Hello, everyone! Thank you so much for your lovely reviews! Regarding the red potion, yeah, I basically figure it will fuse flesh and bone just fine... in whatever position they happen to be in when the potion is drunk; it won't snap bone back into place and won't necessarily bond the right bits of flesh to one another, or generally remove things that shouldn't be in places from those places. With a nasty gut wound like that (congrats on calling it, Birdie!), you want to be real sure you're not just sealing things into places where they really shouldn't be. I mean, by my conception of how these very handy potions work, anyway!

Very glad to hear the fight scene went down so well, especially. The closest I've ever come to a real battle is larp and martial arts and stuff, but even those tend to hit that way, I find - you're in it and it's happening and everything is happening and then suddenly - it's over. And to Anon who doesn't usually like retellings, wow, thanks! They're not usually my top choice of material either, but I hoped that people besides me would find that this one had an acceptable place. :-)

Finally, really sorry for the delay, everyone! The two weekends I was away I was expecting; the bit where I got covid and was in no fit state to write anything absolutely was not. But I am back with you once again, and I hope for a good run of actually regular updates now!

Chapter 29: Determination

Vast and echoing, the huge entrance hall had proven to contain no further threat than a few evid keese imbued with fire magic, foes Link had easily sliced from the air. Though he desperately wanted to follow Zelda, he'd paced the walls of the enormous room first, ensuring there were no bokoblins left to attack from behind when he least expected it. Cracked and tumbled in places, they were engraved with carvings of what Link took to be dragons, stylised and blocky with mouths agape. Time had not been kind to the ancient temple, and even so, its sheer scale would have awed him if something far more important hadn't superseded everything else.

Having completed his circuit, Link advanced hurriedly along the middle of the once-great hall. The shapes he'd been unable to make out had proven to be a mixture of defaced statues, crude bokoblin huts, and rocks fallen from the ceiling above, something that had him occasionally glancing up nervously despite Fi's reassurance that the roof of the hall remained sufficiently structurally sound that there was only a 5% chance of anything falling from it without external influence. As he approached the crude barrier that blocked his path onwards, however, he heard the strange dry sound of cracking, shifting rock; instinctively leapt away from it; held his breath for a moment as though he could hear pebbles sliding, nothing anywhere near him seemed to fall…

"I never shoulda come here…" a strangely-accented voice complained despondently, and Link realised with shock that it was the same accent and slightly creaky tone of voice that all the mogmas seemed to share. Heart still racing, he ventured to step forward again, speaking softly as his eyes scanned the ground ahead.

"Hello?"

He saw the mogma in the same breath as the creature spoke, light reflecting in his beady eyes beneath a brush of blue hair, buried to his waist in shards of broken stone.

"Oh, it's you again!" The mogma – Cobal, wasn't it? – squinted at him, nose twitching as he sniffed the air. "You came all this way in search of your friend?"

Link nodded.

"Yeah, well… I think you might want to think again about that, pal." Cobal's long, mobile ears sleeked themselves back and down, almost flat to his stumpy neck, and Link realised that near the left ear's tip his furry shoulder was a mess of clotted blood, that arm resting awkwardly atop the crumbled stone. "Those red guys are everywhere, and worse too, and my partner's gone missing…"

"Ledd?" Link guessed, rewarded with a twitch of a nod. "What were you two doing here?" Hadn't they been guarding the path down below?

"Well, you know…" Cobal fidgeted uncomfortably, something that looked a lot like guilt stamped across his face. "Me and Ledd got talking after you went by, and we figured we'd ask around a bit. Seems like those red creeps have all been heading up to this place in the last couple of days for some reason. So we thought we'd see what was what, in case they found some really great treasure…"

Link raised his eyebrows slightly, but said nothing.

"Anyway, Ledd went on ahead after I called him a big scaredy-mole, and now I can't find him. Everywhere I come up there's more of those awful creeps." Cobal clenched his clawed right hand on dust and pebbles, an unpleasant grating sound escaping as they scraped against one another in his fist. "One of the big ones nearly took my head off." He hung the head in question, shamefaced and unquestionably scared. "I can't do this, pal. If you want to live to… live again one day, you should head for home."

"I can't do that, Cobal," Link said quietly, his own fear catching at the back of his throat. "I have to go on. I know my friend came in here, and I've got to find her."

