Thanks once again for the lovely reviews! Glad to hear you all liked the chapter – and the updates to Fi, Ghirahim, and Scaldera! Link will make him acknowledge him eventually...!

Chapter 32: Screams

The mountain was screaming.

Zelda didn't know why she had thought that, staring up at the impossibly tall slopes rising towering ahead of her, red-orange rivers trickling their slow way down its sides. She'd never seen anything like it before, no she hadn't, though she'd come across the geology, but she had, she'd passed over it many times, calm and quiet until the shadow of evil came. Molten rock spat from the depths of the earth, clawing futilely at sky and land, a violent fury triggered by the miasma of evil.

She put both hands over her mouth, and tried to control her breathing. How did she know these things? Her mind skated away from it in broken fragments. The only constant was that she had to press on. It had kept her going since in some unknowable way she couldn't quite remember she had transported herself from the spring; had found shelter for the night and walked a full day and found shelter again to awaken under this dull and lowering ash-stained sky, clouded with the tears of the volcano.

This was not helping her.

Zelda lowered her hands slowly, clenching them both into fists. She had to go on, had to, barely even the illusion of a choice. She'd reach the second spring, and then… and then the confusion of her mind would be quieted, would be clarity. She couldn't wait lest the evil that hunted her, hungered for her found her, or worse, found him.

She started forwards again, picking her careful way through the blanket of ash scattered across charred and splintered stumps. Fire had raged here, recently: the slow-moving tongue of lava to her left told her the other half of the story. Ash stirring around her with every step, Zelda trudged up the steadily steepening slope, using the lava flow as her guide.

. . .

The strip of rock between rivers of lava had narrowed, and narrowed, until at last Zelda had reached its end. A huge river of lava rolled inexorably down from above her, splitting into two at the cone and parting around it, leaving her stranded with no way to press on. She couldn't let that stop her, couldn't let anything stop her, and she continued forwards, hoping that she would see something useful from the top of the cone.

The dark crack in its side offered her a convenient way up the last and hardest part of the ascent, but as she reached it and peered in, she realised that it might show her something more. There was light at the other end, another end far too close by for the cone to be anything but hollow, and the faint flows of the air told her that it was an old, cold chimney; something in her awareness shifted and she knew it extended far below.

It wasn't full of lava, and that meant the passages had to pass under the lava rivers safely. Could she do it? Could she get down there? Careful, feeling cautiously for every handhold, Zelda edged through the crack, tripping over her own imprecations as her dress snagged on something and she muttered a curse against it.

"By the goddess-"

It felt like cursing by her own name.

She shuddered and shook her head, trying to force the strange feeling back into the back of her mind along with everything else. She wanted to see beyond the horizon, she wanted to protect all that was her own. She wanted to go home, she wanted to see her father, and home was endlessly repeating centuries away and her father was long lost in them and she had never had a father and only if she climbed this mountain could she go home.

Everything agreed on that. Only if she climbed this mountain could she go home. Some kind of duty lay ahead of her, half-glimpsed and half-forgotten, looming over her like a storm that had broken upon her and she a loftwing trying with all her might to keep clear of its winds and lightning when she knew with every beat of her wings that she could not escape it.

Up the mountain, then. It's my duty. I want to go home. I have to go up the mountain. I have to keep moving.

Zelda took a deep breath, and did not notice the unconscious touch of power that cleansed ash and dust and soot from it. She forced herself to unclench her hands, to move on another few steps, until she could peer out of the far end of the crack into a vertical shaft, almost perfectly cylindrical with a flat floor far below.

Somehow, it seemed perfectly natural to step out of the crack in the rock and simply float down, fly down, as if borne on great wings outspread, though her loftwing was so achingly far away. Her feet lightly touched the ground, and she looked around, then up. She'd… had she really…? The impossible felt natural, and her thoughts spun, and Zelda shook her head as if she could shake it all loose and forced herself to focus only on the dark passage that was her way out. There was evil down there, cloying, hungering, but she was armed and if she knew it was there then she hoped she could avoid it.

A faint light bloomed at her back as she stepped into the darkness, sword in her hand.

. . .

She had picked her way carefully through dark passageways, turned aside and hidden from vile wandering bokoblins where she had to, half-leapt and half-flown up vertical drops where she must. Some had been crusted with dribbling rock like a waterfall turned to stone; some were mere cracks where rock had sheared and snapped and left a cleft connecting one passage to another. Following her feelings, she had pressed on, onward and upwards until at long, long last a light neither her own nor the flickering of fire beckoned palely before her. Shining down from above at something of an angle, it offered a way out of the caves that she took without thinking, lofting herself into the air as if on a great, slow wingbeat, landing in dirty ash-stained daylight on the ground above.

