic, leggings, and boots—was a must. All of those clothes were things they wore almost daily now. Yellow had that new bunny cloak that they hadn't added to their summons list yet, since he and Harry weren't sure it was worth taking up one of those limited slots with a piece of clothing. He'd place that as a low priority for improvement. Red's new fire sword was on their conjuring list as a back-up blade, though, which meant a boost to one would probably ripple across to the others. Then there was their bow, which was underpowered due to it being designed for children learning how to hunt small game. If he improved that, it might bring it up to the power of at least an average adult hunting bow.
"You could drop all copies of the same item my pool at the same time, if the Four Sword isn't multiplying things across," Hora said. "A blessing can be spread as wide as needed without weakening. It's limited by specificity, not quantity."
Blue stepped up next to Harry, rubbing his hands together and grinning sinisterly. "Excellent. Let's get started."
0
Harry took in the scene of gray devastation that had rolled across half of the Golden Cliffs. This close to the core of the problem, he could actually feel it. A chilling, prickling sense of wrongness danced up and down his spine. It was a little hard to breathe out here, the air feeling thin and cold. The air that remained gently tugged at his broom, urging him to drift closer to the field of death spread across the sandstone plateaus in front of him like spilled paint.
He was supposed to find a weak point in the Veil to place a portal here. How, though, when the soundless roar of the growing vacuum was clouding his senses? The spot where his sword-induced senses resided felt like a ball of anxious static right now.
"You're not having any sword-feelings?" Yellow asked. "Even with half of this ridge turned to dust, there's still a huge area to comb through for an invisible weird spot. Technically we have all, day, but…I mean, we kind of don't."
Harry shook his head. "The only thing I can sense is the black hole over there." He pointed to a distant spot above a high pinnacle of the plateaus. It looked like a heat-shimmer floating in the air, but it positively screamed of danger.
"That's what's causing all of this?" Yellow squinted into the distance. "Oh, huh. It just looks like a tiny mirage. It must be a lot bigger and scarier on the other side, then."
Red took out the Trail Finder and twirled the crystal-headed metal lolly between his fingers. "The Hero of Lights was connected to all this goddess-stuff in the Light World, wasn't she?" he said. "What if she had magic senses like Green does?"
"I only have sword-senses because my magic taped the Four Sword back together after Vaati almost broke it," Harry pointed out. "It bound me to it a lot closer than it should have. Even the Hero of Time never had the Master Sword talking in his head." He would know, because he'd been reading the boy's journal and Link would have spent at least a whole entry squealing about how awesome it was to have a talking psychic sword friend in addition to Navi traveling with him on his quest. That kid had been desperately lonely.
"Yeah, but the Four Sword is helping you by connecting you to the memories of past heroes. So it's basically doing what the Spirit of Courage does for the people who reincarnate with it, but secondhand," Red said. "The Hero of Lights might have been able to feel around for portal spots and she could have built one of her puzzles on top of one. She wouldn't have had to know why it felt interesting there, just that it seemed like a cool, spooky place to put her stuff."
"It's as sound a hypothesis as any," Blue said. "And it's worth a shot, if there's too much interference in the air for Green to be of any use."
Harry rolled his eyes. "Well, excuse me for not being able to hear a potential portal over the bloody hole in existence over there."
They wove down toward the Golden Cliffs in a back-and-forth search pattern, Red leading the group and waving around the Trail Finder in search of a signal. The Golden Hills, where they weren't featureless giant stairs coated in the gray powder of what had once lived there, were an exotic-looking area. Shallow marshes interrupted the sandstone, dotted with funny bottle-shaped trees. Wild hares and rabbits hopped between patches of scrubby green-gray bushes and brownish grass, while loping coyotes patrolled in packs to search for prey.