Cobal looked wretched. "I should go find Ledd. But I just can't face it." He breathed a shaky sigh, trembling. "I can't go back in there, pal. You don't leave a partner in the lurch, but I just can't do it."

"I'll see if I can find him," Link promised. "I have to go deeper in anyway." He glanced again at the mogma's injured arm. "I don't think there are any more bokoblins in this hall now, so you should be safe for the moment, but be careful."

Cobal nodded stiffly, relief and gratitude mingling with the fear, pain, and chagrin on his long face. "You'll have to be more careful than me, pal. If you're really going in there, don't let your guard up for one second. Not even one."

"I won't," Link told him quietly. The mogma watched fretfully as he turned away, pacing cautiously back towards the crude barricade that covered a grand archway several times his own height. Made of mismatched wood and metal parts all crudely lashed together, it looked like most of the materials had been scavenged from somewhere, perhaps ripped from their original places in the temple: there was part of what looked like a decoratively wrought screen; there a piece with ravaged paint still clinging to it, brought into sharp relief by the light of Link's lantern. Towards the top, some of the ropes almost seemed to disappear into the wall, and Link squinted up, trying to see what they were attached to without risking climbing the rickety-looking structure.

Master Link. Fi spoke in his mind without appearing, yet he wondered if her own attention was also directed upwards. It is not possible to satisfactorily observe the region you are interested in from this angle. I recommend that you employ the Beetle's alternate viewing capability.

"Good idea, Fi," Link murmured quietly, doing his best to still the tension and dread clutching at his heart. Davar had fallen at the very entryway; Cobal was likely only still alive because he had dug his way to safety. If he passed beyond the barricade, there would be worse danger within…

His hands moved almost automatically even as the dark thoughts played through his mind: drawing the bulky artificial insect from its safe resting place in his pouch; sliding his arm through its clasp and tightening it until it fit snugly. The beetle sat incongruously lightly atop his arm, and Link thought for a moment, recalling Fi's instructions, before cautiously pressing the leftmost of the two buttons behind it. It clicked, then gave a buzz that dwindled to a faint and constant hum, and the small light on its tail blinked into steady life.

All right…

Link aimed his arm up at a steep angle and pressed the right-hand button. The beetle's wings whirred into life in a blur of motion, and it lifted from his arm with a click. He wanted to watch it; forced himself to look down instead, to see the view from its eyes, or whatever passed for them, somehow displayed on the back of his arm. He touched his finger to the screen, dragging it sideways, and the beetle obediently turned, its eye-view tilting as it spiralled obediently upwards.

It took two tries to line it up properly with the top of the barrier while still keeping it at the right altitude, and enough concentration that it kept Link's mind at least partially distracted from what he was about to willingly walk into. Half-hidden in the shadows, the ropes he'd noticed fed through a decorative grille that framed the top of the archway, passing through to somewhere beyond. Unlike the rest of the rope in the structure, they didn't seem to be binding anything, nor attached anywhere beyond their original anchor points, some way lower down.

Link circled the beetle again, getting another look as it flew past. Could they be holding the entire thing up, like a plank bridge drawn up in high winds? There didn't seem to be anything else binding the edges to the wall, whether by rope or crude nail.

"Fi," he said softly, "I think those ropes are holding the barricade up."

This time, Fi sprang from the sword, her subtly luminous blue face otherworldly as she hovered at his shoulder, her head tilting as she seemed to look from his arm to the ropes high above and back again.

"I calculate a probability of 90% that you are correct, Master. I hypothesise that there will be a mechanism on the other side for adjusting the length of the ropes, thus lowering and raising the barricade."

"Do you think it would come down if we just cut them?" The thought of leaving it to be pulled up again behind them made him even more uneasy.

"Yes, Master Link." Fi turned slightly, looking down on him from the couple of inches of additional height she gained from hovering above the ground. "However, its impact with the ground is likely to be dangerous due to its crude construction. Its structural integrity will be critically reduced."

"Good." Link pressed the button to recall the beetle, holding his arm out stiffly as he talked while it returned to him and lowered itself gently down. "I don't want to risk it being closed behind us."