She was in what had once been a shallow cave, riven through its centre by the crack she had ascended from, and the outside was no more than three steps away. Zelda took those steps, cautiously, looking around for danger as she stepped out, but – other than the ever-present threat of the volcano itself – nothing seemed immediately visible. Taking a deep breath, still without fully realising how the hot and ashen air of the volcano should have choked it, she carried on, following the easiest route around the base of a rocky outcrop.

Once again, the path ended before her. Whatever had split the rock open in ages past, another deep and sharp-sided chasm barred her way, heat rising from lava flowing far below. Zelda looked left, then right, but saw no easy way across.

The gap was narrowest directly in front of her, far narrower than the wide lava river that had barred her path before, and she could let nothing stop her. Steeling herself, she walked to the edge and let herself fly. Fly, float, drift: she arced slowly and gracefully across the gap and landed on the other side.

It was only when she turned to look back that cold reality hit her once again, trickling down her back like ice water in her bones. She had just stepped… flown… across a river of molten rock, across a gap she could never have jumped, without a second thought. What was happening to her? What was she becoming?

Zelda hugged herself tight despite the baking air of the volcano, gripping her own waist with shaking hands through the thick fabric of her bleached dress. Things she had seen and hadn't seen, things she could only half remember, pinwheeled through her mind like a bird flying out of control. How could she be doing this? How could she even be here on the surface, below the clouds, her home out of reach and her thoughts of it scattering like clouds in the wind? How could she know that Link was here coming for her – know that he would fight for her – ask him to die for her – and not wait for him?

"I won't," she said aloud to the gritty breeze. "I won't! I won't ask him – I would never ask him to-"

But she had, or some part of her thought she had, knew she had. Some part of her had counted up her choices and thought them worth the cost, some part of her had-

She pressed her hands to her face, refusing to believe it. She hadn't, she hadn't done that, she'd left, fled so that the demon that hunted her would follow her and leave him. The demon had no interest in her friend who bore a sword she ought to know; he would have, must have, left him, wouldn't he? He was a terrible thing, an evil thing, a monster that would kill for the twisted fun of it, but she'd known then, in the spring when she had felt that she knew more, when it had all seemed to make sense, that he would leave if she did. She had to have been right, didn't she? She had to believe it, or what else was there?

Choking back a sob, she forced herself to straighten, scrubbing the tears from her cheeks with shaking hands. She had to focus, had to keep moving. From this side of the ravine, she had a better view down the mountain, and she looked that way to see how far she had come. Scanning the slopes below, her searching gaze flitted over the ridges and dips of the volcano's sharp, lava-streaked side. Was that the shaft she had climbed (flown) down? If it was, she had come a long way. A long way, but there was still much further to go. Turning around, Zelda set her face to the steep upper slopes, and continued to climb.

. . .

The higher she got, the more bokoblins there seemed to be, as if something malicious had scattered them in her path. More than once she was forced to hide from them, or dart across slopes when they weren't looking; once, as she scrambled desperately up a steep slope of rock shards that shifted and slid beneath her feet, one had seen her from the top and squealed with vile glee. It had vanished in the next moment, and confusion had touched her thoughts as she forced herself to keep climbing as fast as she could in the shattered stone.

The bokoblin had returned when she was barely three-quarters of the way up, hefting a frighteningly large boulder above its piggy head on strong arms that wavered with the weight even so. Zelda's eyes widened in horrible realisation a moment before it hefted the boulder forward with a straining grunt, more letting it go than throwing it, shrieking and dancing a little jig as the boulder crashed down onto the slope, spilling smaller rocks in its wake. All at once it was a landslide, the little stones slipping over one another with dry rushing scrapes that together sounded like what Zelda could only imagine as an island shaking itself apart. Exposed before it with barely a moment to think, let alone act, she froze, some instinct taking over as her conscious mind stared death in the face.

Rock rained and slid around her, bounced off a shimmering golden haze bare inches from her face. The loose rock under her hands and knees remained perfectly still despite the vibrations trembling through her bones, and she felt the countless impacts on the shield like a kind of pressure on her mind, on her power. It didn't feel like a very strong shield, or like one that was taking much effort, and that was ridiculous: as she stared forwards in terrified frozen disbelief she could see the rock rising around her like a wave, waist-height, higher, falling again as the body of the landslide passed her by, until the sounds came only from below and all that was left where she crouched was Zelda herself perched on a small mound of tumbled stones.