Monsters patrolled the place, too. The orange and yellow stripes of the Electric Lizalfoses in the wetlands helped them camouflage against the sandstone, but they didn't hide the bright flash of the electric jolts they used to fry any animals that came close enough. On dry plateaus, the sun reflected off the red and teal skin of Moblins sitting around in crude encampments. Bokoblins, some with warning horns tied at their waists, stood on raised boulders around the Moblins clustered by the fire pit in the middle, their crystal eyes alert and searching.
Harry chewed on the inside of his cheek as he did a head-count on a camp a couple of hundred feet below him. That was three Red Moblins and two blue ones down there, surrounded by four bow-wielding Blue Bokoblins on watch duty. A banged-up looking treasure chest, maybe dragged away from a slain group of travelers, sat by the fire pit like bait for any cocky would-be monster hunters.
To Harry's shame, he wasn't sure he and his brothers would have won if they'd barged into that camp. While he could match up against all nine feet and however many tons of bulky muscle that made up a Red Moblin on his own (if he didn't decide to use any risky, untested tactics) there was no telling how much stronger, faster, and more cunning the blue ones were. The Bokoblin sentries wouldn't be too hard to disarm if the Harrys snuck up on them, but if any of those blue monsters got ahold of a sword, they were skilled and durable enough to take up a fair amount of the Harrys' time. Time they wouldn't have if any one of those sentries used their warning horn to call over five Moblins at once.
Red zoomed up next to him. "Ooh, is that a treasure chest?" he asked, leaning forward on his broom to scan the camp.
Harry lurched to the side to seize him by the back of his robes. "Leave it," he growled.
Red pouted. "C'mon, Green, we can take 'em! What was all that training for, if not for this?" He waved a hand toward the camp.
"They're not causing any problems for anyone out here, and we've got more important things to do right now," Harry told him. "If we're going to fight that many monsters, it'll take planning, not just barging in, and planning takes time. Also, knowing us, if we win, we're going to be all excited about it and hop right over to the next camp. And another, and another. We've got a black hole to stop and maybe a temple to find first."
Red groaned. "Ugh, patience. Fine, I'll wait for now. Black holes being destroyers of everything fun, and all that." He raised up the Trail Finder. Its orange head finally flared blue and began shining a short beam of light toward the road that clove through the sandstone ridge. "Here's hoping we get a good fight on the other side of that portal!"
They followed the light to the narrow valley that the main sandstone-paved travel path of the Golden Cliffs waggled through. Ahead, like a specter looming through the haze of sand kicked up by the strong wind, lay the grayness. It turned the light, warm stone of the plateaus darker and cooler, dyeing the valley an ominous blue.
Behind them lay a long, massive half-cylinder taken out of the earth and refilled with headache-inducing visual static. From what Harry could make out by forcing himself to stare into the dimensional weirdness, it looked as though one of the goddesses had taken her personal ice cream scoop and dragged it across the ground. Harry didn't know how to recognize layers of stone on sight, but he was willing to bet that was the basin of Din River, carved out all the way down to the bedrock. Wherever Vaati had inadvertently sent it, the channel had gone there in one solid piece.
As they flew closer to the cave the Trail Finder had indicated, which was marked from the outside only by two tiny chips of Bluestone, Harry felt two invisible hands squeeze his shoulders. He nearly screamed before realizing it was just Shadow Harry.
"I'm not so sure about this, Hero," the spirit fretted in his ear. "You're cutting it awfully close here. Like I said, I don't want to feel you get culled from the reincarnation cycle, even if your world's version of it is probably all sad and broken like everything else there. For a spirit like me, it hurts."
Harry looked over at the Silent Zone ahead. Here, the winds were an odd mixture of out and in. Out, because the sandstorm raging in the desert was big enough to stir up dirt all the way out here. In, because the lack of air within the field of death less than fifteen meters away was drawing in and killing all the wind around it. Harry's robes were fluttering, being pushed back from the desert one second and dragged toward it the next.
"I'm sure it'll be fine," Harry told the spirit. Shadow Harry thought they were all idiots, but even Red had the sense not to mess with the moon dust. If interdimensional decay had crept into the Hero of Lights' puzzle, they'd just have to work around it.