"That is a rational concern," Fi agreed, and Link thought she seemed subtly approving. Or was it just that she hadn't told him he was making a fool of himself? He waited as the beetle landed and clipped itself back into place atop his arm, then turned around, looking at a nearby chipped and battered block of undulating stone defaced beyond recognition.

"We'd be safe behind there, wouldn't we?" he said, pointing. Fi inclined her head, smooth and perfect, drifting along beside him as he crossed to it. On a scale to match the cavernous hall, it was taller than he was even at its lowest point. Without the beetle's eyes, he wouldn't have a hope of seeing what was going on beyond it.

As he stepped around its blunt end, he called out to the mogma, lost in the shadows of the hall.

"Cobal? If you're still there, you should go underground. I'm going to try and bring down the barrier."

A sudden scuffling of sliding rock was his only answer, but it was all the one he needed. Fi vanished back into the sword as he knelt behind the statue, aiming his right arm along it; pressed the button and launched the beetle. As it rose through the air, Link's eyes remained fixed on the screen, tracing his finger across it to guide the strange device upwards and towards the rope. The image on the screen was definitely brighter than the shadows it was flying through should have permitted, and he could see, if not clearly, at least well enough. The blade on its mandibles was impressively sharp despite the amount of time it had spent locked in a rotting chest – but would it be enough to cut the rope?

There was only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, Link edged his finger slightly rightward, then left again, lining the beetle up with the first rope. It hit it and swayed alarmingly, words spilling across the screen beneath his finger – then the rope parted with a snap that seemed to echo around the hall, the beetle spinning away from it as the words on the screen read:

[ERROR: ATTEMPTING FLIGHT STABILISATION.]

Link held his breath as the words stayed on the screen, the image behind them lurching like a flag in a gale. Was it levelling out?

[FLIGHT STABILISED. USER CONTROL RESTORED.]

The message vanished almost as quickly as he'd read it, and a tentative brush of his finger saw the beetle turn, as obedient as ever once again. It had got some distance down the hall while it was trying to stabilise itself, and as he aimed it back at the barricade, he could see it sagging just slightly on one side, the cut rope trailing down uselessly from its anchor. Determined, Link sent the beetle flying unerringly towards the second rope, angling it across the front of the barricade so that it would be less likely to hit it as it fell. Once again it struck the rope, closer to centrally this time; once again the thick but crude rope parted under the mechanical beetle's assault and it spun out of control –

Before Link had time to think, a tremendous, shattering crash echoed through the hall, reverberating through the tiled stone floor, echoing around like a thunderclap even as other little pings and skittering thuds wove a harsh counterpoint beneath it. He flinched, arms thrown protectively over his ducked head, until silence fell once again.

His arm was beeping.

Link cautiously lowered his hands and looked at the beetle's screen on the back of his arm.

[USER CONTROL ERROR. RETURNING TO CONTROL UNIT.]

He had to force himself to stay still and hold out his arm, waiting patiently for the beetle to land despite the fact that the crash must have echoed through what felt like the entire mountain. Everything in the temple had to know he was coming now; could be converging on him as he waited frozen, breath shallow with tension, until the beetle landed at last and he could unfasten the clasp from his arm, stowing it away to replace it with the heavier, metal-plated shield. It made him feel at least a little less vulnerable.

Slowly, cautiously, he crept to the edge of the defaced statue and peered around it. Nothing visible moved in the darkness beyond, a faint glow of light shining through the now-open archway, the light of his lantern all but overwhelming it and casting strange low shadows across the floor from the scattered debris that was all that remained of the crude barricade. Nothing moved that he could see, and Link drew a sharp, deep breath.

For all he knew, his death waited beyond that archway, just as Davar's had caught them at the entrance. It certainly knew he was coming.

But perhaps, if it did, if it followed his trail instead of his friend's…

Mustering every scrap of will he possessed, Link stepped out from behind the statue.

He could still turn back.

But if he did, he would never forgive himself.

Somewhere ahead of him, his best friend was even more alone than he was, facing the dangers of the depths with no-one at her side.

Step slow but unbroken, Link advanced to the huge archway – and walked through.

Wow, it's been a while... As I said above, hoping for more regular updates for the next few weeks at least!

Patch Notes:
- Mogma emotions upgraded from comedy reluctance to actual fear.
- Bridge over lava replaced with barricade drawbridge due to removal of lava.