She could have crouched there for hours, petrified, her mind refusing to process what had just happened, if the same deep instinct that had raised the shield hadn't lowered it again. Her protective cage gone, the rocks she stood on, suddenly unsupported, spilled free, throwing her into lurching motion as they belatedly followed their fellows down the almost bare slope, and Zelda scrambled up towards the promise of safety with desperate sobbing breaths, pulling herself up at last onto the ledge the bokoblin had looked down at her from. It was still there, staring at her for a moment with shock in its evil squinting eyes, and as it fumbled for its crude notched sword, Zelda forced strength born of terror and relief and anger into her limbs, whipping her own sword from its sheath in a fluid lunge and striking before her foe had quite freed its blade! Her attack cut fatally deep, the bokoblin dead almost before it hit the ground, only a weak and fading squeak escaping it as it fell, the sound almost drowned by the rumbling of the mountain.

Shaking, Zelda wiped off her sword and looked around. She couldn't see any others, but over a nearby rock she could see what looked like the top of a crude structure, and she could sense a faint miasma of evil cloaking everything. There were more here, almost certainly, and if there were, she couldn't risk leaving the body where they would find it.

Though her stomach turned at the thought, Zelda sheathed her sword and bent down, gripping the stinking bokoblin corpse by its wrist. It lolled horribly as she dragged it to the edge, half tugging, half pushing it down onto the slope below to tumble and roll sickeningly like a broken doll breaking still further until it landed in a crumpled heap on the rocks far below. Let them think it had died in the landslide it had started.

She turned back, kicking ash and pebbles over the streak of blood it had left behind, and moved on.

. . .

Zelda pulled herself up to the top of another ridge and paused still kneeling, staring at the sight ahead. Some ancient edifice had been constructed from and into the very rock of the mountain, a once-ornate wall (did she remember it as it was or only imagine it?) with its grand pillars cracked and reliefs obscured, great doors standing closed. It was the Earth Temple, she knew it as if she recognised it, built into what had once been a cavern that led to the inaccessible spring on the volcano's very slopes. She was almost there.

Zelda looked around, checking for danger. She could sense the taint of evil, spilling out from the temple as well as more generally around the mountain, and as she listened, her sharp ears caught an ugly chittering. There were bokoblins very nearby, somewhere off to her left by the sound of it. Cautiously, barely daring to breathe, she crept forwards, sheltering behind an ash-stained pillar to peer around the break in the rocks to her left.

There were bokoblins: two, no, three of the awful things, grunting and chittering at one another, waving their crude clubs and swords as if they were arguing. Zelda hoped they were, hoped they stayed fixated on each other. If she could only find some way to distract them…

Never taking her eyes from the three bokoblins, Zelda let herself slide down the pillar into a kneel, sword-hilt gripped in her right hand, feeling around on the ground with her left. A large stone soon offered itself, fitting snugly into her palm, and she dared to rise again, hefting it, preparing herself. She would only get one shot.

The bokoblins shrieked and shook their weapons, two on one, and all her held tension uncoiled, arm unwinding in an overarm throw, lofting the rock high – over the boulders, and that was the most important bit, flattening herself to the pillar and relying only on her ears as it clattered satisfyingly down the rock on the other side. The shrieking turned to grunts of dim puzzlement and curiosity, and as Zelda dared lean far enough to see past the pillar with one eye, she saw that they had taken the bait, trotting towards the sound on their stubby legs.

She almost froze. She almost couldn't do it. But the fear of what would happen if she waited was strong than the fear of what would happen if one happened to look the wrong way, and she ran on light feet to the doors, pulling one with all her strength in frantic haste as it grated across the ground. She cringed, but dared not stop, certain that the bokoblins would have heard, desperately dragging it open just far enough to slip through, ignoring the wash of air – hot air – billowing out from below as she forced herself through a gap barely wide enough to admit her, yanking on the door from the inside to close it faster without even pausing to look back.

The door shut behind her, and she was at the top of a long flight of stairs, alone. She'd done it.

It should have been pitch darkness, but once again a half-subconscious thought kindled a golden radiance at her back. One hand on her sword, Zelda descended the stairs, bearing her own light with her.

The evil in the temple seemed to pulse in her ears, though it was silent other than her footsteps. Before long, she had reached the bottom of the stairs and the first great hall, her light showing the high old ceiling cracked and the once-great statues broken to unrecognisability. As she took her first cautious step into the silent, still hall, she glanced to her left – and almost directly into the slavering face of a bokoblin! It shrieked with a vicious hunger as she leapt back, drawing her sword with a hand that felt nerveless on the hilt: there wasn't just one bokoblin, but ten, maybe more, and-

There was an explosion of pain at the back of her head, and then there was only blackness.

I swear I had a good reason for being this late to post! Sorry, all the same.

Patch Notes:
- Half-memories of past lives spilling into the mind now cause notable mental problems as expected.
- Zelda given partial access to suitable divine powers per partial past-life memories.
- Knight Academy student with half-memories of being a deity no longer moves like frightened mouse.
- Ambush that could capture lone Knight Academy student created; successfully does so.