The Harrys filed one by one into the cave, tucking their brooms into their bags once they landed inside the small, well-lit chamber that was the first room. "What kind of puzzle do you think it might be?" Yellow asked as they walked toward the dark doorway at the back of the room.
Harry preemptively conjured his Magic Lamp. "I'm hoping it's a straightforward obstacle course so we can get done with it quickly."
Red and Blue reached the opening first, passing a lagging Harry and Yellow, who'd hung back with him. They walked in with their lamps raised, squinting into the dark.
"Well, damn," Red remarked. "That's a shame."
Blue pressed his lips together and put a hand on his hip. "It looks like robbers managed to get in here," he said. "What a bunch of inconsiderate arseholes. They broke what they couldn't steal!"
Released tension and disappointment played tug-o-war in Harry's chest. "Really? They ruined the whole place?" He jogged forward to take his own look at the next room.
The Hero's Trail was indeed destroyed beyond all functionality. A couple of giant brass mirror frames laying on their sides and the partially dismantled floor mounts of more mirrors were all that remained. A shaft of natural light shone through a square hole cut straight up through the ceiling, falling upon where a swiveling mirror should have been. Going by the placement of the mounts, which the bandits must not have been able to work free from the floor, the puzzle would have consisted of bouncing light back and forth across the room, mirror to mirror, until they found the right angle to shine it on a circular-shaped thing that had once been mounted on the open stone doors at the back of the room.
"Aww," Yellow said, going over to one of the mirror frames. "What a crummy thing to do! They could have just solved the puzzle and taken their prize, but they had to go and ruin it for everyone else!" He laid a hand on the tarnished metal. "You'd think, as easy as it is to get money here, people wouldn't stoop to such a mean level of robbing."
Red sighed, his shoulders sagging. "People are people, and some people will always find reasons to be arseholes."
Harry studied the room. This was his first glimpse of a kind of puzzle that might very well carry over into any major temples or dungeons out in the desert. Assuming one of the Gerudo structures Vaati had stolen was a hiding spot for a Sacred Maiden's power crystal, he wanted to be prepared.
There was a nudge between his shoulder blades. "Pick up the pace, kid!" Shadow Harry urged. A dark tendril of solid air snaked out of Harry's collar, curled around his chin, and turned his head to the side.
The blood drained from Harry's face. Grayness had leaked through the wall. Not only that, but it was moving fast enough that he could see it spreading. It bled through the stone closest to the Silent Zone he'd seen outside like wine through a tablecloth. The fancy bronze moulding that ran along the ceiling quietly crumbled to dust on that side of the room.
Harry pulled Yellow along behind him and gave Red and Blue hurried shoves. "Gotta go, go, go!" he shrilled. "The room's turning to dust!"
Blue twisted around to look. "The Silent Zone has caught up already? How fast is it spreading?"
The fallen mirror frame closest to the gray wall was now being consumed. "Fast enough!"
They leapt up the stairs that zig-zagged between the mirror platforms. Broken glass crunched under their boots and made their footing slip. Harry caught Blue as his brother skidded forward on the next mirror platform, and Yellow saved Red from cracking his head on the stairs.
"Yellow, the Moon Pearl!" Harry gasped out when they'd reached the top room of the stairs. There had probably been a red and gold treasure chest in here at some point, but it had been carried off like most of the mirror frames. More importantly, Harry could feel the visual magnetism of a potential portal. It was the opposite of the rip in reality outside, drawing his eyes toward the center of the room.
Yellow pulled the Moon Pearl out of his bag and passed it like a basketball. Harry caught it and kept his eye on the wall to his right as grayness began bleeding through it. "Hold onto me. Tight," he ordered. "We've got to—"
"Wait a second!" Shadow Harry sprang from Harry's shadow holding a rolled-up scroll in one hand. He smacked Harry on the forehead with it.
Harry's breath caught in his lungs as the magical details of creating expanded internal space poured painfully into his ears. Once he could speak again, he spluttered, "Wh-What the hell—?"
"I added your bags to your summons list so your wizard magic will keep your Light World things from breaking during the trip," the spirit said breathlessly. "Now get us out of here before we all die!" The wall behind him had turned to purplish gray chalk and more grayness was creeping up from where they'd entered the room.
The brothers linked arms, Harry holding the Moon Pearl awkwardly in front of his chest with both hands, and ran forward toward where the room felt the strangest. In a smooth visual shift from blue-lit sandstone to sunlit brick, they crossed worlds.
What hit Harry before anything else—sights, sounds, or smells—was the heat. He wilted to his knees as all of the energy seemed to leave him at once. It was unfathomably, horrifically hot. The air pressed in on him with the force of a lead weight, leaving him in a wheezing heap on the ground.
In contrast to his nearly paralyzed body, Harry's eyes flicked around frantically. What was going on? Where was he?!
Everything was lit with a bizarre tinge of yellow. It was like sunset lighting, but higher-contrast and…foggy. The world as seen through a misty glass. A blurry halo surrounded the bright things and shadows were dark enough to swallow all details. The ghostly lighting came not from a sunset, but a glaring yellow sky that loomed above. Cloudless, vast, and heavy, the field of yellow was interrupted only by a dim white sun.
Nope, scratch that. Two brilliant ribbons of white-gold light arced through the sky, coming from somewhere not too far from where he lay. They looked like paper cut-outs laid atop the world. They simply did not fit in a way that made his head throb. One soared off into the distance, the beam continuing until it disappeared beyond the horizon. The other went up at a steep angle, made a hairpin turn, and slammed right back down where it began. Blinding threads violently twisted along their lengths like fibers in a rope struggling to break free.
He snuffled into the sandy mud under his face, struggling to sit up against the immense pressure forcing him to the ground. The simple act of fighting against the air exhausted all the remaining strength in his body. By the time he'd gotten upright, his arms were shaking and threatening to collapse.
He was in a river bed. But there were buildings and a street around it. There were cars and buildings inside it. Blinking blearily and panting as he resisted the force of gravity, he searched for any familiar landmarks. Where on earth—?
His eyes alit on the word "London" plastered across the side of an overturned double-decker city bus. London? This was London?
Didn't London have a whole lot of people?
There were no people. Not a single one. He saw cars, all positioned like they'd been driving around normally until a river had suddenly appeared in the middle of the road. Lights were on in the shops he glimpsed beyond the other side of the riverbed. There should have been people walking around looking confused and scared, searching for their car or lost family members. Even after a disaster like this, London shouldn't have been empty. There weren't even any bodies!
Instead of people, there were monsters. Moblins—the smaller, man-sized ones that had patrolled certain halls of Hogwarts—were clustered around a car maybe thirty yards away, ripping out parts of the interior and marveling at any shiny trinkets they found inside. The hoof-steps of others clunked on the roadway that ran along the edge of the riverbed spliced through the street. He could hear Wizzrobes laughing somewhere nearby and smelled foul smoke from something burning. A Buzz Blob was threatening to wobble its way over Yellow's foot.
Harry cried out in attempt to get the electrified monster's attention and lead it away. His voice didn't have the strength to leave his desert-dry, aching throat. There was a water jug in his bag, but Harry was in no state to lift it to his lips. He weakly scuffled one hand on the ground, his numb, burning fingers searching for a rock to throw.
"Alright, clearly none of you are going to be of any use here without even more help." Shadow Harry rose out from the silhouette of a nearby car and cracked his knuckles. "Let's go somewhere more comfortable, shall we?" He reached out one hand, which split into four streams of shadow. One such tentacle tapped Harry on the shoulder, and there was an abrupt feeling of the world flipping upside-down.
Harry wobbled, his hands clutching at the mud to hold himself steady. The world was no longer spinning, but an uneasy sense of being upside-down still rested in his stomach. That unpleasant feeling was accompanied by much lighter, cooler, and easier-to-breathe air, though, so it was a fair trade-off. He sucked in deep breaths as he waited for his head's feverish swimming to fade.
Looking around, he realized his surroundings still didn't seem quite right. There was the fact that he was sitting at the bottom of a muddy riverbed running through the middle of a London street, yes, but the weird thing was that everything was lit like it was noon on the dot, every shadow a neat and direct translation of whatever object was casting it. The light was too well-distributed, seeming to bounce off of and highlight everything from all angles without any care for where the sun might be. Looking up, he saw a pure black, lightless void. No sun, no stars, no sky.
He pressed himself flat against the ground, staring wide-eyed at the open space above him. It felt like the dark abyss would swallow him whole. A phantom itch started in his skin as green stars swished across the empty sky. He remembered the burn of digestive acid—
Someone snapped their fingers right next to his ear. "Nope, we don't have time for you to lose your mind." Shadow Harry's face appeared in front of his. Harry dimly noted for the first time that day that the spirit had both of his yellow eyes in, for once, rather than having one sticking horribly out of his face. "You're in the world of shadows, Hero. The sky doesn't cast a shadow, so you can't see it from here. Don't think about it too hard."
Harry forced his eyes away from the vastness above and focused on Shadow Harry's gray face. His hands still clutched hard at the wet silt. "Why are we in the Shadow Realm?" he asked. "Why'd you send us here?"
"Because this area of your world is oversaturated with the same kind of power that was eating away at you near the Temple of Time. If I hadn't brought you down here, it would have burned all the way through your wizard-magic before reducing you to a shadow. This way, you'll have some magic left when you go back topside."
Now that he mentally felt around for it, Harry could tell something had been taken out of him. It was a something that rested deeper than bone-level, around where his mental sense of his brothers resided. There was a slight, nagging sense of emptiness that pulled in his chest when he moved.
"Your brothers are still knocked out for the time being, so it's gonna be just me and you for a bit." Shadow Harry crouched in front of him, his nice school shoes hovering a centimeter over the mud. "What you need to do here, as fast as you can, is shut down the generator sending out the shiny ribbons in the sky. Those ribbons are pure Light World energy, which the ground-tap is sucking from a hole it punched through your world. My boss doesn't get the difference between this dimension and the Light World, so it looks like he's trying to flood this place with the Light World power he inadvertently stole to get it up to the standards he's used to. One of those Light ribbons is splashing back into the ground here in an attempt to maintain its dimensional integrity and the other is flying all the way over to where Hogwarts was so he can put it to use. Technically the boss is doing what he set out to do, enriching the land with magic, but he's also poisoning this place because the Light World energy is trying to purify it in the same way that Sunburst Spell of yours would banish a Floormaster."
"It's dissolving everything," Harry gasped, jerking upright. From an atomic level—or whatever the magical equivalent was—Vaati was tearing this Light-tainted area of the Dark World apart. It was essentially being blasted with magical radiation. "Vaati'll burn the whole world down if he sets up more generators like that for his spell anchors! And the Light World will all turn to dust on the other side as it tries to fill the holes in!"
"There we go. That's some nice urgency," Shadow Harry said, flashing Harry his own crooked-toothed smile. "Yes, that's exactly what's going to happen. While you kids are busy in the next dungeon, I'll try to talk to my boss about it. His original plan to draw up as much power as he could from less populated spots of the Dark World and use it to piece a personal kingdom together was totally fine, but threatening all of existence by bringing mismanaged Light World power into it? That's no fun." He shook his head. "You can't take over the world if there's no world to take over!"
"Villain ethics" sounded like an obvious contradiction, but Harry was glad that Shadow seemed to have a fair amount of them. No using his shadow powers to snap Harry's neck, no using the Harrys' current inexperience to hack them to pieces in a sword fight, no mass-murder, no destroying the world during a takeover—as powerful as a spirit was, it was heartening to know the sadistic arsehole had reasonable, consistent guidelines for his evilness. Voldemort, meanwhile, had been willing to manipulate and mind-control an eleven-year-old girl last year in order to set a killer snake on even more children. That was just embarrassing.
"How do I get rid of the generator?" Harry asked. "If going back into the light is going to drain the life out of me until I get turned into a shadow, how will I do anything? It was a fight just to stay breathing out there."
The spirit tilted his head to one side. "Did you notice how strong the shadows were?"
Harry was reminded of something Shadow Harry had said months earlier, about shadows getting stronger under bright light. "Yeah…?"
"Consider those your 'safe zones'. Under the stolen Light of Hyrule, everyone in this world is a shadow already. If you hide in the darkness cast by it, you'll blend right in."
"Oh, huh." Harry rubbed his chin. "Do I need Force Gems for this, since I'm breaking Vaati's anchor? There are still Force Gems around in the Dark World, aren't there?"
Shadow Harry nodded. "You won't need quite as many as before, since your sword has been partially repaired, but you'll have to do some monster-slaying from the shadows to get the Four Sword strong enough to break the ties keeping that power generator here."
"Alright." Harry took a deep breath and exhaled. "I've got to juice my sword up, keep to the shadows, and get to the generator."
"And avoid using magic, if you can," Shadow Harry added.
"What?! No magic?" Harry balked. "I'm a wizard!"
"Yes, and your wizardliness is why you weren't turned into a shadow as soon as you got here," Shadow Harry told him. "The Muggles didn't stand a chance. They got knocked onto this plane as soon as that purifying light washed over them. You, on the other hand, have enough of this world's power within you to resist somewhat. Since you have more 'evil' to purify, it'll take longer for you to get burned up. If you exhaust that magic yourself, however, you're just making the Light's job easier."
Harry put a hand to his forehead and pushed it back through his hair, blowing out a breath. Fighting monsters without magic was something he'd had to do before, back when he hadn't had a Magic Rod, so it wasn't like he couldn't manage. In fact, he'd be a lot better at it than he'd been before, especially against the dumbed-down monsters here. Not having that fallback was going to make things harder, though. Blue in particular was going to be miffed about it.
A voice echoed down into the basin from the street. "Hey! Hey you!"
Harry looked up. A man in a business suit was waving at him. "Erm, hello," he called back.
"You're one of those 'wizard' people, right?" the man said, fluttering the fingers of one hand.
Harry jumped. "You know—you know about wizards?!" he asked in shock. The biggest rule in the magical world was to not let Muggles know. The only non-magical people allowed to know about magic were Squibs and close relatives of muggleborns and half-bloods. Never, ever was anyone else allowed to be told magic was real.
"It wasn't hard to figure out. I mean, there were a gaggle of strange-looking birds and blokes by this one pub I've never seen before, wearing robes and shouting about magic and waving wands. When the wands actually made things happen, I figured those weirdoes weren't just nutters," the man replied. "Those robed people keep running off any time anyone tries to ask where these monsters came from or why the cars won't start, though. Quite rude, I say!"
Another Muggle—this time an older woman dressed for church in a nice tweed suit with a hat and gloves—poked her head over the side of the road. "And what's with the sky, anyway?" she asked. "How's it daytime when it's darker than night?"
"Er…" Harry found himself in a weird spot. He wasn't supposed to blab about anything magical to strangers who were clearly not mages. These people were probably going to get memory-wiped anyway, though, once the Ministry of Magic caught on. Depending on where the headquarters were, the whole Ministry might have gotten turned into shadows, too, so they might have already known something was up. Besides, didn't these people deserve to know at least the basics of what had happened?
"Well, I know this sounds mad, but you're shadows right now," he told them. "The cars won't start because they're just the shadows of cars and the engines might not be real enough to work. It's all weird magic stuff."
"So you're telling me that all of this," the man waved his hand toward the row of buildings behind him, "is shadow? I'm existing as my own shadow, and that's why I haven't seen myself casting one since the world seemed to flip?" He frowned and fiddled with his briefcase, which bore a great number of scratches and one distinct set of claw marks on the leather. "And I've no idea how much time has passed here, either. Forget the clocks—not even the sun is working! Could be out of a job…"
Harry looked down at his feet. Sure enough, he had no shadow. "Yeah, that's about the shape of it. You got blasted with a certain kind of light and it sent you down here," he said. "We'll have this stuff sorted out soon, don't worry."
"'We'?" the woman repeated.
Harry looked over at his siblings, who were now prying themselves up from the muck and getting a briefing from Shadow Harry. "Me and my brothers, I mean. We're the only robed guys here who actually know what's going on and how to stop it, so don't bother those other witches and wizards, alright? They don't really know how to talk to Mug—er, to non-magical people. It's a culture thing."
"But you do?" the man asked.
"I've only known I was a wizard for a couple of years now, so yeah." Harry rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, I've got to go monster-slaying now. We have magic swords, so we'll be fine. Stay safe and, er, have a nice day?"
"Why, thank you, dearie," the woman said. "You have a nice day, too."
The man stared at him incredulously. "Monster-slaying? Wizard or not, you look like you're ten! Where are your parents?"
"I'm thirteen!" Harry proclaimed with annoyance before jogging back to his brothers. Seriously, if people were going to guess his age wrong, he at least rated eleven!
Notes:
-The design for Hora's hair is inspired by a Joseon Korean gisaeng style. The other mainland Great Fairies will have similarly inspired hair designs.
-Funnily enough, I planned to have a Rupees + Materials system for Great Fairy upgrades in this fic long before TOTK came out! I'm not sure whether I'll have the Harrys find every single Great Fairy (because there are six and I'm already juggling a lot of stuff here), but they'll be able to upgrade things better depending on the age of the fairy sister they're talking to. Items they can boost at Hora's spring include any piece of clothing and any armament found in the Overworld (both shop items and armaments looted from monsters). A basic, non-specialized boost to an item will add +5 DEF for clothes, +5 DEF for shields, +5 ATK for weapons, and +5 capacity for the Bomb Bag and Quiver. Each item can be upgraded up to 4 times on the mainland, but can be upgraded a fifth time by a Sea Fairy if already maxed out.
-The Harrys got basic upgrades on their robes (100rp), boots + adventuring belt (100rp), tunics + leggings (80rp), and bracers + breast plate + pauldrons (60rp) in terms of clothing. Each of those "+" clusters in the list must be worn together for the full boost to take effect. They also upgraded their Fire Swords (specialized, 20rp + Materials) and Hunting Bows (150rp). They did only one upgrade each because Blue was tackled and dragged off by his siblings before he could blow the rest of their money on a second round.
-The destructive bandits in this case, as in most cases when it comes to Hyrule, were Hylians. There's a certain level of entitlement and perceived superiority toward minority groups and their creations that being the dominant culture can cause; thus, some Hylians wind up forgetting the unspoken rules of treasure-hunting in their pursuit of riches. The thieves mentioned in this chapter assumed the Hero of Lights's puzzle was of Gerudo construction and decided to help themselves to it.
-The key to keeping things from breaking between dimensions is tying them to both of the world's magics. In addition to the Harrys' conjuration method, one can smuggle things from one world to another by casting an enchantment from the opposite world on said items or by stowing them in the opposite world's version of a Bag of Holding.
-The aesthetic of the Light-poisoned Dark World is similar to the Twilight-poisoned Light World in Twilight Princess, but with harsher shadows and no black bits floating around. The look of the Shadow Realm (I'm an old-school Yu-Gi-Oh fan; I couldn't resist) is based on Hawaii's Lāhainā Noon, in which the sun passes over in such a way that every shadow points straight down and practically disappears.
Next month: Avoka acquaints himself with Harry's and Draco's friends and the Harrys set off on a difficult trek through Light-poisoned London.